Amen, you can be seated. Jesus, and all in him is mine. That is that fullness that we've been filled with in Christ that is so much of this epistle. Colossians, Colossians 1, 9 to 14, we're gonna be going through. And last week I had I had gone back on my desire to preach through the whole of the opening section of Colossians 1 because there's just so much there. I'm going to read from verses 9 to 14 and hope to preach through that tonight. Last week was, what makes Paul pray? And it was the good report that he heard from Epaphras. of how the Colossian church is faring despite the wolves that are in sheep's clothing around them. And this week we're going to be covering what Paul prays for connected with that same phrase, what we heard from the day we heard or since we heard. So he says in verse nine and following, and so from the day we heard, We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. It is a nice thing to get a letter from the Apostle Paul. It is a great thing to have him pray for you. I didn't want to say it is a greater thing because we still have his letter and his word is sufficient and we have prayers that are of a better quality than the Apostle Paul's. because we have the Apostle and High Priest of our Confession, Jesus Christ, praying for us at all times. It would be to have Paul praying for you, bringing up specific requests. Because of the circumstances that you're going through, it would be like one of the greats praying for you, like George Mueller or D.E. Host. the successor to the China and inland missions, and even before him, having Hudson Taylor pray for you, or E.M. Bounds, who spent so much time and so much ink writing about prayer. We know what makes Paul skip prayer in a letter when you have Galatian gullibility. He just cuts to the chase. and addresses the problem in the church. But, when you have Colossian continuity, he'll tell the Colossians not to be in collusion with false teachers. Colossians, don't be in collusion with the false teachers. But, he will pray. And what a high standard of prayer It is. If you read these prayers of Paul, I hope that you get the same kind of conviction in your own heart that I get when I read these because I think of how many churches there were that he said he had anxiety for in 2 Corinthians 12. The care that daily is pressed upon him for all the churches. but he would pray for them. He knew of their needs and because of the distance he couldn't do anything for them in that immediate circumstance except write a letter and hand it to Tychicus and hand another letter to Onesimus to hand to Philemon. But he could pray and boy could Paul pray from the day we heard we have not ceased to pray for them." Him and Timothy, prayer partners. Him and Timothy, as he writes this letter to the Colossian Christians, shows that he persists in prayer. And the things that he prays for are spiritual maturity, a continued firmness in faith, a grasping of the Christian faith, its content, and living in a manner worthy of God in response to that revelation, but that there is a need for persistent prayer. Paul didn't believe that just because you pray once that therefore your duty is fulfilled. Though he serves a sovereign God, though our God is in the heavens and able to hear before we even ask, Yet he's the one who commanded us to and delights in us actually asking and seeking and knocking. A persistence in prayer. Paul who wrote Romans 9 about the sovereignty of God in the choice of the individual before they had done anything good or evil, before they were even born. The same apostle who penned Ephesians 1 with its high soteriology, this doctrine of salvation, how God saves. God the Father does specific works in salvation. God the Son does other specific works in salvation. And God the Holy Spirit does completing specific works in salvation. That same apostle didn't think it below his theology to continue in prayer. And I don't think that he's just giving a judgment of charity to these people, saying that they are saints when in actuality he thinks that they are not saints. These are believers, and he's praying for them. They're assaulted, but they are firm in their faith, but he prays for them nonetheless. Just because they're doing well doesn't mean they don't need prayer. There is still the enemy at the gates. And so, we should take from this. We should pray for one another, in good times and in bad. We should pray trusting in the Lord to be able to actually deliver and strengthen, to be able to grow. And really, it seems like the Christian sometimes grows in the strangest conditions. The Christian is a plant that instead of getting full sun does well in the shadows sometimes and in the valleys and where there's beating rain and there is pressure and the Christian is almost threatened with being pulled up by the roots. But we are to pray, trusting that God will do His will. So He's praying and He's asking, desiring, that they may be filled with the knowledge of His will. This is, as we're going to see, useful knowledge. Knowledge that doesn't just puff up, like He says in 1 Corinthians 8. Knowledge that makes a man full in the head with a shrunken soul. unable to be able to sympathize with other believers and communicate with them in their trouble. But this is a knowledge that leads to God-pleasing action. And this filling is in accordance with God's Word, God's will. How do we know what God wants? How do you Come to the realization God wants this, God wants that. It is from reading his word. You can't just sense it. You can't