The King Of The Cosmos | Caleb Schmitt

Welcome to our latest sermon, where we embark on a journey to explore the supremacy of God and the profound mystery of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In this message, we dive deep into the Scriptures from Colossians 1 and John 1, unraveling the significance of Christ's birth and His role as the King of the Cosmos.

Through captivating imagery and powerful biblical insights, we uncover how the vastness of God's creation and the depth of His love offer us redemption and a pathway to being united with Him. Discover the transformative power of faith as we reflect on our relationship with Christ, the Creator, and our Savior.

Whether you're seeking spiritual enrichment or looking to deepen your understanding of the divine, this sermon is for you. Listen in and be inspired by the powerful message of God's grace and the promise of new creation through the life and resurrection of Jesus. 

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Transcript

 You should come up and say hi, meet my wife and I.

 Every time Kaylee would sit down, we're getting kind of close to the due date, so I'm like, oh my gosh, is it happening?

So we're all good.

We're good.

It's happening.

I thought I'd actually open with a story.

You all can be seated.

Thank you so much.

Band, you guys are just delightful and wonderful.

 I thought I'd open with a story like Pastor Jake said.

We came kind of at the tail end of COVID, moved out here from snowy Minnesota and came out to Los Angeles.

And part of our story in moving is we had been married for a handful of years, and we kind of felt drawn out here.

We thought mostly for career stuff, and that's showed to be true, but...

 there was also kind of this sense that there was a church out here for us.

And I don't want to be too dramatic in that we moved for a church or anything like that.

I wouldn't say that we were aware of that level of God's just providence in our life, knowing that he had a place for us.

But

 We were preparing to move.

We knew we were kind of drawn out here.

And during that time, this is probably 2019, we felt, you know, moved from Minnesota, which was really sad because we have a ton of family.

We love Minnesota.

I know it's snowy and you guys don't want to go there, but it's actually, it's really great.

It's really great.

And in that season of feeling called snow,

 out here, my mom got diagnosed with cancer.

COVID hit, all this stuff started hitting.

And throughout the, I say 2019, 2020, 2021, it was hard to move out here.

I'm not gonna lie.

 I'm very close to my mom, and seeing someone go through that level of suffering, I know many of you are either walking through that right now, or have had family go through that, or are very close to that.

And so, moving out here during my mom's first cancer treatment, she had just gone through her first round of chemo, and it looked like cancer had been beaten, was at bay.

And the last few years, it's been coming back, and coming back.

 I just want to thank you all so much for praying for my mom.

I know only some of you have met her when they're out in the South Bay here, but I just want to thank you so much for your constant prayers throughout these years.

And for those of you that have had a similar battle, you know how just discouraging, kind of like a roller coaster it can be.

 I wanted to share this story because in the last year, things have gone, my mom kind of had her third cancer appearance and stage four, it's starting to go places.

And it's at that time that you start, you know, my mom and dad are trying to think of, okay, let's make sure we're close to family.

You know, no one can ever say life expectancy, but the numbers start going down to single digits at that point, generally.

And we're praying, you know, faith is kind of like a roller coaster.

 Totally, this is great.

She's going to have 30 years, you know, easy.

FaceTime my mom, 30 years.

And then other days, a test will come back and you just feel like the smallest thing, you know, you just feel tiny.

And this past year has been uniquely difficult just with that diagnosis.

It's spreading, it's going places.

And my parents kind of preparing to move and we're praying.

And just in the last couple months,

 a scan came back and her biggest spot is just gone.

I don't know how to explain it.

It's just completely gone.

It makes no sense.

 So the drug she's on, it's kind of a situation where there's only a few more things you can throw at this.

And there's only so long these things can last.

And so that big spot just completely disappeared.

And just two weeks ago, the second one disappeared too.

My mom right now is...

 They won't say cancer-free.

Their oncologist is a little bit confused.

They don't know exactly why.

I say this, her radiologist thinks it's him.

He's like, it's got to be my radiation.

It's like really good.

We're like, I don't know.

But I just can't tell you how encouraging the past, like just praise God.

 Just praise God.

I want to share that to encourage you.

I want to share that to also just thank you for your prayers.

South Bay, I know you are all in the room, and many of you have known us for years.

