Text today is 1 Peter 2, verses 11 and 12. Starts on page 1646. The Bible's in your seats. My screen seems to be frozen. I knew this day would come. Usually it responds here in a second. If I reset it, it's like five minutes. We might have to sing another song. Let me see what I can do. It's not responding to touch. Oh, here we go, maybe. OK. I don't need your ancient technology. I used to make paper backups. Okay, there we go. See, just needs a little time. So last week we finally finished up our coverage of verses four through 10. And we looked at Peter's mention of the doctrine of reprobation for those that reject Christ. And now this week we're starting this extended section carrying all the way into chapter 4 that's primarily directives of how we are to live in this world. So we'll read verses just 11 and 12 today. Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from the fleshly lusts which wage against your soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may, because of your good deeds as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. Let's pray. Father God, we ask for your spirit's presence among us. We long for your word to shape our lives, our thoughts, our actions, our emotions. Work in us today then to use this portion of text to do just that. Renew our minds, strengthen our resolve to face the slander of the world, to abstain from the fleshly lust which wage war against our soul. Bring conviction on us as needed and then grant us the grace to leave our sins behind. We ask all this in Christ's name, amen. The past three weeks have highlighted our identity in Christ, our identity in relation to God, we could say. We are his temple, his holy priesthood, a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession. And that reality has implications for who we are in relation to the world. So that was kind of who we are in relation to God, and now we learn about who we are in relation to the world, which is where Peter takes us next. This section begins an extended series of directives that tell us how to live. Since we are those things that Peter has described, that means in relation to the world, We are what he calls us at the beginning of verse 11. That makes us strangers and aliens in relation to the world. Aliens and strangers. Other translations use similar terms such as sojourners and exiles. All of which are coming from the Old Testament. We heard it even in the opening invocation in Psalm 39. It calls us sojourners and exiles. Sojourner or stranger is the term that Abraham actually used of himself when he was speaking to the Canaanites. He says, I'm a sojourner, I'm a stranger among you. And then exile or alien is of course used of Israel after they're taken out of the land and they're exiled to Babylon and Assyria. So, these are terms for God's people. They're used of God's people in the Old Testament. His covenant community. They're for Abraham and the sons of Abraham. They're for Israel. Again, this is more evidence that Peter sees the church as the new Israel, the spiritual Israel, whose identity is more important than the genetic identity of being born a Hebrew. We are sojourners like Abraham. We are exiles like Israel was. We are living in a land that is not our own. We're awaiting a future city, an inheritance that's going to be given to us. It's been promised to us, but we don't have it yet. So we're living in this foreign land. We have citizenship in a future heaven and future earth. That is the place of our ultimate allegiance, we would say. We live and exist in this world But we ought not to have a strong sense of belonging to this world. We know that this world will only exist temporarily while our future inheritance is going to be eternal. So there's a sense in which we can look at Abraham and we can look at Israel in their exile, in their pilgrimage, to get an idea of how God would have us to live here and now. It can give us insight how we are to relate to our surroundings and how we are to interact with unbelieving people around us that are all around us, the unbelieving nations that we live among. Their example is why we don't turn the church into a commune where we just buy this giant plot of land and we hide ourselves away from the world. They didn't do that. They weren't called to do that. Nor do we seek to establish a theocratic government. Israel was not called to overturn the government of Babylon and institute a theocracy. We're not called to establish a government in the civil realm that institutes God's laws necessarily, all of God's laws, for worship or punishes idolatry, things like that. That's not the sort of thing that Abraham and Israel did in their sojourning, in their exile. Like them, though, we do actively engage with this world, we participate in its functions, we interact, we work, we build our homes, we live among the inhabitants of the world. We don't all go look for jobs exclusively within the church or exclusively within the realm of ministry, within the the realm of the ecclesiastic realm, we would say. We don't build our own neighborhoods. We don't shop at our own grocery stores. We don't build a separate distinct Christian world that exists alongside the secular world where everything is our own little version of what they have. We still vote in elections. We even participate in the civil government. In fact, the more we do that, I would say, the better the civil realm will be, the healthier it would be, the more useful, more functional it would be. But we do acknowledge