just intuit. God wants this. God wants X, Y, Z. You go to his word. Paul talks about not being unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is in Ephesians 4. and follows that up with talking about being filled with the Spirit. And it is that very phrase, being filled with the Spirit, that in Colossians 3 we will see the parallel is to have the Word of Christ dwelling in your heart richly. How do you know God's will? How, Paul, if your prayer is to be answered, am I to be filled with the knowledge of God's will. Praise God for Gutenberg and for all of the different men and women that spilled blood and ink in order to get this into your hands. We have more than what these first century Christians had. Just a letter here, just a letter there, just the oral communication of God's word In the synagogue, we have whole Bibles here, and it takes up even less space than this when you have it in a PDF form or on your cell phone. You dig into God's Word, Old Testament and New Testament, you put the two together, And it starts to change the way you think, transforming your desires so that your desires are his desires, and his desires are your desires, and your thoughts are his thoughts, and his thoughts are your thoughts. It's like the Star Trek mind melding going on, if anybody remembers that. Filled with the knowledge of his will, Not minoring in majors and majoring in minors. This is God's will. This is not just the fringe things that you could know, extracurricular stuff that you could find on the internet somewhere on a post that was done in 1998 when they first had internet starting up. This is God's Word that He cares about us to know and has preserved for us, has gone through all the trouble for us to know it inside and out, front to back. That we would be filled, that they would be, and so we would be, picking it up today, filled with the knowledge of His will, in all spiritual wisdom and understanding that we would be absolutely suffused, filled, filled up with the knowledge of God's Word. What use, you might say, what use is the knowledge that I get? What I know of God's Word, what service is it to the church? What practical effect do I see it having in my life? That's how you can look to see if this prayer is being answered, so to speak, in your life. Are you actually living in accordance with what God's will is here when Paul prays these certain things? What use is your gematria to the sister Christian who is depressed? That you know the significance of the numbers 7 and 12 and 14 in the scriptures, and you could point to different places in the Bible where there is this numerology. Who cares about that? How does it change your life? How does it impact your soul so that you grow in the knowledge of God, of his ways, and are able to then help instruct other believers? I remember when I was working at Hope Mission and I had a brother there ask me a question about how God's word from front to back is put together. And I could tell he was bothered with this question. And when he told me what this other professing believer told him, in answer to his question, this other professing believer handed him a book on Eastern Orthodoxy. This guy was all about Eastern Orthodoxy. He had just become converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. And then he said, well, you know, I think to answer your question, here is this book on Eastern Orthodoxy. When if you look into Eastern Orthodoxy, all of the Orthodox Church, revelation from God in his word is put way down here. Mystic knowledge and feeling and prayer and fasting and holiness by that means is put on a pedestal. How did I answer this brother's question? I just told him what the Bible says, front to back. It was a biblical theology session that I had with him. This is what Genesis to Revelation says, and the changing from one age to the next, one testament to the next, is what we see, and here's why you're having this problem that you are. You should be able to do that, brothers and sisters. Knowledge is not just something for you to accrue so that you can either have a degree or be known as the smart guy or gal, but that you'd be able to help and that you would be able to veer away from false teaching. filled with the knowledge of His will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding. Now, the homeschooler in me kind of wants to say, well, all knowledge is spiritual if you make it that way, if you apply it in that direction. You could learn about history and you could talk about then the providence of God and the lordship of Christ over history. You could talk about science and get into molecules and the way they interact with each other. And that all shows the amazing hand of God. But that's not spiritual wisdom and understanding. To know the word of God so that you can apply it in life, so that you can actually live it out. This is what Paul's praying for. Not so that you could be heady and high-minded, but that you would have a philosophy that is based on scripture, that shows the pagans what's up, that you would be as a Christian equipped to be able to answer those that offer objections to the Christian faith like they were doing. This word filled is the first time that we come across this word in Colossians. It's going to come up again. And it is a word that's significant within this context of Colossians, the word pleroma, because in this early stage of Gnostic teaching, which became full blown in the second century, pleroma, fullness, came to mean That totality of the fullness of these aeons and