I just cannot thank you enough for the faithful prayers of the saints.

We are rejoicing.

We are confused and delighted and rejoicing, and the Lord is good.

So I guess that's to say...

 The power of God and the supremacy of God has very little to do with how we feel.

And thank God for that.

Thank God for that.

I wanted to preach today and teach today on that topic, on the supremacy of God.

 on the kingship of Jesus.

And it's a common theme that probably comes up during Christmas time.

You know, Jesus is a gift under the tree.

He's the gift that came and there's many true things about that.

I remember when I was younger, I grew up a church kid and

 I remember I had this weird fear.

I don't know if you guys have had, if you grew up in the church or faith or around it and you had weird church fears.

One of my weird fears, aside from just the infinity of heaven and be like, oh my gosh, heaven is so scary.

Like it's infinity goes on forever.

I don't know that I want that.

I'd freak out.

The second one close to that was, actually it's kind of similar now that I'm thinking about it.

My fears are fairly similar.

But the second fear is like, what if the fall just keeps happening again and again and again?

 Like, we get there, and then, oh, no.

Like, is it going to be me?

I don't want it to be me.

Please don't.

Like, I don't want to be the person.

It's like, you get to heaven, and you're like, don't like apples, just dislike trees in general.

I don't know if you've had, like, I legitimately had those two weird heavenly church fears.

I'm glad I'm not alone in this.

This is good.

But I have good news today.

 Those fears stem from misunderstanding who Jesus is.

Those fears come from misunderstanding what came in the manger, who hung on the cross, and who rose again.

It is a simple misunderstanding, little Caleb, and little Caleb's out there, that we do not have to fear this cycle of fall.

 and Eden happening again and again and again, and God's just throwing up his hands.

What do I do?

What do I do?

The big idea today is that if Jesus wasn't born God and man, then you are not united with God.

 if he was not both fully, if God was just cosplaying as a person, if Earth was his Comic-Con and he just wanted, you know, put on a suit, that would have been cool.

Like, great, we get to learn some more about God.

But it says nothing about you changing.

It says nothing about my fears going away, that this cycle of ugh would happen over and over again.

 If we're not united with God in some way, if he doesn't do this, then we're just doomed to stay in that cycle of our Father Adam and our Mother Eve.

That's what's going to happen.

I want to read out of Colossians 1 today.

If you have your Bibles, open up to Colossians 1.

1.15, we're going to go right in the middle because this is just the banger.

It's just a poem.

It's just awesome.

Every little one is a bar about how awesome

 and powerful our Lord is.

We're going to look at the incarnation and why it matters out of Colossians 1.15.

Digital Bibles are acceptable too.

I will say I like the pages, but you know, you can search.

You can search for stuff.

Colossians 1.15, the sun is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

 For in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities.

All things have been created through him and for him.

I'm going to pause after each one of these almost.

You just have to marinate in this a little bit.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

 And he is the head of the body, the church.

He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have his fullness dwell in him, and through him reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.

Once you were alienated from God,

 And we're enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.

But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation.

 The title of the message today, if you are a title person, is the King of the Cosmos.

The King of the Cosmos.

The reason is that if it's not the King of the Cosmos in Jesus, it doesn't matter as much as we're pretending it does.

It just doesn't.

Let's just pray.

Let's just pray.

Lord, we just honor you and we welcome you

 We thank you for the revelation of yourself.

We thank you and praise you that you are good, that you have come down into our history, and that you are uniquely interested in making yourself known and making us like you.

We just praise you and we invite you.

Lord, teach us through the scriptures.

 Would you show us the face of Christ in your full beauty and power and humanity today?

In Jesus' name, amen.

So if you're talking about the incarnation, if you're talking about this big topic,

 It's almost like, have you ever met somebody and you're like, hey, how was your week?

And you're like, well, you know, I first loved technology when I was five.

And then my parents, and you're like, oh my gosh, you were in for like a 30-second conversation.

And then they immediately made this like, it's minimum 15.

Understanding what God did starts with what he started in creation.

It has to start there.

 That's exactly where our verse started.

If you notice, Colossians 1.15 goes through almost the entire Bible, cover to cover, in that one poem.

