Judges chapter 21, verses 8 through 25. In the past few weeks, we've seen how the nation of Israel has largely wiped out the tribe of Benjamin. There were 600 men remaining as a remnant. And in verse 7, the Israelites were wondering what they should do for wives, for those who are left, since they'd sworn not to give their own daughters as wives for the Benjamites. And they said, what one is there of the tribes of Israel that did not come to the Lord to Mizpah? And behold, no one had come to the camp from Jabesh Gilead to the assembly. For when the people were mustered, behold, not one of the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead was there. So the congregation sent 12,000 of their bravest men there and commanded them, go and strike the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead with the edge of the sword, also the women and little ones. This is what you shall do. Every male and every woman that has lain with a male, you shall devote to destruction. And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead 400 young virgins who had not known a man by lying with him. And they brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. Then the whole congregation sent word to the people of Benjamin, who were at the Rock of Rimen, and proclaimed peace to them. And Benjamin returned at that time. And they gave them the women whom they had saved alive, of the women of Jabesh Gilead. But there were not enough for them. And the people had compassion on Benjamin because the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. Then the elders of the congregation said, what shall we do for wives for those who are left since the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? And they said, there must be an inheritance for the survivors of Benjamin that a tribe not be blotted out from Israel. Yet, we cannot give them wives from our daughters. For the people of Israel had sworn, Cursed be he who gives a wife to Benjamin. So they said, Behold, there is the yearly feast of the Lord at Shiloh, which is north of Bethel, on the east of the highway that goes from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Lebanon. And they commanded the people of Benjamin saying, go lie in ambush in the vineyards and watch. If the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come out of the vineyards and snatch each man his wife from the daughters of Shiloh and go to the land of Benjamin. and when their fathers or their brothers come to complain to us we will say to them grant them graciously to us because we did not take for each man of them his wife in battle neither did you give them to them else you would now be guilty and the people of Benjamin did so and took their wives according to their number from the dancers whom they carried off Then they went and returned to their inheritance and rebuilt the towns and lived in them. And the people of Israel departed from there at that time, every man to his tribe and family. And they went out from there, every man to his inheritance. In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. You may be seated. Today, dears, we conclude our long series in the book of Judges, which made up 65 installments, took us one year, six months, one week, and six days, in case any of you were counting. And we've discovered that the book of Judges is highly pertinent, relevant, and practical, and speaks so much of our own situation today. And also, I appreciate all the good and encouraging comments from you regarding this series over all these months. Well, at this time, let's go to the Lord in prayer, shall we? Father, we thank you for coming to the end of a book. It's no small thing to be in the house of the Lord. It's a miracle that we're here. We can never take one Sabbath for granted. We never know if we'll have another one. and yet you gave us 65 of them to cover this sermon we're thankful for that and we pray that we will come through it to the very end and that we'll be found faithful and that at the end of our race of faith on the last day that we will hear Jesus say well done thou good and faithful servant and this we pray in Jesus Christ's holy name Amen The book of Judges ends with a tell-tale and oft-repeated words of verse 25, the last verse in the entire book, and of course you've heard this if you've been here, and that is, in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. That expression is very, very key and very pertinent. It reminds the church in every age and us today that we need King Jesus and without him we're in big, deep and dark trouble. The Benjamites had represented the worst of the apostasy of the people of the time of the judges and they had almost been eliminated completely, almost wiped out, almost annihilated but by the grace of God they were not exterminated in fact today's text is very gracious to them and we see in the scripture lesson how the Lord made provision to spare them from utter destruction and to keep a posterity and I've mentioned several times the great apostle Paul would actually rise from this restored tribe of Benjamin the same is true for us but for the grace of God we all would be on the scrap heap of human, fallen, depraved, sinful, Adamic history, and simply another calamity among many others, the history of fallen and unregenerate men. But instead for us, the Church, the redeemed of God, those who have been given the grace of God that we can never earn, merit, or deserve, we are the beneficiaries of all that is