to bear these fruits, to sow and to plant and to labor in order that you might bring forth fruit for God's Kingdom. Now is the opportunity, but when the harvest day comes, that opportunity will be over. Only a fool would squander the opportunity to lay up eternal treasure and to be distracted laying up treasure that will perish. When we stop to consider all this, we can only conclude that we're not nearly as diligent about laying up treasure in heaven as we ought to be. As reason would tell us to be from the words of our Lord Jesus Christ here. Verses 22-23, Jesus goes on to tell us what our problem is. Why is it that we are so lax about laying up treasures in heaven. And he tells us that the problem is with our eyes. We don't see clearly. We don't see the exceeding superiority of heavenly treasures. And because earthly treasures look so good to us, and look so satisfying and beneficial, that we often pursue them instead of doing what is worthwhile. The only way to correct our problem is to look at everything under the light of God's Word. Our eyes are bad unless we are able to see through the light of God's Word. Then we will see clearly the excellence of our Lord Jesus Christ. I presented much to you last week of His excellence that we see when we come to the Word of God. And not only His excellence, but also the way that He has directed us to walk. We begin to see what that way is and to understand it. And to understand how it applies to us. that still, even after we see His way and His glory, we still have to get on with actually serving Him. It will do you no good to see His way if you do not also begin to walk in His way, to actually begin to lay up those treasures. This is something that you cannot be undecided about. In verse 24, Jesus reminds you that you can't sit on the fence of indecision about this. It's something that you cannot be undecided about. The very obvious application of verse 24 is don't sit on the fence. Jump over onto God's side of the fence. and serve Him with single-minded dedication, with your whole heart, with all diligence. Plunge yourself wholly into His service alone and don't allow yourself to be distracted with service to other masters. This morning, I want to look at three reasons why you should not sit on the fence. First, because you can only serve one Master, not two. And secondly, because you belong to only one Master, not two. And third, because only one Master can bless you, not two. Let's begin with the first thing. Don't sit on the fence. You can only serve one Master, not two. Jesus states the axiom here, no one can serve two Masters. Now that's something that many people try to do. They usually don't put it into words. But if the way that they act and the way that they think were to be put into words, one would say, I will serve God on Sunday, and on the other days, I will serve other things. Another will say, I will serve God whenever I can. And yet another says, I will serve Him outwardly, but I will not serve Him with my heart. Now, they don't say that to themselves, but that is the thought by which they live. The faulty idea here is that life can be and even should be divided up into different compartments. The problem is that God is seen perhaps even as the One who has done certain things for us and that we ought to every once in a while pay homage to and recognize that He is there. I'll have my devotions and I'll go to worship Him at church. But that He is not seen as the One who is the center of life. the One to Whom every act is to be performed. He is not seen as the One before Whom we continually live and move and have our being, and the One who has a right to every thought and action that we perform. How far we come short of God's standard. Jesus' words here, no man can serve two masters, are a wake-up call to reality for us. That is a very true statement. The word serve that's used here, the word in the Greek, is the strongest of six or seven Greek words that he might have chosen to refer to service. He speaks here of a slave who has no rights of his own. A slave had no property. Everything belonged to his master. He had no vote. His Master made all the decisions. Even His children did not belong to Him, but were born into His Master's house and belonged to His Master. And this was no temporary arrangement for this type of slavery that Jesus mentions here, this type of servitude. It was a permanent relationship. By using this word, Jesus makes it clear that the kind of service we are to render to God is absolute. Now, you really don't need the Greek to see that. He makes it clear that He's talking about absolute service because it cannot in any way be divided and given to someone else. It's obvious that such service is not something that you can do on Sunday only. that that is just the time that your Master has appointed for you to meet specially with Him in the assembly of His people and to worship Him and to hear His Word. It's obvious that the kind of service Jesus is talking about here is not something that you can do whenever you get the time. All of your time belongs to Him. And with this kind of service, everything you have belongs to your Master and is to be used for His purposes according to His instruction. Even your children belong to Him. You are only a steward who holds everything that your Master has given you for His purposes, for His sake. Now with these words, Jesus is putting to rest once and for all the notion that you can do part-time service to the living God. With the kind of service He is talking about here, there can only be one Master. Jesus further explains that with this kind of Master-Servant relationship, you will always violate that relationship. You will do violence to the relationship if you attempt to serve another. If all your time