of first importance

below is my first sermon, preached today at plainfield first church of God, plainfield, pa.

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“now i would remind you, brothers, of the gospel i preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word i preached to you – unless you believed in vain. for i delivered to you as of first importance what i also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to cephas, then to the twelve. then He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. then He appeared to james, then to all the apostles. last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared also to me.” ~1Cor. 15:1-8

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today i want to speak to you about something hopefully most of you know. today’s sermon should have little new for you, though perhaps it might clarify some things in your mind. the purpose of today’s message is not so that you will come away with some new knowledge, or with a new way to apply what you know, but that your hearts would be filled anew with love for our Savior, and that your affections would be stirred once more by His gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

as this is my first time preaching to you, i figured i’d start with what’s most important. the text that is the “launch pad” for today’s sermon has in it an important phrase: “of first importance”. the apostle paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, calls what we’re going to be looking at this morning the matter of first importance. so i figure i’ll start at the top, so if, God forbid, i only get one chance, i’ve preached to you on the best thing i could.

now what is this gospel that God places such emphasis on? paul starts it off with a person: Christ. Jesus Christ, the Son of God who became a man, who lived like we do yet without sin. this is the Guy who the whole Bible is about. paul then states a historical fact: Christ died. while the Gospel narratives in our Bibles speak much about Jesus’ life and earthly public ministry, in the summary here paul skips straight to the point of the matter. many of you have heard this countless times in your life, but let me remind you that this is not some fairytale or bedtime story, not some parable or fable to be learned from. Christ’s crucifixion is a historical event, in a place and a time and with witnesses, as are all the other events that paul mentions here. and for sake of time, i won’t go into how absolutely brutal Jesus’ death was at the hands of the roman executioners, but think on this: our word “excruciating” was invented because they needed a new word to describe the agony of death on a cross. he says later in this chapter that if these things are not true, if they are only nice ideas and not historical, physical reality, then everything we believe is in vain.

paul goes on to give not only the historical event but its theological meaning. he says, “Christ died for our sins.” now sin is a word we use a lot in the church, but it’s rarely used outside spiritual or ‘God-talk’ conversations. we tend to think about sin as a list of things we’re not supposed to do. you might think of the ten commandments: don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, and so forth. or we might think of sin as the reverse: not doing things we’re supposed to do. so if we don’t pray or we don’t act nicely to other people, we’re sinning. and all of that is pretty much true. but that falls short of what the Bible means by sin, because it’s not just about what you do, it’s about who you are. it’s not just our actions that can be sinful; it’s also our thoughts, our motives, our emotions, down to the very core of us.

you see, sin is rooted in this simple idea: we want something other than God. we see this in the words of the prophet jeremiah: “be appalled, o heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” the people of israel, instead of enjoying God and drinking deeply from Him and His glory- they sought out other things to satisfy themselves. they went after other things, to honor them and praise them. we also see this in chapter 1 of the Letter to the Romans, where it is written that the people of the world, “although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but ...exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” or as paul summarizes it a few chapters later, “all have sinned and fallen short (or ‘lack’) the glory of God.” the basis of sin is that we trade away God as the object of our worship, the thing that we treasure and praise and seek after, and take instead something else as our ‘god.’ this goes back to the first commandment, “you shall have no other gods besides Me.” the essence of sin is idolatry: that we take something other than God as our highest treasure, what we are devoted to, in which we most delight, what we honor and prize above all else. as luther says, you’ll never break any other commandment if you keep the first one, because in order to sin in any way you must put something before God in your life.