It starts out in 1.16, for in him all things were created.

 Things in heaven and things on earth.

And so you see Paul using this creation imagery.

He is taking the conversation way back on purpose.

He wants to make it crystal clear that Jesus is in fact that second person of the Godhead.

This is the character that you thought it was.

I know it sounded like Genesis.

I know it sounded like John in the beginning was the word.

You're like, oh, that's Genesis.

 In the beginning, God created.

Paul wants us to think of creation imagery because he wants us to think of creation power.

Only God can create.

We should be in that mindset starting in this poem.

The thought here is that Jesus is the principle of creation.

He's the principle agent of creation.

 He is the word through Genesis, through creation.

Every instance of the universe being upheld by a power is that second person of the Trinity, Jesus.

I want to actually bring up a few images.

I'm a visual person.

 And I work with a bunch of space nerds.

And so I get all of these random space nerd facts.

I design squares on computers.

I don't know this stuff.

But all of my coworkers would know that this is the galaxy.

This is our nearest neighbor.

One trillion stars are in this galaxy.

It's about 160,000 light years wide.

 This is crazy.

I'll just say that again.

Light, 160,000 years to get to the other side.

This is nuts.

I mean, we can actually zoom in a little bit more.

Okay, so those are not pixels.

Those are stars.

 Each one of those is a star.

This image is one of the largest images taken by NASA, by cameras over years and years and years, letting the exposures open just so you can see light coming from years and years away.

Each star here

 I know they look very close.

Each star is, it's not too dissimilar from how the nearest star is in relation to us and our sun.

So if you look at the sun and you look at the next star, that distance is larger, but not that much larger than that to that.

We're gonna keep going, guys.

Like, it doesn't stop.

 I want to have this up as I read John 1, 1 through 4.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was the God in the beginning, and through him all things were made.

This helps me think more cosmically a little bit.

We need to have our brains broken a little bit to help see afresh things

 How cosmic our Lord is.

It's really important for your soul to feel really small.

There's another, this one's going to be a video.

And it's going to be one of those slow zooms.

So there's maybe a couple stars in here, but each one of these is a galaxy that we were just looking at.

 This is the legacy Hubble field.

This right here is galaxy upon galaxy upon galaxy.

Each one up to about a trillion stars.

In the beginning was the Word.

And the Word was with God.

And at His Word, the cosmos were created.

 He's a galaxy breather.

His creativity knows no bounds.

There's about 265,000 here.

Just for context, this would cover up about a thumb in the sky.

We're going to keep going, okay?

It gets better, all right?

 Okay, so let's do math, all right?

So we looked at one galaxy.

There's like a trillion in there, okay?

Stars.

Each of those little pixels are a star.

We have a star that's so far away and so huge in the sun, right?

Okay, so then you start zooming out.

You got galaxies.

There's so many of them.

Each one, trillion stars.

 The psalmist counts the thoughts, the sweet thoughts of the Lord towards you as more numerous than the sand.

And if you do math, you can do this in AI right now, there are more stars than sand.

There are more stars than sand.

 We are looking at a small percentage of the observable galaxy.

The amount of galaxies right now, it keeps going up because we keep, you know, we're tiny, we're trying, you know.

There's approximately known observable two trillion galaxies.

Meaning that first picture we looked at, if you could say that each one of those stars were galaxies,

 You'd actually have to double it because there's only a trillion stars in that galaxy and there's two trillion galaxies.

The scale is really hard to think about.

The incarnation is important because the word, the agent that made this and is making this and upholding this by his word right now is upholding the cells in your body.

 The breath you use to bless, to curse, is upheld by the word.

That's our God.

It's important for us to think about the manger, Christ in the manger, as fully man.

Because that means he's us.

Like really, really us.

Like he really did it.

 We cannot pretend that he is not the king of the cosmos in that manger.

Because otherwise, there's no power.

There's no power outside of Christ.

The king of the cosmos came close.

To take the scale even further, we've looked at all the stars and all the galaxies and all that.

 If you shrunk all of the stars and all of those trillions of galaxies, and you made them the size of a cell, they would fit in, I mean, we're talking like glasses of water.

They would fit in your body.