belongs to your Master, as soon as you go to serve another, you are rejecting in total the relationship with the First Master. Jesus uses very strong terms here. He says, you will hate the one and love the other. You will be loyal to one and despise the other. Now, He is not talking here so much about your feelings, about bitterness or anger or rage or that kind of thing, but He is talking about rejection of relationship when He says hate. the relationship of servant-master in which you wholly belong to your Master. You tear yourself away from that relationship when you go to serve another. You violently rip yourself away. It's like adultery. A married person despises and hates his spouse when adultery is committed. Even though that adulterer may claim that he's still fond of both of these women, his wife and this other woman that he's He loves them both in different ways. The truth is that there has been such a breach in the marriage relationship that his wife is hated and despised by him, even if he doesn't feel hatred and animosity. You can't have two one-flesh relationships. Marriage is a one-flesh relationship. You can't have two of those. The adulterous union violently severs the marital relationship. So you see then, it's only impossible also to have one servant-master relationship because of what the servant-master relationship entails. There is no way that you can be wholly devoted to two, because as soon as there is a second, you are no longer wholly devoted to the first. It really boils down to a question of ultimate loyalty. Your whole life is to be about serving Christ and doing His will. There's no choice to make about whom you're going to obey. If He is your Master, whom you are going to obey has already been determined. The question is not whom to obey or if you should obey, but how can I please this Master? Your goal is to find out what He wants and then do it. You are to learn to observe everything that He has commanded in His Word. Find out what the Master wants and do it. That's the servant's task. Now that doesn't mean that your Master tells you all the details. A master may ask his servant to go and invest a sum of money for him, but he may not tell him where to invest that money. He wants the servant to decide. That's part of the work that he has given the servant to do. Not just to go through the mechanics of the investment, but to go through and find out where to invest that money. Yet the servant should know his Master's principles as he goes to do that task, so that he would not invest that money anywhere that would meet with disapproval by his Master. Jesus does not tell us all the details. But Jesus tells us all that we need to know to please Him. For example, He does not tell you men which woman to marry. He rather tells you what kind of woman to marry. How you are to treat that woman. in ways that please Him when you do marry her. And the work that you are called to do together as husband and wife when you are joined together. But as soon as you willingly reject any of the guidelines and commandments that He has given, you are no longer His servant. There is somewhere, somehow, another loyalty, another Master, something else that has come into that thing. Something from outside your relationship with God has come in and you are following that instead of the Lord. You are obeying something else. You've rejected God. You're despising Him. You cannot serve two masters. But there is something in all this that you also need to be clear about so you won't get tripped up. As your Supreme Master, God does in fact call you to have other Masters that we might call secondary masters that are masters for His sake. Let me explain what I mean. It's not serving two masters in the way that Jesus is forbidding, but this is rendering service to those that your Master has commanded you to render service to. You will be called, for example, to serve those that He places over you to obey them and devote yourself to them. There are many that Christ has placed over you. Children, Christ commands you to honor and obey your mother and father. Wives, Christ commands you to honor and obey your husbands. Citizens, Christ commands you to honor and obey the governing authorities in the land. Employees, Christ commands you to obey those that are over you in the workplace. Church members, Christ commands you to obey the elders in the church. And if you think about it, you're even called by Him, by Jesus Christ Himself the Master, to serve the earth. Adam was called to till the ground in order that it may bring forth fruit. And there are certain things that the ground requires of you. Certain things that you must do in order that it will bring forth fruit. And all of your labor that you're called to do is service that Christ has commanded. to refuse to obey these other masters that your Master has placed over you would dishonor and disobey Him. But obeying the masters that your Master has placed over you in no way means that He is no longer exclusively and only your Master. Just as a laborer actually shows his loyalty to the owner of the company by obeying the foreman that is placed over Him in the workplace. So, you show your loyalty to Christ by obeying those that He has placed over you in their respective spheres of authority. Likewise, if any of these authorities call you to do something contrary to your Master's will, you show your loyalty to your Supreme Master by refusing to obey them, even if it means that you have to suffer for that disobedience. If the foreman wants you to act contrary to company policy, you are to refuse for the sake of the owner, even if the owner doesn't find out about it and the foreman fires you. If the government demands that you as a citizen renounce Christ or any of His commandments, you are