now think with me a moment. most of us aren’t bowing down before some carving of a bird or cow or something. we’re not slaughtering farm animals to statues of wood or metal. our idolatry tends to be more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘civilized’ than that, but we still sacrifice for things other than God, we give offerings to them and make them our source of meaning and satisfaction in life. and some of you, as i’m saying this, will think of what most church folk tend to think of as the “big sins”: sex, drugs, money, and things along those lines; and those are definitely idols for many. but as calvin says, “our hearts are idol factories”, they keep producing new ones. for some, our tv or computer is a big idol: it’s where we escape to, it’s what we long for after a hard day at work, and we’ll sit staring at the screen for hours on end, numbing our minds and our hearts. for others, we make sports our idol. i know some african Christians who view the stadiums we build to our sports teams as modern-day temples, with mascots as the symbolic idol, and the team as our object of devotion. some make popularity an idol, or academic achievement. and we mentioned last week in sunday school that for some of us, our families are our idols. and some even make an idol out of external goodness and religiosity. we do all the right things, and check off all the boxes, either out of pride or for the praise of men.

one last example: one of the things we want for our kids is sexual purity, and that’s not a bad desire. but the guy who never slept around, who never looked at porn, who was abstinent ‘til marriage and completely faithful to his wife until the day he died: if that guy did not do so for the glory of God, he sinned in keeping sexually pure. because if he didn’t do it out of a love for God and a desire to know and honor Him, then he’s acting either out of self-righteous pride, or worldly fear, or people-pleasing vanity. Scripture says that “everything that is not from faith is sin.” so even our good works that are not born out of faith in God are disgusting in God’s sight; He tells isaiah that they are to Him as “dirty menstrual rags.”

now hear me out: most of these are good things. it’s not bad to love your wife, or your kids. and it’s not wrong to enjoy a sports game, or a tv show. the problem is that we make these good things into ultimate things. instead of being a means to honor and enjoy God, we make these things an end in and of themselves. instead of seeing God through the gifts, instead of being in awe of the display of God’s character and nature in the gift, we stop at the thing itself, and make it the source of our meaning and purpose and satisfaction.

the reason i need you to get this, to get what sin really is, and how pervasive it is, is because if you don’t get this, you won’t love Jesus much. Christ said that “the one who has been forgiven much, loves much, but the one who has been forgiven little, loves little.” the reason i’m praying to God that you get this is that if you don’t understand how great a debt you owed God outside of Christ, you won’t be in awe of the gospel, and the heart that once sang out “amazing grace! how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!” will start to think of what we don’t have, and what we’re entitled to, and become puffed up like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son.

but get this, please get this: Jesus died for your sins. and i know we say that all the time, and as the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt.” that’s why if you look at church history, you’ll see that one generation believes and loves the gospel, the next generation assumes the gospel, and the third generation ends up denying the gospel.

so hear this and let it impact your hearts: Christ died for your sins. and if you don’t know what that means, let me walk you through how the Scriptures unpack that.

• in Isaiah 53, we’re told that Jesus “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows...upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.”
• in Acts 10 we’re told “everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name.”
• in Romans 3 we’re told that we “are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Whom God put forward as a propitiation [that is, a wrath-absorbing sacrifice] by His blood.”
• in Galatians 3 we read that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us...so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”
• in Hebrews 2 God says that “through death [Jesus] destroy[ed] the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”
• in 2 Corinthians 5 we read, “God made Him Who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
• in Colossians 1 we read that “He has now reconciled [you] in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him.”
• we read earlier that Revelation 5 declares of Jesus that “You were slaughtered, and by Your blood You ransomed a people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and You have made them a kingdom and priests to our God.”
• 1 John 4 declares that “in this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him.”
• 1 Peter 3 says that “Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God.”
• in Ephesians God tells us that “in love He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace.”

so because of the death of Christ, we get all this: our sins are forgiven, the wrath of God against us is removed, we are freed from the curse of the law, we are free from the power of death and the devil, we have the righteousness of Jesus counted as our own, we are considered holy and blameless before Him, we have been made a kingdom and priests of God, we have everlasting life, we know the love of God, we are brought back to God, we are adopted as sons, and we are free to praise His glorious grace forever.

think about this: how many of your sins were future sins when Christ died? all of them. Christ knows we’re unrighteous, we’re messed up, we’re broken, we’re evil. Romans says that before God got a hold of us, we were His enemies. but He loves us through all of that, not based on anything in us or anything we do, but because that’s the kind of God He is. we can’t earn it, and we can’t pay Him back. He doesn’t want us to! that’s the point of it being a gift! you don’t try to repay someone for a gift: it’s almost insulting, and it goes against the idea of giving.