a difference in Christ's rule over his spiritual kingdom of the church, in distinction from his secular kingdom of the civil realm, the civil government. Christ still rules it, but he rules it in a different way. Whenever the church has conflated these two kingdoms into one, then things get really ugly. Things get really screwed up. Because not all sins are meant to be treated as crimes, as civil crimes. And the church does not bear the responsibility of bearing the sword. That's not our job. And the civil realm does not bear the responsibility of preaching the gospel. That's not their job. Neither one has the ability to do the other. You don't call your elders, for example, to report that your car has been stolen. And you don't ask your kid's public school teacher to teach them about Jesus. Your elders won't know what to do to get your car back. And that public school teacher is either going to get the message of Jesus incredibly wrong, completely wrong, or they might by chance get it right and they'll get fired for teaching it rightly. And we essentially see Abraham and Isaac operating with an understanding of the distinction in these kingdoms. While they're sojourning in this foreign territory, they get it. They're not conflating the two. They recognize there's this civil, secular realm, and there's a kingdom of God that's different, that has different rules. Not that there's no overlap, there's clearly overlap, but they're distinct. And that's how we are. We're not like Israel when they had inherited the promised land and they set up their kingdom. That's not what we are in terms of where we are in the world. We don't have rules for worship in the civil realm and civil penalties for sin in the civil realm. We're actually more like Israel when it was exiled to Babylon and Assyria. They were called to build houses. They were called to live and work amongst them, to be productive, to engage with them as their neighbors until God saw fit to restore them to the land. That's more like what we are. We're waiting to be restored to our future home. We're more like Abraham who was told that he would eventually one day inherit all of Canaan, but for the meantime he had to wait. He had to live among them as a sojourner, as a stranger. He had to get along with them, essentially. Like them, we can't avoid interacting with the pagan secular world around us. Nor are we wrong to do so. It's not wrong to interact with them in that way, in a peaceful way. They are our neighbors, in spite of them not being our brothers and sisters. In fact, they could be our physical brothers and sisters, our literal brothers and sisters, and yet not be our spiritual brothers and sisters. We are physically with them, but we are spiritually distinct. And the source of that spiritual distinction is also the source of our true allegiance, our more ultimate allegiance. We may have allegiance to the United States of America. We may have allegiance to Alabama. But our highest allegiance is to Christ and his kingdom. We submit to legitimate worldly authorities, as we're going to talk about a little bit more next week. That's in the text next week. But nothing those authorities can say will trump the authority that God has. We have a higher authority. And when what they say overlaps with what God says we obey, when it differs from what God says, we obey God rather than man. We obey God over man. And all this gives us an underlying sense of detachment from this world. We could speak of it that way. An underlying sense of detachment. We are not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, as 2 Corinthians says in our responsive reading. So that direction is where Peter takes us. Peter takes us direction. We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood. Therefore, that makes us aliens and strangers in this world. Therefore, again, as non-natives, we do not take our moral standards from this world. And the first command he gives us on that basis is to abstain from fleshly lusts which war against our soul. When we hear fleshly lusts, that kind of verbiage, we naturally think of improper sexual desires. But this phrase here, fleshly lust, is more inclusive than just that sort of thing. It's broader. It does include improper sexual desires, but it's all evil desires, all improper, all disordered desires. Any longing that we have for things that God has told us to avoid. Or any longing that exceeds an appropriate desire would be called a fleshly lust. Any longing that wants something but it wants it in the wrong context or in the wrong way. So even good things that we want in the wrong way. Because it's not that all of these desires are necessarily wrong. But we twist them and we desire them in the wrong way, in a disordered way. So for example, it's okay to desire food. We need it to live. You need food. It's okay. But gluttony is sinful. And it's okay to desire money because we can use it to provide for our needs, provide for our families, buy food, clothing, and shelter. But greed is sinful. And it's okay to desire for intimate relations, but it must be directed at the right person in the right context. It has to be a person of the opposite gender in the context of marriage. These sorts of desires themselves are not wrong as long as they are not disordered. Now, some of them, yes, include just outright desiring for sin, but we have to include within this desirings for good things that are twisted. Like any desire or any emotion that we feel, they must be righted by the law