The cosmos in your body dwarfs the known cosmos that we can see out here.

 the king of the cosmos became a cell.

And Mary took on sin, took on us, and became us so that we could become him.

When we think about the vastness of all this stuff, there's a couple things that happen.

 We need to think about the bigness and the goodness and the otherness of God, just as we need to probably have a more cosmic understanding of sin itself.

 That's where the incarnation becomes really sweet to me, when I think about what Jesus did.

It magnifies who he is and how grand and supreme he is.

At the same time, it gives us a view of how troubled and hopeless that we are without him.

I want to go into the power of sin here a little bit.

Sin, in the biblical understanding,

 we probably align with sinful behaviors or instances of rebellion.

The little things in the heart, actions, all of that.

We as a culture generally understand that a little bit more.

I think what we miss a little bit is the language that we see in Genesis 4.

Sin crouching at the door.

This cosmic presence that is an invaded space

 through the mutiny of his own family, right?

God's heavenly family, there's a mutiny.

His earthly family, there's a mutiny there.

There is a force, this cosmic force, that you are both complicit in, going to back again and again and again, while also a victim of this force, crouching at the door.

Colossians 121 says, you were alienated.

 You're alienated from God and enemies.

That language is, it's almost this language of being trapped.

We are trapped by the decisions we keep making.

We are trapped in this cosmic rebellion.

The incarnation is beautiful.

 Not just because the big became small, the mighty became humble, but because he truly wanted to recreate what we are.

He really, really did.

He wanted to do that.

There's a few aspects of sin that I think we should just go over really, really quickly.

What did sin actually do?

Like, let's get into it.

Well, first there's guilt.

 There's the actual guilt of trespass against God.

There's separation.

We were in the garden in this earthly family with our Lord, right?

Where heaven and earth meet.

God is walking among us.

And there's separation.

There can be no longer closeness or intimacy with the Lord.

There's corruption and there's death.

If you're taking notes, I want you to write those things down.

This is sin.

 It is guilt from things you've done, we've done.

It is separation, corruption, and death.

If we think of sin as just one of those things, we're missing part of the problem.

And we're not going to see how stuck we really are.

We're going to probably think, maybe there's a way I could do it on my own.

Maybe there's a way God could have done it other, that would have been better.

Did he really have to come?

 The corruption of God's physical world, that invasion of this cosmic power being passed down in physical matter is a really, really big piece about why Jesus had to come.

Just being born of this matter, this corrupted matter, is going to keep us trapped.

I almost think about it like this, like,

 If you've ever worked with people, maybe you've been in the situation where you are like, I feel dependent on a substance or a chemical, and it starts growing and growing and growing.

We probably all have touched this at some point in our lives.

It's similar with sin.

The action of doing it is sin.

 The action of participating in that is sin.

And you are also oppressed by sin.

You're trapped in this.

And the more you go to it, the more it has power over you.

There's this picture of God kind of looking at his creation with love, with separation, a needed separation.

He's holy.

 And there is both judgment and love and longing.

I just want to recreate this.

I see that you're stuck.

I know, I know what you're going through.

I know what it's like.

Romans 7.24, this is just an emotional verbiage.

Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

 Sin is so much deeper than we think.

Death being physical, spiritual, corruption being deep, separation being permanent, and guilt being deserved.

Deserved.

When I think about the worries that I had as a kid, about the fall just happening again and again, and me misunderstanding what God wanted to do,

 I'm reminded of, there's this wonderful chapter in this little green book, or the one I have is green.

It's by St.

Athanasius.

And he has a chapter in there on the divine problem that God is facing.

And he kind of breaks it down like this.

What is God to do with creation that he loves?

They've chosen rebellion.

They've chosen non-being.

They've chosen to be separate from the source of life.

 He wants to eliminate evil, be just.

He wants to heal you.

He wants to free your will.

He wants to introduce himself, and he wants to keep you forever.

How is God supposed to do that while keeping your will intact?

What's he supposed to do?

What's he supposed to do?

In our passage in verse 22,

 It says, but now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation.

The answer to this dilemma, it's not a dilemma for God, but it's a dilemma for our brain.

How would you solve this?

How would you do this?

The answer is union with God.

 It's the only, only way.