so what do we do with a great gift? we enjoy it. we delight in it. we praise it to other people. i mean, if you get something really good for your birthday, within a few days all your friends know about it, right? we love the giver more because of the gift, because the gift reveals the character of the one who gives it. and we respond in thanksgiving.

and so, as Christ has saved us by His death, we receive all these wonderful blessings by grace, for free. we rejoice in this great gift of salvation, because now we have what we most need, and what is our highest joy, namely, we have God. through Christ, we get God, as our King, as our Father, as our Friend, and as our Treasure.

i wish i had time to really unpack the rest of this morning’s text for you. briefly, paul tells us that Christ’s death, burial and resurrection all happened, and they all happened according to the Scriptures. if you look through the Old Testament, the details of the gospel are laid out in dozens of prophecies, all from hundreds of years before Christ came. and because Jesus was resurrected, we know that God accepted His sacrifice on our behalf, and now He is interceding for us before the Father. and we know that we too will one day be raised, and live on the new earth with Him forever. and finally paul backs this all up by naming a bunch of witnesses to the whole thing, so if anyone had any doubts, they could go ask these guys.

so this is the gospel of our Savior, Jesus Christ. this is the good news “which [we] received, in which [we] stand, and by which [we] are being saved.” i hope your affections for God have been stirred, that your spirits have been re-awakened to these glorious truths, and that your passion for the gospel has been fanned into flame once more. this morning i’m not going to go through practical applications of this, because the entire Christian life is the application of this message, of the gospel, to our lives. but this morning, being reminded of the great gift we have received, i invite you to respond to God. in a moment, we’ll respond in song, praising our God together. we’ll respond in giving, because our God is a giver, and He declares that “it is more blessed to give than receive.” we’ll respond in praising God for all the things He’s been doing in our lives: blessings purchased for us by the blood of Christ. we’ll respond in pouring our hearts out to God, asking Him to make His grace more evident in our lives: as peter says, “casting our cares before Him, because He cares for us.” we’ll respond by recognizing God’s work in the lives of our children, and dedicate their teachers to His work. and then leaving this place, we’ll respond with the rest of our lives, loving and enjoying God, “to the praise of His glorious grace.” amen.

Christology - the humanity of Jesus

i've been a little behind the ball recently, but here is last week's youth group lesson. i owe a large part of this to matt chandler's message at reform and resurge '06.

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behold, My Servant shall act wisely;
He shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted
as many were astonished at you –
His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance
and His form beyond that of the children of mankind –
so shall He sprinkle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of Him;
for that which has not been told them they see,
and that which they have not heard they understand.
who has believed what he has heard from us?
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
for He grew up before Him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him,
and no beauty that we should desire Him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows
yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
but He was wounded for our transgressions;
He was crushed for our iniquities;
upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with His stripes we are healed.
all we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned – every one – to his one way;
and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and He was afflicted,
yet He opened not His mouth.
by oppression and judgment He was taken away;
and as for His generation, who considered
that He was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
and they made His grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in His death,
although He had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in His mouth.
yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him;
He has put Him to grief;
when His soul makes an offering for guilt,
He shall see His offspring; He shall prolong His days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
out of the anguish of His soul He shall see and be satisfied;
by His knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and He shall bear their iniquities
therefore I will divide Him a portion with the many,
and He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
because He poured out His soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet He bore the sin of many
and makes intercession for the transgressors.
~Isaiah 52:13-53:12

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so i want to walk you through what we’ll be doing tonight. there are a few questions i want to discuss with you, then i’m going to lecture for a short bit to give you some background info (it won’t be long, so hang in there), and then we’ll tie the two together. so first, i want you to think about your own life. in particular, i want you to think about any really tough experiences you’ve had. some time when you’ve been really upset, where things have gone pretty bad for you. maybe a friend turned out not to be such a good friend. maybe a time where you had things all planned out, and nothing went the way it was supposed to. or maybe just a time where things were just really busy and hectic, and you felt like you just wanted it over with so you could finally get some rest. anyone willing to share?