of God. They have to be normed by the law of God. We don't look at the world around us to determine what is right and wrong. We don't justify our desires by a world that tells us that those desires are perfectly normal behavior. We have citizenship in God's kingdom, which has the law of God as its standard. So we're not taking the law in the world, either the moral law that they propose or the civil law that they propose, as the norm for what is actually right and wrong. We are only sojourners here. We're just pilgrims in this land. We don't look to see what our neighbors are doing to see what is acceptable behavior. The world wants to tell you that fleshly lusts are fine. But Peter tells you that they wage war against your soul. The world wants to tell you that those fleshly lusts are part of a healthy, carefree lifestyle. That experimenting with these desires, whatever they may be, are fine. God tells us that they are only sweet for a moment, and then they will be bitterness in the end. That desire for riches that causes men to lie, cheat, and steal. Or the sanitized version that causes men to put in overly long hours at the office or at the job site to neglect of their wife and their kids and their family or their church. All of that, that's fleshly lusts. Those desires that drive men to do that. We can desire to work hard and make a good living, but we have duties to our family and to our church that should keep us from being workaholics. And even our families can be made idolatrous. We can turn our families into idols. It's a good thing. How many evangelicals in our day have effectively ceased to keep the Lord's Day because of their family traditions or because of their family's sporting events or their traveling leagues that their kids are going to be a part of? so casually skip corporate worship with their spiritual family to make sure that their kids are at every single game and at every single practice because they've got to play in this sport that they love. I mean, their chosen sport, whatever it is, they're setting an example. that will only be amplified by their kids and their grandkids. This casualness of missing corporate worship. It's going to be amplified. The parents' occasional neglect of faithful worship and service will result in their children's frequent neglect once they are grown. And that's going to result in the non-existence of worship and service in their grandkids. These patterns are obvious and sadly familiar. Their desire to be with the family and support their kids is of course not a bad thing at all. It's not wrong. But when it's disordered to the point of neglecting your duties to the church or your corporate worship, that becomes a fleshly lust. It's one of those things we're to abstain from. We have to be careful what we're longing for to make sure we're not desiring a good thing in a bad way. not turning a good thing into an idol. The most obvious example of this, the desire that perhaps battles the strongest against our souls, is in the sexual realm, I believe. The temptation here has never been greater, the ease of gratification has never been simpler, and sadly, its presence in the church has never been more pervasive. And men, I think we know this is more applicable to us This is an area that we fail more than women. It's the area we probably fail more than other sins, just generally speaking, not necessarily every single person, but generally speaking. We've talked about it before. We'll talk about it again in the future because if surveys are correct, then this is the huge hidden problem in the evangelical church. in the sexual realm, the lust in the sexual realm. I've no reason to believe that it's the hidden secret sin of Grace Chapel, but I'm not naive enough to think that none of us are dealing with it. I would hate for someone to attend this church with a secret online habit to attend here regularly and to feel comfortable under the preaching. I would hate that. I want someone like that to feel incredible discomfort. I don't want them coming in here being cheered up, necessarily. I want the law of God to weigh down on the shoulders of a man like that until he can't even lift his eyes out of shame. I want him so convicted that opening his Bible embarrasses him. Not because I simply want him to suffer sin and shame and guilt and embarrassment. That's not necessarily what I'm saying. I don't want him to avoid his Bible reading out of embarrassment. That's not what I mean. But I want them to suffer that because persistent heavy conviction in believers leads to confession and repentance. They know they can't go on living like that, and they know there's a refuge, a way out from under the weight of their guilt. As a church, that's what we want for those ensnared in secret sin. We want it to end. We want that person to trust in the life-changing power of God to actually overcome it. Every one of us here knows the strength of those slushy lusts. We know what they feel like. Every guy has felt that seemingly invincible lust that can come upon us. When you confess giving in to such sin in a habitual way, it will not be to someone that doesn't get it, or to those that find such experiences completely foreign. They're gonna get it. They understand. But still, exposing it depends on your willingness to deal with that sin. We're not checking your internet history. No one's standing over your shoulder whenever you pull out your phone or at your home or at your office. But if this is an ongoing problem with anybody