emanations from this divine being, fullness of powers, fullness of reality. And Paul flips it around and he says, the fullness, fullness of God dwells in Christ. And he's praying for them. And he's saying, God's Word is sufficient. You don't need anything more. You don't need to know what they say you need to know. You have enough in the Bible. I want you to be filled with the knowledge of His will. And so, brothers and sisters, we have in God's Word everything that we need for life and godliness. They had everything that they needed to walk in a way that was pleasing to God, that they knew enough from scripture to get them into heaven, to get them right with God, and to live in a manner that was pleasing to Him. They didn't need what Gnostic teachers were telling them. They didn't need the kinds of traditions handed down. They have the scriptures. And so he says, I want you to know God's will in his word and to be full of it. To be full of it. That wisdom, that word Sophia, pleroma, another word that's going to be coming up is the manner worthy, axios. All of these things. go to show what the Christian has in the scriptures. The knowledge that we get from God's word is enough to live a decent life in God's sight. If you were to go to philosophy, if you were to study the nature of things in ontology, how you know where things came from or what you know what you know in epistemology, or how to live a virtuous ethical life in axiology. All of those things are in God's Word. And Paul wants the Christians there to know God's Word. And so we should then dig deep into God's Word. We not only have Colossians, and we not only have the letters of Paul, we have the rest of the New Testament, which guides us into understanding the Old Testament, and we have the whole Old Testament, which guides us into understanding the New Testament. It casts a light both ways, where we would be able to understand who Christ is, and what our salvation consists of, and it is a useful knowledge. It leads to a life of godliness. My brother, William Ames, some years ago said, therefore the judgment, and this he's talking about, he's actually going to quote another guy named Peter Ramos, who he benefited from, He says, if I could wish for what I wanted, I had rather that philosophy were taught to children out of the gospel by a learned theologian of proved character than out of Aristotle by a philosopher. A child will learn many impieties from Aristotle, which it is to be feared he will unlearn too late. He will learn, for example, that is, he will learn in Aristotle, that the beginning of blessedness arises out of man, that the end of blessedness lies in man, that all virtues are within man's power, unobtainable by man's nature, art, and industry, that God is never present in such works, either as helper or author, however great and divine they are, that divine providence is removed from the theater of human life, that not a word can be spoken about divine justice, that man's blessedness is based on this frail life. We have a philosophy much greater to offer to the world, and it is in God's Word. And to know God's Word, you have enough to direct you in all of life, and to live a virtuous life, a life of wisdom, of fortitude, A life of justice, a life of godliness is in his word. Now this, all of this knowledge is for a reason. It's to some end. It is not an end in and of itself. It is not just to have content filling your brain. It is so as to walk, he says in verse 10, in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him. Now, brothers and sisters, we have been accepted in the beloved. The moment that you receive Christ Jesus, there is to your account the perfect record of Christ's righteousness, that God could never love us more, that we have been adopted into God's family, that we are His chosen children, and we come to see that we were loved before the foundation of the world. There's nothing that we could do to even add to that. It's chock full of grace and love from God. But as to your daily life and conduct, as to where you are today from five years ago, there's degrees of pleasure that the Lord has with how you are living. Just as with one another, there are degrees of pleasure that we have with the way the other relates to us. You experience this in marriage, you experience this in childhood, you experience this in family with one another, and you may experience it as a church. One day, you're getting along just fine, but then it takes only a few small choices made in the wrong direction, and then suddenly that experience can change for you, and you are not fully pleased with brother X or sister Y. With the Lord, our day-to-day conduct how we live in response to his revelation, how we put into effect the things that we know in our walk and talk is either more or less pleasing to the Lord. We are to abide in Christ's love. and to abide in the Father's love. How do we do that? How do we remain in His love? Jesus said, keep my commandments, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in His love. There is to be a continual fellowship with God. Having the word of Christ remain in us, and in us, we can't change our standing before God. Nobody can ever go from a justified state, having all the righteousness of Christ credited to him, to an unjustified, condemned state. It only works the other way around. You go from condemned to no condemnation. You go from a hell-bound sinner to a justified saint. But then in that state, Paul's desire is that their life would be progressively growing in