commanded to refuse to obey. Peter and John were in that situation when they were told not to preach anymore in the name of Jesus Christ. And they said, when they were charged with this, they said, we ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging Him on a tree. Him God has exalted to His right hand to be Prince and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are His witnesses to these things, and so also is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey Him." They showed that Christ was their Master by first obeying these authorities as far as they could, and then by refusing to obey them when they asked them to do something that was contrary to the will of God. Clearly, you see, they were serving others for Christ's sake. But, it is very, very important that you don't make a subtle shift here and begin to get things backwards and put Christ under one of these secondary masters. That is a danger. that it's all too easy to fall into. This is the situation in the parable of the sower. In that parable, there's the first type of ground that the seed never takes root. But there's three types that receive the seed. In other words, there's three types that receive the Word of God and take Christ as their Master outwardly. But it seems that two of these receive Christ as a secondary Master instead of as the exclusive Master. The stony ground hearer was committed to peace and acceptance by others as his Master. He was willing to do anything in order that he might have peace and acceptance of other people. But as soon as persecution arose on account of Christ, he forsook Christ. Perhaps he was excited when he first came to Christ because perhaps he thought that Christ would further the peace that he was seeking and the acceptance by other people. But when that didn't come to pass and he was persecuted, then who did he say goodbye to? Not to peace and security, but he said goodbye to Jesus Christ. He had a different Master. Christ was a servant to that greater Master. Christ was not His absolute Master. The thorny ground here was likewise not committed to Christ, but rather to the riches of this world. Things started out okay. Perhaps He was excited when He saw that there is a man here who could feed 5,000 people at His command. And he said, what prosperity there is with this man. What great things I can find if I follow him. I will attain my Master. Riches on earth. And so he came to follow Jesus Christ perhaps for that reason. And then when instead his service to Jesus Christ got in the way of his attainment of the treasures of this world, who did he say goodbye to? Not the treasures of this world, but to Jesus Christ. Christ was in His way. The riches of this world were His supreme master. This is where the true loyalties were. So Christ was hated. The third soil that received the Word of God continued in Christ. In this case, Christ was the Master. The same persecutions and the same temptations arose. But peace and safety, as well as prosperity, were gladly forsaken when they were no longer facilitating service to Christ. But sometimes it's difficult to tell just where your loyalties really are. Many people have been deceived because it can look very much like you're serving Christ when you're really serving another master. Very subtle at the beginning. Many have been deceived by this. For example, look at how similar many of the goals that parents have for their children are for those that are serving mammon and those that are serving Christ. Now, mammon, as it's used here, just speaks of wealth or things that we trust in in this world. Now, a parent who is trusting in mammon and is looking to mammon wants his children to be well-disciplined and hard-working because he realizes that they will not be successful in this world if they are not. He also wants them to be respectful and learn to be courteous and obedient to authority, because He knows that that will be important if they're going to be successful in this world. He does not want them to be involved in drugs or drunkenness, to fall in with the wrong crowd and get mixed up with immorality that will distract them from seeking success in this world. Outwardly, Those goals seem to correspond quite nicely with the goals that a Christian parent would have. There was a time when Christian parents very naively concluded that we basically do have the same goals for our children as the world does. And therefore, that we can educate them all together. But this misses the most important distinction of all. If Christ is our Master, our goals are entirely different. Because at the root of everything, our lives are about serving Christ and Christ alone. And theirs is about serving Mammon. Everything we do is for Him. Everything they do is for Mammon. Everything we do is for Him. And that is the thing that we should be more concerned about instilling in our children than anything else. If we don't instill in them the importance that everything in our lives is unto Christ, then everything in their lives will be out of joint. Even if there are no drugs. Even if they learn to work hard and be self-disciplined and have respect for authority and all the rest of the good things that we can talk about. In fact, if they have all of those things, and they don't have Christ as Master, then they're worse off than they would be if they didn't have all of those respectable things in this world. They're further from the Kingdom of God. The parents look and say, we have been successful in training our children. They did not go on drugs. They have been successful in this world. They have made a way for themselves. Not only is the whole foundation and the whole purpose different, but you see, we want to teach our children to do things that are different. We want them to give