here, then get a filter, get Covenant Eye software, get rid of your access, whatever it is. We do not want that sin infesting into the lives of the families here. Just do something. Don't let that fleshly lust win the battle for your soul. Don't dishonor God because you think you can get away with it with men. You probably can, honestly. You can probably get away with it with men. You can probably keep it hidden from your church. You can probably keep it hidden from your wife and from everybody else, your parents, whoever it may be. But if hiding your sins so that you can continue in it is more appealing to you than holiness, I dare say you're probably not saved. Expose it, reject it, defeat it, and resolve to protect your soul from such less. Like I said though, this fleshly lust terminology is broader than mere sexual sin. So ladies, don't sit here comfortably thinking this is just a text for men. True, you may not have one identifiable sin so applicable to your gender, but I hope that does not stop you from searching the depths of your heart to find your own fleshly lusts. whatever they may be. Maybe it's a desire to rule in the place of your husband who has been established as your head. Maybe it's constant dissatisfaction with the material blessings you've been given. Maybe it's discontentment with your physical appearance. You probably struggle with that more than men. Or a jealousy of another woman's station in life. Maybe she's more admired. Maybe she's taller or better looking, more fashionable, nicer house, nicer car, richer husband. better lifestyle, more appealing lifestyle, maybe her social life, her social media feed, whatever it is, it looks more spiritual and it looks more adventurous. Whatever it may be, whatever allure you see in the lives of others, recognize the battle you are in and do not give in to that desire, that discontentment. that longing and jealousy of someone else, don't give in to that. These things wage war against our souls. That language is not meant to be overly dramatic. It's a recognition, it's meant to capture the danger that it's posed by such lusts. When kids grow up in the church, but they leave in their young adulthood, or when long-time professing Christians abandon their faith after years. It's never out of a mere loss of confidence in the truth of Christ and in his work. Rather, it is a return to a sinful lifestyle. It's a returning to these fleshly lusts. It's in taking advantage of an opportunity to pursue those fleshly lusts. They don't leave and still maintain the morals and the values of their Christian life. They return to the relativistic and depraved morals and values of the world. They're drawn away by temptation. They are incentivized to leave the faith by the very fleshly lust that Peter is telling us to abstain from. They leave so they can engage in something that they lust after, but that God hates. It is a spiritual war for your soul, a spiritual war, and you will not overcome these fleshly lusts by sheer willpower and sheer determination of your own flesh. As we're told in 2 Corinthians 10, though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. And we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We are part of the church for many reasons. one of which is to be equipped with the weapons of our warfare. We take every thought captive, every emotion captive, every desire is taken captive, and then we norm it against the knowledge of God. If we feel a certain way, and the Bible says, don't feel this way, then we correct our emotions. And if we think a certain thing, and the Bible says, that's not true, then we correct our thoughts. And if we desire a certain thing, and the Bible says that's sin, then we correct our desire. We take them captive. We wage war against that sin. Those fleshly desires are fighting us. They are waging war against our souls. The only question is, are we fighting back? Are you resting in Christ and asking for grace and the power of the Spirit to fight back against those emotions and those desires and those thoughts that are attacking your soul? This is important for true Christians, not because we think that you're in danger of losing your salvation. We're not saying that. But for the reason that Paul gives us. This is one of the reasons it's important. One of the reasons, he calls out, is you are being observed by unbelievers. In verse 12 he writes, keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, that they may, because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. He calls unbelievers here Gentiles, which keeps with his theme of believers being part of the spiritual Israel. But the point is, unbelievers, these Gentiles, they are watching. They're watching us. So he says, keep your behavior excellent before them. In other words, live in an honorable way. Live in a way that your behavior is outwardly lovely and gracious and honorable, honest, praiseworthy and noble. These are terms more familiar to us that are conveyed by that word Peter uses, excellent. Keep your behavior excellent. Keep it honorable and noble, praiseworthy. We are to put our godly behavior on display. And we walk a fine line here, because we don't mean that in a way that trumpets our good works, necessarily, of, hey everybody, look at this good stuff I'm doing, everybody turn your eyes to me, look at me. We don't mean it that way. But in a way that does not shrink back from modeling an avoidance of sin and a seeking of the good and the honest and the true. We're not