Christlikeness. Well, this is the doctrine of sanctification, that there was a work that is passed and that sets us right with God and we are placed, set apart for him, but that there is an ongoing work where little by little the works of the flesh are killed off. The desires of the body and the mind are put to death by the spirit. The passions and desires that we formerly lived in and were dominated by are crucified. And there is the acting out of that crucifixion daily in life, and the enlivening of new godly fruit, pleasing to God, pleasing to His sight. It is our manner of life, it is our walk, daily conduct, that God views. And He sees either with more or less pleasure. So then how do we grow in grace? How do we actually come and then grow in that fully pleasing to Him? Think about the potential to be fully pleasing to the Lord. Now, I don't think that this means that we would reach a point of no return in this life where we've suddenly found the secret And we have left the plane of the ordinary Christian and suddenly jumped up onto this accelerated level of holiness that we just keep and plateau for the rest of our lives. But that we can. actually bring forth to God the obedience desired by him and worked out on the inside by his spirit so that there would be, as he's going to point out, grateful growth. So there is this knowledge that is useful. And it leads to a lifestyle that would be fully pleasing to the Father. And it works itself out this way, where it is characterized by this, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. Bearing fruit in every good work. We are not all given the same amount of gifts or the same quality of gifts, but what gifts you're given. To the extent that God has placed those desires in your heart and that capability has been entrusted to you, whatever it is, that you would bear fruit in it. And for believers, there can't be no fruit whatsoever. If you're grafted into the vine, if you are a part of that vine as a branch in Jesus Christ, the true vine, there can't but be some fruit. There can't but be some blessing to those around you and some measure of spiritual fruit. So then, whatever it is, Lay hold of that and do it in everything that you do. Brother Spurgeon said one time, have you the ability to preach the gospel? Preach it. Does a little child need comforting? Comfort it. Can you stand up and vindicate a glorious truth before thousands? Do it. Does a poor saint need a bit of dinner from your table? Send it to her. Let works of obedience, testimony, zeal, charity, piety, and philanthropy all be found in your life. Do not select big things as your special line, but glorify the Lord also in the littles, fruitful in every good work. Brothers and sisters, we're not all given the same talents. And I don't mean talents in the normal way of using talents. Talents is in that measure of money entrusted. We're not all given the same amount. Brother Spurgeon was given a hefty amount. To even desire to be like Spurgeon is great. You want to shoot for the moon. That's great. But you will likely miss and fall lower. But fruitful in every good work, whatever the work is, whatever the kind of thing that God has placed before you, whatever good work he has prepared beforehand for you, walk in it. And in the sight of others, it can be very minuscule. Brothers and sisters, I would need to put on my spectacles in order to see it. But God sees it, and he would reward it. But then also this. The brothers and sisters in this Colossian church need to recognize that even for all of that, they haven't arrived. And nobody has arrived here, increasing in the knowledge of God. that to walk with God, not just to understand the deep things of God laid down in heavy, fine print books, but that the experiential walking, talking, daily converse with God, knowing your English Bible, and seeing there the ways of God increasing in the knowledge of God. It is not a bad thing. It is not a bad thing to always be increasing. You will never be able to boast that you know the extremity that there is to know of God. God is too deep of an ocean for you to plumb the depths. God is too vast, too great, and too good to be able to even consider that you have come to know Him in His fullness. Though we can know Him for sure, truly, we can know Him in Christ. We see the Father when we see the Son. But to know Him extensively is an impossibility. But it's an impossibility that we should love to challenge ourselves with, of actually going the distance and seeking to know God more and more, to commune in fellowship with Him, to understand Him in His Word as He's revealed Himself, and to be okay with the way He's revealed Himself in Scripture. to let him rule our hearts when we come to God's word. He's revealed himself in a very certain specific way. I wanna know what he said. Now, this is not putting God inside a box. This is God stating who he is. And we are saying, okay, yes, Lord. Increasing in that knowledge. being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might. This is might that is honorable might. This is might that God gets glory for. This is the power that raised Christ from the dead, that he does good things with. This is not the kind of power that an evil villain has, like Lex Luthor, to create some machination that is going to destroy his enemies. This is not the skill and ability of a man who knows how with such skill and intent to roll a joint, okay? This is God. in His goodness, demonstrating that goodness in a climactic way of raising His Son from the dead and then pouring