thanks to the Lord in all things. Our goal is to uphold His law in everything. Instead of avoiding lying because it will tarnish our reputation, we renounce lying because it is against the will of God. Instead of taking a day off because everybody needs a break, we observe the Lord's day because He has commanded it. And if anything gets in the way of our service to Christ, that thing is the thing that must be abandoned. Our whole purpose is to serve Him. See, for those who serve Mammon, anything that gets in the way of Mammon is abandoned. If prayer seems to help in the pursuit of Mammon, then prayer will be engaged in. But if prayer seems to be taking up too much time and distracting from the pursuit of mammon, doesn't seem to be fruitful, then prayer is forsaken. You see how this works. Jesus is teaching here that your loyalties will always become evident in time. If you're serving Christ because that seems to agree with your pursuit of mammon, the day will come when His demands will get in the way of your pursuit of mammon, and your loyalty to mammon will be exposed. All along, understand, you were serving Mammon as supreme. But that wasn't clearly seen until the day of conflict came, the day of testing. Jesus says, you cannot serve God and Mammon. Education of children is just one example. There are many others. So don't think you can sit on the fence. You can only serve one Master, not two. That's the first point. The second is like it. Don't sit on the fence. You belong to only one Master, not two. By right of creation, every one of you belongs to God. Every member of the human race is by nature a servant of God. You are not designed, people, to govern yourselves. But you were designed to be governed by God. He made you with the capacity to understand His counsel and the ability to walk in it. He made you so that you could consciously and actively serve Him. Notice I did not say everyone is an obedient servant. Just because everyone is a servant by nature to God, it does not mean that any of us are obedient servants. The very reason, in fact, that the human race is in trouble with God is not because we're not His servants, but because being His servants, we do not serve Him. Now, you could say we're not His servants. But in the way I'm using it, we were created to be His servants, and we have forsaken that service, and that's why we're in trouble. If we were not made to serve Him, we wouldn't be in such great trouble for not serving Him. We would be much better off if we were not servants at all. But as it stands now, we are servants who continually displease our Master. That's the case for everyone except Jesus Christ. From all eternity, even as the Son of God before He took human flesh to Himself, Jesus did nothing else but serve the Father with perfect dedication. For all eternity, the Trinity has continued in perfect unity and perfect harmony, moving together with one purpose, with one will, with one mind, with one action. Together, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created the world. Together in perfect harmony, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit brought redemption into this world. And so it was that when the Son of God did come to earth, He came in full obedience to the Father's command. And He took human flesh to Himself. And in the form of man, He continued doing what He had done for all eternity. He served God with absolute commitment and with perfect dedication. His very food and drink was to do the will of God and no other. He said, I have come, O God, to do Your will. And so the result was that in Jesus Christ, we see man as man ought to be. The perfect image of God living in perfect conformity to God. Moving in perfect harmony with God's will. And shining as light in this world. Jesus is the ideal man. He is the exact representation of God. The perfect image. In Him there is no flaw and no blemish. He is the servant of God. He is what every man ought to be. and what no man is, other man. For the Bible declares that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We are not good servants, even though we are by creation God's servants. What all this means is that you ought to serve God as your only Master, because you were created to serve Him as your only Master. You ought to be like Jesus. It is your purpose as a human being to serve Him and so live in that perfect harmony in all of your ways that He lived in. Get off the fence. God is your rightful Master by creation. Why do you serve any other? But, alas, serving God with this perfect allegiance is something you cannot do. Though you try. with all your might. To begin with, because you've already forsaken that service. Already failed in that service to God, so He cannot be your ultimate Master. And secondly, because though you try, even now, you still find continually that you come short in that service to Him. Satan. became master to fallen man and brought us into miserable bondage to sin. But there is very good news. The good news is that through faith in Jesus Christ, you who believe have been restored again to God's service. I told you before that when Jesus became man, He was a perfect man, without spot, without blemish. But the most wonderful thing about this for us is that Jesus came as man, as our priest. And as our priest, this ideal man represents us before the face of the living God. God in effect said to him, if you represent these people, they are sinners. And you will have to offer sacrifices for them to take away their sins. And the sacrifice, the only sacrifice that I will accept is your own blood. And He called His only Son to shed His blood for us. And Jesus obeyed. He had to bear the wrath and curse of God for us. And by that, this perfect man that represents us to the Father took away all of