trying to show off, we're not trying to convey a holier-than-thou type attitude. Have everybody be like us. Hey world, look at us, we're the good ones, you're the bad ones. That's not what we're trying to do. But we are living in a way that sets us apart from a world with a different set of morals, a different standard of priorities, a different set of priorities, a different purpose to life itself. Our lives are going to look different When we believe that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, your life will look different than it is if your chief end is enjoy the here and now because this is all there ever is and all there ever will be, so get the best now. Your life is of course going to look different if you're living for a city that's to come, a reality that's coming, that's promised to you. If you have a citizenship in a new heavens and a new earth, your life will look different here and now. And strange as it may seem, God will be praised even by these unbelievers upon his return because of our good deeds. Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. And every unbeliever will be compelled to admit that God is deserving of praise for even the good deeds done by his people. The stuff that he sees us doing, God will be praised for it, even by unbelievers. Even Jesus said in Matthew 5.16, He said, So make sure your light is shining. Make sure you behave like you truly believe the faith that you profess. The unbelievers are watching. They are eager to see you screw up. Oh, they are eager to see you. Don't give them that satisfaction. They want to see it so bad. They want a list of examples of these people say they're Christians and look at all the stupid stuff they've done and they want to throw it in your face. The world loves to see Christians caught in hypocrisy. They want to catch you at your worst. They want you to look bad. Like Peter wrote, they slander us as evildoers. Don't give them ammunition to defend that as if it is true. In the first century, the church was constantly being slandered. I don't know how much of this happened by the time of Peter's writing, but they were said to be bad citizens of the republic. They were said to be rebellious, disloyal to the emperor because they had an affinity or they had an allegiance to Christ over man, over the earthly rule. They were accused of burning Rome. They were called atheists, ironically. They were accused of, I mean, they were ironically called atheists, not in an ironic way, but they were called atheists is ironic, is what I mean. They were accused of defamation of the gods for being unwilling to worship the pagan gods that supposedly protected cities like Rome. Like, oh, these Christians, they won't worship these gods, they're upsetting these gods, so when bad things happen, it's the Christians' fault for not worshiping these gods. These guys are troublemakers. They're called cannibals. They were called cannibals for the Lord's Supper, troublemakers for overturning social norms in the church because of their good and fair treatment of women and slaves. They were said to be sexually immoral because of their love for one another, because they called one another brother and sister. So they're like, oh, these people are practicing incest. They're a bunch of perverts. The world shuts up when Christians behave like they ought. They've got nothing to say. but they will never miss an opportunity to broadcast the failures of every pastor and every public Christian with a sneer and a smirk. They will love to broadcast that. They love it. And I say again, do not give them that satisfaction. Keep your behavior excellent so that they have to do the exact opposite. They have to, in the end, actually give praise to God for your good deeds. Just like in the first century, we are being slandered. Christians are publicly slandered all the time. It's the only religion you can openly make fun of, and society doesn't care at all. The media doesn't care at all. Pop culture doesn't care at all. They eat it up. They love it. We're called close-minded. We're called bigots. We're called haters. We're called intolerant. We're slandered. We're continuously falsely maligned for opposing what God hates and for preaching the repentance which God loves. and the need for repentance. Just saying that we need to repent, people go, no, no. Continuously falsely maligned. In the words of Isaiah, they call evil good and good evil. They put darkness for light and light for darkness. This is the truth of prophecy if there ever was one. It's the most true thing of our day and age. This is why it's all the more important for you to abstain from the fleshy lusts and to keep your behavior excellent because they do this To not do so is to take actions capable of producing praise to God from even unbelievers and then turning it over to the world to give them ammunition to assail the Christian faith and its followers. That's what happens when we do not keep our behavior excellent, when we do not abstain from fleshly lusts. You're wasting an opportunity for God to be praised by unbelievers and you're giving them ammunition to slander the Christian faith. If you're like me, then you have instances in your mind that haunt you from your past where you have done just that. You've wasted the opportunities, you've given the world ammunition. Some of those still make me cringe to this day. Sometimes I literally will lay in bed awake at night and I still think of things and I'm just like, Why? But what those don't