that glorious power in its effect in our lives so that we'd be more godly, that we would be stronger for the battle. For, specifically, He says, all endurance and patience with joy. in their situation, they needed endurance and patience because likely it would not be overnight that their problem with false religion and false teaching would just vanish. It would just dissipate. But rather, this would be a recurring problem. They would have brothers and sisters that they would have to counsel. And some would leave and say, these guys are right. I'm going to follow them. You guys are in the wrong. And they would need patience to be able to call upon the Lord and say, Lord, I don't know why this is happening. Why would they even believe this heresy? Why would they go back to the shadows when we have the light of Christ in the scriptures? They need patience. They need endurance. Being mocked, being disqualified by them. Oh, you don't have what we have. You need what we have. You're not right without what we have. They need patience. They need endurance and they need joy. That kind of patience that just laughs at that kind of stuff and thanks God that they actually have the truth, have been saved, contrary to their enemies' jeers. This kind of a joy that sticks through trouble, that is not just a happiness because of a state, when everything is well with your soul. but that though there are enemies and mockers, though times are dark, though trials come and abide, though the Christian walk ebbs and flows, that there'd still be a joy that's not founded on your experience but is founded on a rock-solid God that doesn't move and doesn't change and has saved us for eternity and works good out for us. All of that, giving thanks. So bearing fruit, being strengthened, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you. Giving thanks throughout this tribulation. Giving thanks throughout the Christian life. If there is one sin that you can think of, that isn't in some measure destroyed and limited by giving thanks to God the Father. I will give you 50 bucks. Some kids pay attention now. Sin is in large part killed with thankfulness to God. because you go after things that you know you shouldn't when you're ungrateful for what God has given you or ungrateful for the fact that God has withheld something from you. Giving thanks to the Father in all that fruitfulness spiritually. then brings us to who Paul is praying to. What he's prayed for we see, why he prayed for we saw, who he prays to, and this character of the God that he calls upon is laid out here. This father that you could personally know, who's knowable and loving, whose character you can see in the scriptures, you see the fullness of in Christ. He has qualified them to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Now, your car that you drive, is it qualified to race in the Indy 500? Is it fit and suited to compete there? That's the meaning of this qualification. There has been a work done to a saint so that there is a fitness for heaven. And this is done by the Father. He has fitted us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. When we get to heaven, there is going to be a certain affinity that we have for all the activity that goes on in heaven. Worship is going to be something that we will delight in. The joy of the saints being saved from sin, it no longer having a presence and a grapple on us will be something that we will actually love. But until you have been suited for that, You don't want any of this. If you want freedom from sin, it's of a selfish sort because you just don't like the way that it wrecks your life. You'd gladly have the sin if you didn't have your life wrecked. And then God the Father comes in and he gives you a gift where he actually transforms you from the inside so that your heart is not a dead, stony, stale heart that is so hard, but is one that is as squishy as flesh, where you actually are enabled to take joy in the things of God, to love God and His ways. To actually be able to be in the presence of God and seek his face, where formerly that was the farthest thing from your mind. Light, where formerly you were darkness. What has God done? He has delivered us from that darkness. We were in the darkness. Satan had a stranglehold of us. His authority, exousia, the domain there, was over the unbeliever in Colossae. And this kind of language that he uses here is God in his kingdom power coming and taking a sinner from that power and then him holding sway over him instead. We were like a dance partner. And the people of God throughout, you can see, the Old Testament was like a dance partner. They were the bride of Yahweh. And Egypt comes along and steals the partner away from the Lord and dances. And then the Lord takes Israel back. And then Assyria comes and steals this partner away and the Lord takes him back, her back. Babylon comes and steals her away and the Lord takes her back. This is the story throughout the Old Testament. We were in Satan's kingdom. He had a hold of us. This is what it means to be unsaved. Not just that you do bad things, but that your overlord actually excites that depravity in you so that he drives you like a rider of a horse. And you are like a beast before God. And you're in Satan's territory on his turf. Well, what God does is he says, no, you're mine. And he takes you away. This transferring and this redemption, I believe, has to do, it's the exact same thing. And it's the language of the Exodus. Formerly, we were enslaved and we were in bondage. The devil was