the sins of those who belong to Him. What that means is that all the guilt you incurred for your breach of God's service has been taken away by Him. Jesus bore that sin to the cross for you. He has paid the penalty that God justly demanded. And now, all of you who trust in Him are completely forgiven. You are washed as white as snow. You have this ideal man with this precious sacrifice of His own blood The God-Man offered for you. And your standing is in Him if you have trusted in Him. His righteousness is imputed to you. And God is pleased with Him, not only for Himself, but as representative of all of us, so that He is pleased with all of us. And we as sinners can now come and be the servants of God. This is not all that Jesus does to restore us either. If that is all He did, you would be completely forgiven, but you would still not be serving God. And so to complete the work of restoring us to God's service, Jesus also gives us the Holy Spirit. And the promise is that by giving us the Holy Spirit, He will write God's law in our heart so that we will do it. He'll put God's Word in our minds and enable us to serve God again. The work of the Spirit is a work that He does over time. Over time, He brings us into that perfect service to God until that is completed when we go to heaven. The change is so radical that it's called a new birth when it begins. It's so radical that it's called being raised from the dead. It's so powerful that it's equated with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead that is at work in you. And so, this means that for you who believe, God is your Master not only by right of creation, but now also by right of redemption. You know, a Master in the old days, in the Bible times, could procure a servant in a number of different ways. In fact, in four different ways. And Jesus Christ has procured us to be His servants in all four of these ways. First of all, they could procure a servant by conquest. Captured. in battle. When they overcame a city, then they could make slaves of their captors. Jesus has redeemed us by conquering Satan, who held us in bondage. Satan tried to bring Jesus down with the sweetest of enticements and temptations to lure Him away from the will of God, and with the severest of trials to drive Him away from serving God. Jesus did not turn. He conquered Satan. He overcame and went to the cross in obedience to the Father. And now He has conquest and He takes us as a spoil of that battle. Secondly, by purchase, a servant could be bought from a family or from another master and become the slave of the master that purchased him. Jesus had to purchase us from the courts of God's justice. We had been condemned by God Almighty And the penalty was everlasting death. And Jesus, as we saw earlier, paid that penalty when He died on the cross as a substitute for us. So He has purchased us with His own blood. And third, by birth, if a servant was born in his master's house, then we saw earlier that even the children of a slave belonged to the master. That was another way that a Master could acquire servants. Jesus has given us His Holy Spirit so that we're born again to be God's people, His own people who serve Him. And that leads to the fourth way, which is a voluntary giving of a man to be a slave. A man who is on economic hard times and had lots of debts to pay could go and say, I want to be your slave. and the man could take him as a slave, pay for all of his debts, and take care of that man for the rest of his life. Jesus has so presented Himself to us by the work of the Holy Spirit that we have come willingly to be His servants if we know Him. He has procured us for Himself as slaves by redemption in all four ways that slaves can be procured. And so you see that as a believer, you are God's servants, not only by creation, but also by redemption. Now, it is to His disciples who have this double connection to Him, to those who come professing to be His own, that our Savior says, no one can serve two masters. Or either He will hate the one and love the other, or else He will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God in mammon. Do you see, Jesus says this to you who are redeemed. Truly, you belong to God. You've been bought with a price to serve God alone. How can you sit on the fence now? You belong to one Master in two ways. Not to two Masters. And so we have seen now two reasons to not sit on the fence. Because you can only serve one Master, not two. And because you only belong to one Master, not two. And now for the third reason, don't sit on the fence. Only one Master will bless you, not two. One of our greatest deceptions, and I've talked about that in this series already, is to suppose that someone or something other than God, apart from God, can bless you and make you happy. When Augustine saw all the gods that the pagans were worshiping in his day, he asked them this simple question to all the polytheists that were out there. He said, why do you worship all these gods when one of the gods that you worship you claim is a god of happiness? who can make you happy, who can bless you. If you have riches from the God of riches without happiness, what good are those riches? If you have safety and protection from all the gods that you have that protect the threshold of your house and protect the windows and protect your treasures and all these different things, if you have safety and protection from these gods, but you are miserable, What have you gained? The only wise thing to do is to give up all these many gods and worship with all your being that one God who is the God of happiness. Then you will have everything and you will lack nothing. Here you see the folly of trying to serve two masters. The only reason for doing it is because you don't think that one of those