good as it comes to us from God our Father through Jesus Christ and the power of the Blessed Holy Spirit. In light of this morning's scripture lesson, let us make it our goal this morning to understand how the book of Judges leads us to Jesus. And that is a very, very pertinent goal and very applicable to this text. We'll be studying Judges 21, 8 through 25, concluding the book. Title of this morning's sermon is Wives for the Benjamites. If you're new here, and I know we do have some visitors and guests, feel free if you would like to use the half-sheet outline Note the doctrine of these texts. Our immediate needs always point us to God's ultimate provision, Jesus. When you got up this morning, were you hungry, a little bit ready for breakfast? If you were, that is a foreshadowing of a much greater need that you have to be fed Jesus, the Son of God, in the word and sacrament in the context of the church's worship service. The same could be said about everything else that we experience in the world. All of our needs are designed to bring us to Christ. Hence, our immediate needs always point us to God's ultimate provision, Jesus. Temporal issues are real and legitimate. Children temporal, T-E-M-P-O-R-A-L, speaks of this world or what we sense here, if you will. God would not have us take lightly our felt needs. We're not Gnostics, we're not hard-hearted people that are Stoics. We actually feel things and we have needs and those are gifts from God. God has given us those. They are the fodder that the Lord uses to constantly direct us, his church, back to him our very felt needs, the things that we can sense, the things that we need. In the case of the Benjamites, they needed wives because all the women and many of the children were actually killed in the Civil War that took place, which wasn't necessary had the Benjamites handed over the homosexuals, the murderers, and the rapists that had caused the problem in the first place, those men would have been punished and the rest of the tribe would have gone free. But instead, the tribe of Benjamin identified with them and as a result, Covenantly had to suffer all together. And almost all of them were killed off except for these 600 surviving soldiers. Now, you and I will face various needs this week. When we do, Let us first look to God to have those met in prayer. Come to the house of the Lord, the house of plenty, the house of richness, the house of abundance, and then go to the Lord in prayer and seek your needs to be met through him and he'll use his church, he'll use people, he'll use you, he'll use others to see that that comes to be. God our Father wants us to enjoy all good things here on earth. And the way he directs us to them is through his son so that our priority schemes are right. What impossible situations do you face today or this week or on the horizon of your life as you look ahead? What scares you? What seems incredibly difficult? Well, the Benjamites were between a rock and a hard place. They're hiding up at the Rock of Rimmon, hoping for a little mercy from these Israelites who had wiped all the rest of them out, and they get it. And God provided for them. Let us approach the throne of grace as the church in prayer and get all our needs met through Jesus. Temporal issues are real and legitimate, but eternal concerns are absolute and necessary. Now we're going to take this concept a little bit higher to the next level, to the realm of God, theology, the church, the worship of God, the truth of God, the gospel, the word of God, the day of God's holy worship, the things that most matter, the things that are most important. The Benjamites, yeah, they needed wives, that's for sure, but what everybody there really needed, not just the Benjamites, but all the rest of the Israelites, in fact all the world then and today as well, every human being that lives or ever has lived, needs a king. But not just any king, not just any guy with a crown on his head and a scepter in his hand and a royal robe on, but an ultimate king. King Jesus, our Lord. The point here is this. Everything, this world oriented, is to lead us to this great King, the sovereign of the universe, the head of the church, and the Lord and King of all men and angels. Therefore, let us begin to think this way, recognizing that even the most mundane things in our life, the things we think are not important, that are ordinary, pedestrian, kind of plain, maybe troublesome, let's look at them as having an eternal purpose in the hands of a sovereign God about whom nothing is accidental and the one through whose hands everything has a divine purpose for our good that he causes all things to work together for the good of his holy church that he might get the honor and we might enjoy him and be drawn closer and closer to him through Jesus our King Our immediate needs always point us to God's ultimate provision, Jesus. That's the doctrine of these verses, and you can find that in any text of the Bible. Now from this scripture lesson today, let us discern together what we learned from the Wives for the Benjamites story from verses 8 through 25 of Judges chapter 21. Again, let's remind ourselves that all scripture is inspired by God and is given. for doctrine, reproof, correction, for training in righteousness, that the man or woman, boy or girl of God might be thoroughly equipped ready for every good deed, including these scriptures. And let's remember, as Jesus told his disciples as he walked with them after his