Tim Keller has this brilliant explanation of the incarnation, and it goes something like this.

God hates sin, guilt, and death so much that he was born into it so that when he came again, he could destroy evil without destroying you.

I am moved by that every time.

It's God looking at sin, and we have to look at it this way, with just judgment

 with mercy and love our sin is as much a mutiny as it is a really slow suicide sin is is it has to be looked at both ways it is sin against god the only true author of life and it is an intentional separation from him which is the only possible end to that

 is disintegration, non-being.

It's the only possible end to that.

I love that.

It helps us think about redemptive history.

The plan of God is not just simply to snap his fingers and change his mind.

It's not just to show up and show us how to live as God in a cosplay costume.

 Like, I mean, that would be cool.

Okay, imagine this.

Jesus comes down.

He's cosplaying.

He's an avatar or whatever.

That's cool.

But like, if he does that, it's like, well, cool, you can do it.

You know, he's like doing 360s and lightning bolts and like healing people.

And he's like, it's so easy.

And you're like, but it's not for me.

I'm still in this body of death.

What am I supposed to do?

He ascends and peace out.

He's like, you know,

 paid the price and you're like I'm still stuck though if Jesus was not fully man he's not unified with you if he's not fully king of the cosmos what's worth being unified to the only solution the athanasius lays out of all these wonderful things that God wants to do he wants to have you not lose you redeem you show you his justice and mercy

 is that he would recreate you so that he could kill evil without killing you.

Athanasius says this, there's no inconsistency between creation and salvation.

That's that language in Colossians that it brings out.

There's no difference between my saving of you and my creating you.

That's what we should be thinking when we are reading Colossians 1, 15 through 22.

The creator is back again.

 The creator's back with a second chapter, not a rerun.

A rerun would be sad.

We would all be terrified we'd do it again.

The incarnation is new creation.

It is new creation.

119, Colossians, for God was pleased to have his fullness dwell in him.

 There's a couple aspects if you're taking notes of the incarnation.

I want to go through them quickly here.

The incarnation does a few things.

It reveals God as he's meant to be revealed, the only way he's meant to be revealed.

We are entirely in the dark unless the God who made this and is outside this says hello.

We cannot reason our way to knowing the creator of this.

There's no way.

 There's no way to know him.

The incarnation reveals God, not through an announcement through the clouds, which he could have done.

He became a person.

He became a person that we could know.

He became a person that we would know in the sense of being with him.

Hebrews 1 to 4 says the sun is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being.

 sustaining all things by his powerful word.

After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand in the majesty of heaven.

The fullness of God has to be fully man, and it has to be fully God, for it to be anything saving, anything uniting.

The second thing the incarnation does after revealing who he is, reveals himself, comes into history, is healing us.

 We're talking about it two ways.

Healing, there's even a portion of our will.

Martin Luther says it like this, the will of a man without grace is not free, but enslaved.

And that with his own consent.

The idea is that we are so dependent, we almost have this lack of sobriety.

 That the things we choose over and over and over again make it impossible to even choose God if we saw him.

Do you have friends or family like that?

I have a family member in mind who's dealt with this.

You can talk to them and you can see they are trapped.

There is nothing you can do for them that makes them want the thing that's good for them.

 If God came as an avatar, that's great.

Look, here I am.

I can't even choose you.

There's an aspect of our will that is so broken and our eyes so dim and our ears just so hard of hearing that God knew even if he showed his face, we wouldn't even choose him.

The healing happens at our being, at our will.

 Again, this is recreation.

This is not just God snapping his fingers.

And the third thing is, he is recreating us so that we can be like him.

I love this quote.

This is simply not a return to an old order of things before the fall.

It will be an entirely new and unprecedented event.

 The incarnate Christ is inviting us through the person of Jesus Christ into the life of the Trinity.

When I started, I think, really realizing this in the past couple years, I've known God, I think, since I was four.

I don't know.

I've, like, chose him a bunch of times.

Church kid, gave my life a bunch of times.

It's a roller coaster.

We all, you know, you've been there.

 When I realized, when it clicked for me, that me praying a prayer of repentance wasn't just God changing his mind about me.

Or saying, great, you did the three things.

I love you now.

Congrats.