ok, we’ll come back to that in a bit. this is where i’m going to go a little heady on you, and if some of this goes in one ear and out the other, it’s ok, but try to pay attention, especially those of whose favorite questions all start with “why?”. i know you might drive your parents or teachers crazy sometimes, but if that’s you, i’m glad your here; you’re in the right place.

so for the next two weeks, we’re going to be talking about Christology. those of you who really like science might remember that -ology means “the study of [something]”, so this means that today and next week, we’re going to looking at who this Jesus guy really is. this was a particularly debated topic back about A.D. 450, and so a group of wise and learned leaders in the church held an ecumenical (or church-wide) council, called the council of chalcedon, where they set down the Biblical and orthodox understanding of who Christ is. if you’re interested in going deeper than we will here, i’d recommend reading the chalcedonian creed and/or the athanasian creed, both of which lay out a short but thorough view of Christ’s nature.

when we talk of Christ, we generally say He is fully two things: fully God and fully man. think of marbled bread: you have dark and light bread, swirled together. it has all the characteristics of both the dark and light breads, but they are stuck together, inseparable, and one loaf is made out of the two types. in the same way Christ is both God and man, neither nature damaging or overriding the other, and also unmixed, indivisible.

so Christ is the God-man. next week, we’ll look more at what it means that Jesus is God, but for this week i want us to deal with Jesus’ humanity. because i think sometimes, when we think about Jesus, we think of Him as something like santa claus or some sky fairy. He’s up there, He’s watching us, expecting us to do and not to do certain things, and He’ll help us out when we get into a jam. or maybe we have God the Father and Jesus so connected in our brains that we have trouble thinking of Jesus as a human being. i have trouble with that sometimes.

but here’s the thing: Jesus became God incarnate. any of you like chili con carne? casey and i had some the other night, and it was delicious. do you know what the “con carne” part means? it means, “with meat” or “with flesh”. and so Jesus is God come in-carne, in the flesh. Deity become a man. it’s like there are two circles, God and creation, and they are completely different. God is infinite and without beginning. and He created the universe; so it is finite and time-bound. but then this crazy thing happened where these circles touched, and that’s Jesus.

now stay with me: when we think of the life of Jesus, what do you normally think about? perhaps His teaching, His miracles, His death and resurrection. but something we tend to overlook is Christ’s emotional life. if you look at John 4, where Jesus talks with the woman at the well, He’s there because He got tired and had to sit down. i sometimes have trouble of thinking about storm-calming, walk-on-water Jesus as being tired, but at least on this occasion, He got so worn out that He had to send His disciples into town for food, because He was too exhausted to get His own sandwich. have you been tired like that?

or in Mark 11, when He goes to the temple, and He sees all the swindling and greed and such that are going on there, He gets angry. really angry. so angry that He makes a whip, flips over their tables, and drives them out of there. this isn’t a guy letting his emotions run wild, either. this is controlled rage, focused and furious, which is all the scarier to me. we talked about this a little two weeks ago: Jesus is not the effeminate, skinny white guy we normally see in paintings. He was a ripped 1st century carpenter, and i imagine that when He got in these merchants faces, even a guy like schwarzenger would turn tail and run. have you ever felt angry at injustice in the world? has the evil and the brokenness of this world ever really made you fuming mad?

now remember with me the night of His arrest, how judas betrays Jesus. you’ve got to get this, judas was one of the twelve. he was one of Christ’s inner circle, who got to see things and hang out with Jesus in a way only a few got to out of the crowd that followed Him. think of your group of friends. think of the people who you let in on your secrets, and who you let into your life in a way that almost no one else is. judas was one of the guys closest to Jesus, and he’s the one who betrays Him. luke records that judas came up with this big crowd to where he knew Jesus would be, and it was dark. so he singled Him out from the other disciples by kissing Him on the cheek, which in that culture is a greeting of closeness and friendship. and Jesus turns to him and is like, “you’re gonna betray Me with a kiss, judas? with a kiss?! you’re one of my boys, judas! you’re one of the twelve!” Christ felt betrayal, and though He knew it was coming, even so He felt its sting, and he was grieved that one so close to Him would turn Him over for money. have you ever been betrayed? have you ever had one of your closest friends hurt you? and maybe not for a stack of bills, but because they’re part of this crowd now, and you’re not, and so that have to distance themselves from you. have you ever been betrayed?