resurrection in Luke 24, 44 and 45, that all the scripture, the Psalms, the law, the prophetic, the poetic, all of the parts of the Bible are speaking of him. Everything in the scripture leads us to Jesus. If it doesn't, It's wasting its time and we're wasting ours as well, but it does. It all brings us to the feet of Jesus. The book of Judges, as we have consistently seen for a number of months, including this section of Wives for the Benjamites, is certainly no exception. Hence, note with me what we learn from the Wives for the Benjamites story, verses 8-14. that failure to fight for the Lord is disastrous. And they said, what one is there from the tribes of Israel who did not come up to Mizpah to the Lord? In other words, the tribes that fought are saying, hey, who's missing here? Is there somebody not here that should have been part of this army? And in fact, no one had come to the camp from Jabesh Gilead a city, to the assembly. For when the people were counted, indeed not one of the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead was there. So the congregation sent out their 12,000 of their most valiant men and commanded them, saying, Go and strike the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead with the edge of the sword, including the women and children. And this is the thing that you shall do. You shall utterly destroy every male and every woman who has known a man intimately. So they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead 400 young virgins who had not known a man intimately and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh which is in the land of Canaan. Then the whole congregation sent word to the children of Benjamin who were at the Rock of Rimen and announced peace to them. So Benjamin came back at that time and they gave them the women whom they had saved the life of the women of Jabesh Gilead and yet they had not found enough for them. It's really incredible that these 600 guys get peace announced to them. They've been fighting the first two days of the war. They had been successful against the Israelites but after that the tide really turned and peace is announced to them. Now let's talk for a moment about these men of Jabesh Gilead for a while. They probably thought that they could take a pass on this fighting business. They could get a break. Hey, we got enough other people willing to do the work. Let's just stay home and plant some vineyards and eat some grapes and have a good old time and just let other people do the fighting. Probably thought they could do that. Get away with it. They found out the hard way, however, that that supposition is not true. And that is a universal truth. There's for the Church of God. Be it the faithful church on one extreme, the best of the churches, the Puritan, the Reformed, or on the other extreme, a total apostate church that's cast off Jesus, the Gospel, the Word of God, and all the mores of the Bible. The whole extreme is set before us. There are a lot of Christians like the men of Jabesh Gilead today. They think they can sit on the sidelines, stay at home, while others do all the dirty work, while others do all the fighting, while others do all the hard labor, while others do the work of the Lord. And even some of these Christians, apostate, believe that they have the liberty and the freedom to side with God's enemies, to actually align themselves and ally themselves with those who are at war with God, and support their heresies and immoralities, and think all along that they can get away with it. Oh, Jabesh Gileah, that's a safe place. Let's just hang out there and not do anything. Nothing can be further from the truth. Now, in this interesting text that we just read, 8-14, A remarkable thing happens. The very people who before were the objects of the war and were being fought against, and who were on the wrong side of this equation, i.e. the 600 surviving Benjamite soldiers, they end up getting mercy from God and from the Israelites. While these men of Jabesh Gilead who stayed at home didn't come out and fight, guess what? They all end up dead. 12,000 other soldiers go over there and wipe them out, all of their wives, and many others. It's kind of a sad story. And again, none of this was necessary. If the criminals had simply been turned over in the first place, all these people would have still remained, wouldn't have had to die. But they aligned themselves with God's foes. Keep this principle in mind, dears. The true church, the Puritan church, is a strictly no prima donna zone. Prima donnas are not allowed in the church of God, not the true church. There is no comfort or honor for cowards in the body of Christ. and spiritual pacifists like the Javish Gileadites who might have said well I don't believe in fighting, I don't like bloodshed, I don't like warfare, I don't like spiritual battles, I don't like trouble, I don't like messing with people, just let them do their own thing, they have their own ideas, they're fine. Spiritual pacifists have no place in the kingdom or church of God at all. What we learn from the Wives for the Benjamites story The failure to fight for the Lord is disastrous. Now verses 15-22 that compromises with unwise vows sometimes have to be made. This is an interesting text. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but this is the text they reference in the movie. And these men think they can just walk around and pick people up, women, and take them home and make them wives and that kind of thing. But this is where they get it. Let's read these verses. And the people grieved for Benjamin because the Lord had made a void in the tribes of Israel. And the elders of the congregation said, what shall we do for wives for those who remain, since the women of Benjamin have been destroyed? And they said, there must be an inheritance for the survivors of Benjamin, that a tribe may not be destroyed from Israel. However, we cannot give them wives from our daughters, for the children of Israel have sworn an oath, saying, cursed be the one who gives a wife to Benjamin. Then they said, In fact, there is a yearly feast of the Lord in Shiloh, which is north of Bethel on the east side of the highway that goes up from Bethel to Shechem and south of Labona. Therefore they instructed the children of Israel, saying, Go lie in wait in the vineyards, and watch, and just when the daughters of Shiloh come out to perform their dances, then come out from the vineyards, and every man catch a wife for himself from the daughters of Shiloh. Then go to the land of Benjamin. Then it shall be when their fathers or their brothers come to us to complain, that we will say to them, Be kind to them for our sakes, because we did not take a wife for any of them in the war. For it was not as though you have given the women to them at this time, making yourselves guilty of your oath. The Israelites here had painted themselves into a corner regarding this vow not to give their daughters to the Benjamites as wives. It's funny how when you read the Old Testament, sometimes new but mostly old in this regard, the people are making these promises They seem to be quite lax about the really important things of God, the Gospel, or the Word of God, and the commandments that God gives us. A little bit lax on that, but sometimes when it comes to their vows and promises, a lot of which weren't all that bright or all that intelligent, well they hold to them with a great passion and they just won't let them up for anything. So given the fact that they're in a tight spot, they now have to kind of bend the rules so that the need could be met. So you have 600 men who need wives, 400 are taken care of from the Jabesh Gilead. young women but you still have 200 so they have this ingenious plan to go up to Shiloh and these women come out and they dance and apparently a lot of them and then these guys just literally grab them and take them and make them wives and yet the fathers and brothers of those men in Shiloh they didn't give them away so technically they kept their promise and they're not really guilty and they're kind of off the hook now situations like this there's this is a good example But where it's really a good idea not to enter into binding covenants, contracts, oaths, vows, or promises precipitously or thoughtlessly. Often times people will join a church and they'll make all these blessed promises but they don't have the goods to keep them and they break them. Or people enter marriage vows and They don't have the character or whatever and those get broken as well. Sometimes contracts and business or whatever. But if we are to be solid Christians, faithful Christians, those who are serious about our faith, then we have to enter into covenant with God. And our baptisms, our covenant vows, those are the outward means that express that and bind us. Now, the thing is, before we do that, however, we ought to enter it with a sense of fear and dread because of the weakness of our flesh. And we need to be wary of ourselves and never trust ourselves at all. we must trust God in the context of the broader church and the office core and the membership of the congregation to help us keep our vows, to help us stay accountable and to be able to do what we need to do. Now these folks here, they had to do what they had to do if the need was going to be met. They couldn't go outside of Israel and get pagan wives, that would have even been worse. and so they end up doing this and it's all because of this promise that they made. We ought to put all of our faith not in ourselves, God help us, but in Jesus alone. The bottom line lesson from verses 15 through 22 is that when we get stuck between a rock and a hard place sometimes the only alternative is some bizarre arrangement like this one that the men of Israel had to concoct in order to extricate themselves from the bind that they had tied themselves into. Instead, we should intelligently and prayerfully seek the Lord before doing anything like that, and be careful about those things that we bind ourselves to do, and make our spiritual and covenantal yes, yes, and no, no, leaving the results and the blessing of those promises with God, and never trusting ourselves, but always Christ who lives and dwells in us and through us. So what do we learn from the wives for the Benjamite story? Well, the failure to fight for the Lord is disastrous, as the men of Javish Gilead found out. And that compromises with unwise vows sometimes have to be made. And then finally, verses 23 through 25, that Christ the King is our only hope. And the children of Benjamin did so. They took enough wives for their numbers from those who danced whom they caught. Then they went and returned to their inheritance and they rebuilt the cities and dwelt in them. So the children of Israel departed from there at that time. Every man to his tribe and family they went out from there. Every man to his inheritance. In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Keeping