And then we're all like, that was kind of a weird checklist.

Like, why'd you do that?

It's God truly saying, I can't save you unless I attach you to me.

 There's only one way to get saved.

There's only one way to be with the eternal good.

There's only one way to be with the king of the cosmos, and that's to be attached to him.

Any other way to be saved is redoing the fall.

Do you want another garden?

I mean, I think walking with God would be cool and the good of the garden, but I want Christ.

I want to be bonded to my creator.

 That's good news.

It's good news because he did not want to end creation with some mistake.

He knew we were always going to fall.

He created a garden to be with us in perfection and said, I'm going to give you a will and I'm going to give you my goodness and I'm going to show you me.

And you're going to eventually choose you.

It's just going to happen.

You're contingent on me.

 The final act of creation is the word becoming a cell in his mother Mary.

A cell that is reeked with the sinful, disintegrating stuff.

Not the polished stuff.

And he goes, my final act of creation is spiritually, through the power of the spirit, uniting you to me forever.

 And we go, can I just have like a little love or peace under the tree?

You know, can I just like have some of your attributes or like, can you just snap your fingers and save me?

And he's like, no.

Jesus is better than a garden.

Jesus is so much better.

You could, there's even language in Christ as the mediator between fully God, fully man, that he is a garden.

 The temple was God tabernacling in our presence, but outside of us.

We could just see him like this.

Jesus is saying, get the garden out of here.

I'll be the garden.

Marry yourself to me.

Be with me.

And I'll remake you.

I'm going to remake your desires.

I know what you're going through.

I know you can't stop doing the thing you don't want to do.

 Because I've been there.

Christ becoming man means that you have connection with him.

He knows you.

Christ being the king of the cosmos means you don't have to stay who you are.

There's this verse in Jude that the fourth point of keeping points is he keeps us.

 I love this.

Jude talks about the faithfulness of God.

He ends his book, to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you through his glorious presence without fault and with joy, to the only God our Savior be.

He's able to keep you from stumbling.

Why?

Because you have him.

Because you have him.

Why does this matter?

Why does all this matter?

 God didn't want to restart.

God didn't mess up.

This isn't plan B. This is plan A. Plan A is presenting himself to you in a manger.

The child who was nursed by his mom while he held his mom's cells.

That's the picture of God.

That's the humility of God.

 one of the biggest stumbling blocks to saying yes to Jesus is actually looking at what he's like.

It's hard.

It's hard for those of us to go like, I have to share in the life of my savior.

That should be good news.

But when you're broken and we're sick, it looks like humiliation.

 That size difference looks like humiliation.

Do I really want to be tied to that?

Do I really want that?

The incarnation means that God is human for eternity and God for eternity so that he would redeem you.

He is sustaining you.

 And he's not coming to you like a present that you open and observe.

He's coming a little bit more like an engagement ring.

It's free.

But it's everything.

Saying yes to this is the greatest yes.

 It's the only way you're saved.

It's the only way you participate in the goodness of God is through the life, the death, and the resurrection of our Lord.

I think it's just contemplate him.

Behold him.

 The one who took on the stuff in your flesh that is hard.

The stuff in your flesh that is broken.

And Jesus comes to you and says, I know.

Because I am you.

Do you want to be connected to me?

 Could we all close your eyes?

We're going to close in just a moment.

Is there anyone who has not given their life to Christ?

Is there anyone who has not heard the gospel like this?

Is there anyone who is looking at the Son

 and saying, I want to be unioned with you.

I'm done being a rebel.

I'm done with my trajectory towards non-being.

I just want you.

I think the only appropriate way to end our service is to look at Christ and to say, do you want him?

 Is there anyone here, would you raise your hand if you would like to say yes to Christ?

Yes to our Lord.

Contemplate Him, the author and finisher of your faith.

That's wonderful.

We're going to open up the altar in just a moment.

 And the call is simple.

Let's look at Christ and respond to him.

He loves us.

He loves us so much.

Lord, we thank you for the gift of your son.

We thank you for the redemptive creation that you have not stopped doing.

 We thank you that you know us because you became us.

And we thank you that we can be joined to you through your mercy.

Lord, we love you and we praise you.

In the name of Jesus, amen.