do, those memories, those instances, what they don't do, and what they should not do, is cause us to despair. Because perfect piety is not meant to be the source of our assurance or our joy. That's not the thing that we're supposed to cling to that gives us rest. Even if we had an endless history of Christians who had never been caught sinning publicly, years of excellent behavior to point to, that wouldn't change our faith or our witness because it's not the basis of our faith and it's not what we're testifying to. We're not pointing unbelievers to churches full of sinless saints of like, hey, go there. Everybody there has this perfect piety and is so holy. Go to that one. That's not the gospel. That's not what our faith is based on. We're not saying we know it's true because look how good it made us. We're pointing them to Christ. We're pointing to a Savior who really did keep his behavior excellent, both in public and in private. And every time we get caught in a bout of hypocrisy, we have this opportunity to repent and to admit, that's right, I'm far from perfect. I'm not perfect. I'm far from it. That's the reason I'm a Christian, because I desperately need the righteousness of Jesus Christ. You saw it. You saw me not keep my behavior excellent. You know now I'm a sinner. Secrets out. Guess what? That's not why I'm a Christian. Not because I'm so holy that I became a Christian. I'm a Christian because I recognize that I am sinful. That I do give in to these fleshly lusts. And they wage war against my soul and I still give in to them. So I need the sacrifice of Christ to pay for those sins. And guess what? That's what he did. That's why he died. That's why I'm a Christian. You saw me fail. Let me tell you about a Savior that didn't. Because that's the basis of my faith and that's what I testify to you. Not my own holiness, His. It's an opportunity to proclaim and cling to the gospel. Surely, I assume this, surely one of the reasons that God does not grant us perfect sanctification in this life is because of our tendency to start trusting in ourselves. To start having a self-reliance when we start being like, hey, I haven't sent now for six months. I'm doing pretty well. That grace was good at the beginning, but you know, it got me off and running and here I am, I'm set. You know, it's like a dad teaching their kid to ride where they're holding the bike and then they set us off and now they're balancing on their own. That's not how it works. He's always there. He's always upholding us. The Spirit is always empowering us. Grace is always being poured out on us. We always need the grace to hear the word preached and the Lord's Supper, to proclaim the Lord's death until he comes, and these songs, and these prayers, and the fellowship of the saints. We need this grace constantly. It's why God does not give us this perfect sanctification now. We'd surely start thinking we're pretty good, and we'd lose sight of our dependence on Christ. But our recurring failure and our need for repentance, our recurring need for repentance keeps us aware of our dependence on Christ for our salvation and on the Spirit for our sanctification. We're constantly aware of it because we're constantly face to face with our sin. We can have all the more joy at the fact that the work has been done and that the Father will keep granting us grace. and that Christ will keep holding on to us and the Spirit will keep working in us. As humiliating as it is to get caught indulging in fleshly lusts and giving the world ammunition to slander the name of God, it is still far better than being left to sin in secret, undiscovered until your soul is so rotten so as not to feel the weight of conviction any longer. It's a blessing. to feel that conviction. If you're feeling that conviction or if you have felt that conviction in the past, that is a blessing because it keeps your soul from rotting, from being overcome by these lusts that wage a war against your soul. So praise God that we have the words of the Apostle to implore us to abstain from such actions and to keep our behavior excellent the way that Christ did for us. Amen and Amen. Let's pray. Our gracious Heavenly Father, you are worthy of all worship. Even when we do good deeds, it is you, our Father in Heaven, who deserves the praise. It is you who sent your Son to save us. It is you from whom the Spirit proceeds who applies that work to our hearts. We acknowledge our sin, our failure to abstain from all fleshly lusts and to keep our behavior excellent before a watching world. We acknowledge that too many Christians, ourselves included, have been the source of disdain towards the church that you have established. So it is with all the more thanks that we gratefully praise you for your mercy. Please grant us the grace to represent Christ well. Please grant us the grace to have gracious, honest, noble, praiseworthy behavior, both in public and in private. And grant us repentance when we fail to do so. as well as opportunities to point others to Christ when we fail to do so. When our hypocrisy is exposed, help us to see those opportunities to point to Christ. We praise you, Lord, that you are not a hypocritical God, that you cannot lie, that you are all goodness and all love and all truth. We long for the day of your coming when we can worship you in spirit and in truth. We long for that future city, that future inheritance, our future home. We pray all these things in the name of Jesus Christ, whose excellent behavior saved us all. Amen.