our Pharaoh. Then Jesus came. God the Father sent his son and he transferred us. He redeemed us. so that we could have forgiveness of sins by His blood, through His cross, through the work that He had done outside of us before we ever lived, no thanks to us. All glory be to God. He transferred us. He delivered us. And so now Jesus is our King. We live in a theocracy. We live in the kingdom of God. There's more to the kingdom of God, surely. More to come. The best is yet to come. But it has begun in Christ and in his resurrection. This is the Father that he prays to. And therefore, should Paul expect that his prayers are going to be answered? Yes. If God has already done the greater work of taking them out of the rebel encampment, he's going to do a smaller work of transforming his people to be more like Christ. For us, brothers and sisters, if you're here and you have been delivered, you've been redeemed, you've been brought out and freed, it is settled, it's a done deal, then the greater work has already happened and you can trust that though there are going to be differences among us, there's going to be different growth rates, there's going to be different giftings, yet still, He's going to get you all the way to glory and He's not going to let you die in His arms. He's going to carry you all the way there. However, we should not just therefore sit on our hands like we have nothing to do in this. If you're to know His will and to be fully pleasing to the Lord, well then what do you need to start reading? You need to read the Bible. You need to pray every day and you'll grow. If you forget your Bible and you neglect to pray, then count on it. Mark my words, you will shrink. You need God's Word. You need it to be inside you. You will wander from one irrelevant thing to the next irrelevant thing if the Bible is not what you know cover to cover. Get into the scriptures. Get the scriptures into you. A very practical question. Have you read the whole Bible? Do you know what the whole counsel of God is? Have you read all 66 books? That's God's will. Get into it. Now, not all knowledge is good knowledge. There are many things out there we could search up and find from a A whack load of teachers. I could say a whack load of wackos. And not all of it is good. You will ingest things that are not good for your soul. and will show up in life again and again, and it'll be a thorn in your side because you think that it is special and it is good for you, but you are just like a chicken who's eating only the kind of food that it likes, but it's really not good for it. It might taste good. It might release some dopamine in your brain. You might think that you're smart because you know this thing. But brother, sister, it's not healthy for your soul. You read the scriptures and you listen to those that are of proved character, like a Paul, like a Timothy, who cares for you. Guys like Leighton Flowers on the YouTube, does he pray for you? He doesn't pray for you. Now, I don't have a personal liking for a guy like Leighton Flowers. I believe, I think he's a brother in Christ. Now, let's say James White, brother in Christ that I would be much closer to. Does he pray for you? No. James White does not pray for you. James White does not pray for me. When you want to know the scriptures, The thing that Paul would want you to go to first and foremost is not the internet. They didn't even have the internet back then. You've got God's word, and then you've got teachers that Christ has given to the church. Paul and Timothy were those teachers, but you know who Paul and Timothy would point the Colossian Christians to to say, take your questions to? Epaphras. Epaphras. Brothers and sisters, we want to grow in grace. We want to get to know the Word of God. We have pastors. If you have questions, ask those questions. If you want to know what God's Word says, we will do our best to be able to take you through God's Word and show you what it says. That's our delight. That's not just our duty. That is our desire. I hope that it is your desire that you would know His will and not just the things that you want to know, that you want to focus on, but that you'd be able to know all of God's will and live a life that's fully pleasing to Him. It has to be practical. I think that that was everything that I was going to say. Why don't we ask the Lord for His blessing? Heavenly Father, I thank you for this time and I pray that you'd help us all, Lord. Help us to bear one another up in prayer. Help us to be in your word and have it transform us. That we would see there the uniqueness and the supremacy of Jesus Christ and that we would grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we would go from grace to grace, Lord. Please take us closer to you. I pray, Father, that we would be fruitful. And those in our midst that don't know you, may they come to the knowledge of the truth. Abandon all hope of them working their way into a place of you being pleased with them, but rather resting in what Christ has done, that they would be saved, that they would be delivered from the domain of darkness, transferred into the kingdom of the son of your love, having the forgiveness of sins because of Christ's redemption. May you be glorified, Lord, we pray in Christ's name. All right, if you take your white binder now. And turn to number 37. Number 37 as we stand. See he comes. Number 37. See he comes upon the clouds, Jesus Christ our King appears. All the saints bought by his blood will rise to meet him in the air. Earth and sea shall