in mind the overall context of the book of Judges, when it was written, early monarch period after Saul, perhaps during the time of David, a time of stress and tension between the tribe of Benjamin, i.e. Saul's tribe and the tribe of Judah, David's tribe, the fact that Judah should prevail, the fact that Benjamin hardly even survived to bring forth Saul later on, and the fact that ultimately a greater king was necessary. None of these guys was good enough. Not even David, not even the good kings that followed him, Hezekiah, Josiah, and some of those that were faithful in the line of Jesus, the great king. Christ is our only hope and that is the practical thrust of the book of Judges and the rest of the scriptures. If we do not have Jesus as our king, We are dead in the water and in the world. If some nations like kings, that's fine. But we ought to share the battle cry of some of the soldiers in the American Revolution that said, no king but King Jesus. Ultimately, we need the King Jesus. David would well represent Jesus, and it was necessary for the kingdom to take place so that the great king would be born in Bethlehem in the city of David. And yet, David was not good enough. Jesus Christ, the perfect one, was absolutely necessary. People that don't have Christ don't have a head. They don't have a guide. Or they have two or three or four heads. And they're moving in all kinds of different directions. And this is why people that don't have Jesus as their covenant head in the life of the church do, as verse 25 says, what is right in their own eyes. There's a certain sense in which they have no choice but to do what is right in their own eyes. Basically, what feels good, what seems to be right, what is right for me, whether it's right for anybody else, whether it has any objective truthfulness to it or not. And what does that look like, dears, as we reflect back on one year, six months, one week, and six days in our study of the book of Judges? What does it look like when everyone does what is right in his own eyes? Well, what have we read about? Murder, adultery, sodomy, rape. Are these things good? Is this the way life ought to be? When all people do what is right in their own eyes, those are the results and lots of other bad things. When we, especially as reformed Christians, think of government, We should not first conceive of Washington D.C. or other national capitals. We shouldn't think of kings on earth or princes or presidents or prime ministers or tyrants or scoundrels or dictators or whatever. Instead, when we think of government, dears, and this is a revolutionary truth that can really help us and transform us, We ought to first and foremost think of King Jesus ruling today, right now, over his church, but also the whole world. And when we do that, our hearts can be soothed and we are saved much of the turmoil that is common to ordinary sinful men that are subject only in their minds to these human authorities. Now those human authorities, they're important and we're commanded to pray for them and it is our duty to do that. It's their responsibility to protect the church, but it's our responsibility to pray for them and also to submit and honor them where we can by keeping the Word of God. But ultimately when we think of authority, government, or rule, we ought to think of King Jesus himself. When we do this, we will be much blessed in heart. So it ends with those telltale words, everyone did was right his own eyes. There's no king in Israel. That king of course did come. Jesus Christ the ultimate King. Now our doctrine is that our immediate needs always point us to God's ultimate provision, Jesus. We see what we learned from the wives for the Benjamite story. Finally, in a little further application this morning, let's understand how the church today is to relish Jesus our sovereign head. So I ask you, you might be saying, yes, Pastor, I like this idea of thinking about Jesus the King first when I think about government and rule and human authority and things in the world that are troubling to me. That's very comforting, that's very good. But you might be asking, how can I appreciate a king and his reign whom I don't see with the eyes of the flesh? how can I know that he reigns over all the church and all the world especially when everything appears to be going to hell all around me so the question becomes how do you do that pastor and the answer is by faith but it's not a blind faith it's a faith that is rooted in divine and human history and objective truth unlike any other truth claim of one ultimate sort of any religion in the entire world in the history of the world So let us then today finish our study in the book of Judges by considering how the church today is to relish Jesus our Sovereign Head. First, by thanking the Father that the Messiah has come. Now this has to do with that historical aspect of what I just alluded to. The reality that the Messiah has come. Every December we celebrate Christmas and the Advent, the coming of Jesus to the world. And I've referenced Luke 2 there for you in your outline. He has come and he's rooted in divine and human history. The people in the days of the judges could only look ahead, hope for a king, hope for a good king, hope that David in his house overwhelmed Saul and Ish-bosheth and the remnant of Saul's house and that from the Davidic line would eventually come the blessed Messiah himself. They could only look ahead. Now that was not a bad thing because you