masters will be able to adequately meet all of your needs. And so you will reject something that God says because you want to get something from the world that you think you have to have, even if you have to trample over what God says to get it. And you think that by doing that, that you will actually make yourself happy. And you begin to secure these different gods, just like the polytheists did. Different masters. But as I've told you before, riches do not have an independent power to bless. If you reject God's service to obtain them, you'll end up being cursed by those riches rather than blessed by them. God will turn them into a curse. God alone is sufficient to bless and to curse. You don't need to go following after something else. If you're His slave, then you don't lack anything. Nothing. The problem is when you attempt to serve all these other masters, you dilute your service to God. You dilute it. Who alone is able to bless you? He is the only one that can bless. Your heart is torn and divided so that you're not able to receive His instruction. that makes you beautiful. You're hindered in receiving this instruction. You're following all these other things that make all of their demands on you. And you're partly following them, partly trying to follow Christ. And it diverts you from the training that He is giving you from His Word. You don't receive the full benefit of His counsel, in other words. In addition to that, You set your hope on these other masters. That's why you go after them. Because they have something that you think you've got to have. That they will make you happy or blessed. And in so doing, you set yourself up for disappointment. Because they can't do it. If you had been looking for the blessing that God gives instead of the blessing that good health gives, then you would have found blessing in sickness as well as in health. If you had been looking for the blessing that God gives instead of the blessing that riches give, you would have found blessing with great riches as well as with poverty. Do you see what I'm saying? If there is something that you feel you must have to be blessed other than God, then you're not ready to find God's blessing that He has for you when that thing is taken away. You need to go through life looking for what He has provided for you as your gracious Master, rather than looking for blessings from all these other quarters. You can't look to two Masters at the same time. Because in doing so, you have to reject one in order to look to the other. So the message today is to get off the fence. Get off on God's side. Completely serving Him. Because you can only serve one Master, not two. You only belong to one Master, not two. And only one Master can bless you. Not two. Please stand and let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come to You with confession of our sins. Because Your Word has told us that we cannot serve two masters And we confess to you that we have continually forgotten that. Please have mercy on us through Jesus Christ. How we need Him. Turn our hearts to Him alone for salvation. Cleanse us with His blood. Give us His flesh to eat that we may be nourished into the life that you have promised as your servants. Lord God, we pray that the whole world would see that You are the only rightful Master by creation. Cause the nations of the earth to tremble before You and to see that You alone are worthy of all worship, honor, and glory. Lord, our place as creatures is the place of those former worshipers of Baal who fell on their faces before You That's where we belong. Because You're a holy God. We have sinned against You. You alone are to be feared in all the earth. And we pray that all the earth would fear You. Cause Your glorious Kingdom to spread in our city, and in our province, and in our nation, and into the whole world. We pray that Satan's kingdom would be destroyed that it would be brought down through the preaching of Your Word, that the sword of the Spirit would crush Satan, and that Jesus Christ would be known, trusted in, and relied on, and that He would be loved and obeyed in every place. Father, we pray that You would bring Your lukewarm church to our knees in humble repentance, so that we might faithfully carry the glorious message to the nations. that we might be the light of the world as our Master Jesus is the light of the world. We pray that You would provide for us according to our needs, food and strength and health, and that You would deliver us from the notion that any of these things can bless us without You, or that the lack of any of these things can prevent You from blessing us. Keep us, Lord, from temptation. From that temptation that goes after other masters instead of You. Let us behold Your beauty, Your sufficiency, and Your glory so that we will have no wandering desires for another. Make us to be encouragers of each other's faith in this fellowship, that we might find support in our times of testing and affliction, so that we will remember where our loyalty belongs. We thank You that You do hear these, our prayers, because of our Savior through whom we have received eternal life. And it is in His name that we pray, Amen. You may be seated. Let's now prepare to commune together at our Lord's Table. We have heard His Word. I trust that you have seen your need for Jesus Christ. This table points us to Jesus Christ. I'm going to ask that Mark Blau and Kevin Bigney would please come to assist this morning. Brothers and sisters, you who know that you have not been faithful to your Master, you who know that you desperately need Jesus Christ, I gladly declare to you today that at this table, He presents Himself to us. as the One that was given for us as a sacrifice to atone for our sins. Here He teaches us that His sacrifice