or how about in Mark 3, when Jesus’ family comes and tries to get Him to stop teaching and bring Him home, because they think He’s lost His mind. even mary, the one who got pregnant by the Holy Spirit, who had to flee to egypt so herod couldn’t kill baby Jesus, who got the first Christmas presents ever; even she didn’t believe in Jesus at first. she and His brothers try to stop Him, because they think He’s crazy. have you had to deal with a family that thinks you’re nuts? with relatives who just don’t get it, and who are maybe even a little psychotic themselves?

one last example: Jesus praying the garden of gethsemane before He’s arrested. He said to His disciples, “my soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” Mark says that He was “greatly distressed and troubled.” Luke records that He started sweating blood, which is a real medical condition that happens only to those who are in the utmost stress and agony. He cried out for His Father to change His plan, even though He knew this had to happen, because that was how much He dreaded the cross: not just the physical pain, but the spiritual death of bearing the world’s sins. He knew it had to happen, but in that moment, He dreaded it, and while He had come into the world for this very purpose, as John says, even so He is in agony with the thought of it, and He lays His heart out before the Father. have you ever felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders? like you just couldn’t move on, because what you saw coming was so awful?

i could go on and on. the reason i bring all this is up is because of what the book of Hebrews says about Jesus. the first few chapters of that book are about how awesome Jesus is, and it says at the end of chapter 2:

“for surely it is not angels that He helps, but He helps the offspring of abraham. therefore He had to be made like His brothers in every respect, so that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. for because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.”

and listen to this at the end of chapter 4:

“for we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

so Jesus is not like zeus, some wrathful old guy in the sky who is ready to strike us down for the least wrongdoing. nor is He some spirit which floats about, who doesn’t understand what we go through. He’s not some taskmaster who rates us based on how well we do. no, He has gone through what we go through. He’s been there. He is, as isaiah calls Him, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

and get this: He didn’t have to. Jesus is the Son of God, part of the Trinity. He’s been around since before the beginning of time. He didn’t have to come into creation and write Himself into our story. He could have stayed in heaven, and enjoyed the fellowship of the Father and the Spirit, and have let us alone. but instead He came down to earth, born in a filthy barn to poor young parents and lived a life mostly in obscurity. He spent 3 years trying to teach a stubborn and hard-hearted people the nature and character of God and how we should live in light of that, and was homeless for most of that time, being followed by a bunch of people who just didn’t seem to get it, and being maligned and hated on by the religious rulers of that day. He didn’t have to do any of that, or face any of the trials and temptations and the emotional turmoil that we go through. but He chose to, out of His freely given love for us.

and not only did He live like us and face what we humans face, and more than what most of us will ever face, but He took the place we deserved on the cross, bringing us back to God. despite how often you and i mess up, no matter whether we do great things for Him or not, in spite of anything whatsoever we say or do, nothing is too big to get between us and Jesus. you don’t have to work for Him, as if to earn His love. you can’t! but because of the sacrifice of Christ, God is 100% for us, for all whom He has brought near to Himself. He is sympathetic, He feels for us, He intercedes for us with God the Father, He pleads our case for us, and He grants us mercy and grace and strength to get us through.

i say this so that when trial comes, when you mess up, when everything seems to be going wrong – and trust me, it is coming – when that happens, my prayer is that you’ll run to Jesus, and not away from Him. because He knows, He’s been there, He feels for you, and He does not let you go through hard things for no purpose. He will see you through, because He has saved you and made you His own. if you don’t get this, you’ll run away and find some idol to pursue, and it will kill you. this is about your life. so take the advice of peter, when he said “cast all your cares upon Him, for He cares for you.” run to Him, because He loves you, no matter what, unconditionally.