could be saved by Jesus Christ then as we are today. But they, unlike us in the New Covenant Church, can't look back and see the fullness of this glory and see the actual finishing of the work. And behold in Jesus the fact that God has done everything he's going to do and has said everything that he wants to say. Do we relish or enjoy Christ and his government as the King? And how do we do it? Let me suggest this very practical way. First of all, be grateful to your Father in Heaven that Jesus Christ has come. Now you understand that in the last days, and we say this in 2 Timothy, that the evil is hanked up, the intensity is hanked up, but ultimately the great king is always there. And the gospel is always progressing, always growing, always abounding. The word of God cannot be chained. The church cannot be destroyed. The gates of hell cannot prevail against it. Jesus Christ the great king is still advancing. So let us be grateful that in history he's been born, and then let us make ourselves, not by ourselves, but by the grace of God, understanding Jesus Christ, and be happy subjects of the King. Let us not grouse. Let us not be complainers. Let us not be those who are always bickering, or arguing, or complaining, ultimately against God. Because God, you're not good enough. You haven't catered to all my needs. Where are you God? What's wrong with you? No. God has provided everything for us. Let us wake up and recognize that it is our blessed privilege to be happy subjects of this great King and that we ought to be. It doesn't mean our lives are always happy. It doesn't mean that we don't have sorrow and difficulty. but ultimately by faith, not a blind faith, but a real faith rooted in real truth and history, we have reason to believe the best of our God and the best for ourselves because he does cause all things to work together for our good, those who are in Christ, who are called by his name. How the church today is to relish Jesus our sovereign head by thanking the Father that the Messiah has come And by being united to the King in our holy faith, now this is the personal and covenantal aspect of our appreciation of Jesus reign. The whole world can and does in a sense celebrate Christ's coming at Christmas, even unbelievers and pagans, they like the lights and the trees and they like the celebration and in a certain implicit sense they also share with us the joy of the fact that the Messiah has been born into the world, the Savior has come and died for his people. But whereas all creation can observe the history in that regard, only the redeemed of the Lord, who know that their sins are forgiven by sovereign grace, who are the adopted children of God into the church of the living God, only those can fully really garner the blessedness of the full atonement of Jesus and apply it to their lives. But we invite everyone else to do so as well. And that's our message, is that this gospel is for everyone. all the world, come and eat, come to the house of the Lord and enjoy the full riches of Jesus. Let me ask you dears as we close the book of Judges, are you and I, are we willing to suffer a little bit? Are we willing to do a little fighting? Are we willing to get in the battle? Are we willing to see some arrows fly and some bullets whiz and some bombs go off? Are we willing to take up the sword of the Spirit and the armor of God and to fight a good fight? Are we willing to suffer a little bit for our King and His Church and His Gospel? Are we willing to accept from Him whatever He sends us in His sovereign decrees and wisdom? Are we willing to believe that truly He is sovereign and that He really does know better? Are we willing like them to say God here is our situation and we want the King you want to give us and in our case that King being Jesus alone. If we are it is not because we're so smart and good, bright and enlightened. It's because God has been good to us and it's all because of his grace at work in us. It is the new man in us, the new person that causes that to be. Let all of us here today, dears, and I invite you believe in this Christ of the gospel of grace. Lay aside forever now all our works, all our efforts, all our vain hopes, all of our sins, all of our false gospels, all the world's promises. Let us no longer ever align ourselves with the world and its ways. Let us be fearful of doing so, recognizing it's dangerous to do so. And everyone will be called to account on that great and last day. The gospel has been achieved in full perfection in Jesus Christ who shed his blood for his elect church. Are we among them? Beloved, wives for the Benjamites led to a king for us, for you and for me. And that king is not some ordinary human being, but he is the great God-man, sinless and perfect, He is King Jesus. Wise for the Benjamites. Let's pray together. Father we thank you for our great sovereign Lord Jesus Christ who came. Thank you that book pointed to him all the time. They needed a king. Had to be the right one. Turned out in your perfections you did establish David who through his human line would bring forth the great King Jesus Christ the God-man Thank you that we have now this great, wonderful sovereign over us and that we can trust in him and rest in him, take delight in him and recognize that yes, life here is difficult and it's likely to get much more difficult for a while, at least in our environment, but to be thankful and faithful under the great Shepherd and King Jesus, in whose name we pray, Amen.