i want to give you a little time to process this now. just listen, think, pray, and then we’ll close. [play “i have been there”, then have someone close in prayer.]

now for the next week, i want you to take the Isaiah passage we read, Isaiah 52:13-53:12, and read 2 verses each day. then take 5 or 10 minutes, and just think about what those verses mean, pray about them, and maybe talk to someone about what they brought to your mind.

prayer of restless angst

there are some times where something will hit my heart, and whatever i'm doing doesn't feel right. i often don't know what to do in those moments. this is one of those moments. i'm torn between writing down my thoughts and prayer, so i figure i'll do them both. feel free to join with me in wrestling.

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God, as casey and i were sitting here playing cards and listening to songs, "God of this city" came on, and after a minute or so of just tapping my foot to the good musid, my mind was grabbed by the lyrics. i was taken back to last spring, where 50 or so of my brothers and sisters were gathered in a dinky little apartment in north philly, singing with hearts full for Your glory to fill that place. we burned for You, and yet how quickly those flames can die down. yet You never let them go out. more than that, You freely bring that passion back to us; how great is Your grace to poor sinners like me! but God, i know not what to do with this passion that burns in my heart. this card game, being able to sit with my wife and enjoy some music and each others company, it is so nice, and it is a gift from You, and i want to receive it with thanksgiving, as You have instructed me to. yet i feel no peace about it now, for i long to see You own this place, where there are so many who know the name "jesus" but do not know Your Name. this culture is full of "church-ianity" as my brother once called it, and many hear seem inoculated to You and the glory of Your gospel. and even among my friends who i play poker with, and hang out in bars with, though i rejoice at being able to talk with them about You, yet they seem so unmoved! God, i would that Your power be made known in this place. my heavenly King, bring Your kingdom in greater fullness here, that Your Name might be known and praised among these people!

God, thank you for calming my spirit some, knowing that You will do what is right in Your eyes. yet You call for and expect our prayers, so i beg you for this area, for those at the trailer park tonight, for the members of this, Your church, and for those who hear Your Name on my lips. o God, may it ever be on my lips, that You are never far from my thoughts or my speech. show me my part to play, o Lord, and give me the strength to see it through. God, i feel so weak, and rightly i should, for i am. but Your Word says that in weakness is Your strength shown to be perfect, and so i offer You my all, weak and puny though it may be, and beg You to move through me. Lord, i would that You would even move in spite of me, for i am not as i ought to be, nor act i as i ought, but You, my God, are the one who talks the low and the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are. would You use me, in spite of my mind, which gets in the way so often, and my heart, which stumbles over itself, and my strength, which is very small and often consumed by laziness, and my soul, which grows weary so quickly.

God, i mean to be faithful to where You have called me. help me not to wonder what it would be like to answer some "more glorious" or "more epic" call, but to wonder still that You have entrusted this ministry to me, and though it may seem small, You care very much for these, Your children, and Your children's children. Be at work in them, and if it be Your gracious will, to use me in the process, that they might know You more fully, and be transformed by Your Word and Your ways, that they might look more like Your Son, and praise You all the more, because they see You more like You are, then the tiny bit they, and even we, see now. grow them for Your Name's sake, o Christ, that through You they might bow at the Father's feet, and be the objects of His love, and that they might display how great that love is, even as You did. be with me, Dad, for i am frail, and my heart is fickle, and i need You desperately. help me to rest in You, and take comfort in Your sovereign will, and hope against hope because You who have promised so much good are the One called Faithful and True. blessed be Your Name.

thank You for being with me. thank You for letting me know You. thank You that even though i type these words into a computer, yet You hear them in heaven, because You are near me, and because Jesus is my great High Priest, and perfect Mediator as the God-man. thank You for the cross, through which i can approach Your throne of grace with confidence and courage, knowing You will give me all that is good for me. i rest in Your care. thank You for hearing me for the sake of Your Son.