Well, both pastors, Bill and Sean, have both kind of set you up a bit about this sermon tonight, or set me up to begin this story of Samson. You've heard that name several times today already. Like me, you probably think you know Samson. You've heard some of your most memorable Sunday school lessons of your childhood were probably about the great figure of Samson. I hope, like me, you discover new things in looking closely at the narrative of his birth and life and death. So let's turn our attention to the word of God now from Judges chapter 13. And if you're reading along in your Black Pew Bibles, you'll find that on page 213. Hear now the word of the living God. And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. So the Lord gave them into the hand of the Philistines for 40 years. There was a certain man of Zorah in the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah, and his wife was barren and had no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, behold, you are barren and have not born children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore, be careful and drink no wine or strong drink and eat nothing unclean. For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head for the child shall be a Nazarite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines. And the woman came and told her husband, A man of God came to me and his appearance was like the appearance of the angel of God. Very awesome. I did not ask him where he was from and he did not tell me his name, but he said to me, behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink and eat nothing unclean for the child shall be a Nazarite to God from the womb to the day of his death. And then Manoa prayed to the Lord and said, oh Lord, please let the man of God whom you sent come again to us and teach us what we are to do with the child who will be born. And God listened to the voice of Manoah and the angel of God came again to the woman, as she said in the field. But Manoah, her husband, was not with her. So the woman ran quickly and told her husband, behold, the man who came to me the other day has appeared to me. And Manoah arose and went after his wife and came to the man and said to him, are you the man who spoke to this woman? And he said, I am. And Manoah said, now, when your words come true, what is to be the child's manner of life and what is his mission? And the angel of the Lord said to Manoah of all that I said to the woman, let her be careful. She may not eat of anything that comes from the vine, neither let her drink wine or strong drink or eat any unclean thing. All that I commanded her, let her observe. Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, Please let us detain you and prepare a young goat for you.' And the angel of the Lord said to Manoah, If you detain me, I will not eat of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, then offer it to the Lord. For Manoah did not know that he was the angel of the Lord. And Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, What is your name? So that when your words come true, we may honor you. And the angel of the Lord said to him, Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful? So when Noah took the young goat with the grain offering and offered it on the rock to the Lord, to the one who works wonders and Manoah and his wife were watching. And when the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel of the Lord went up in the flame of the altar. Now, Manoah and his wife were watching and they fell on their faces to the ground. The angel of the Lord appeared no more to Manoah and to his wife. Then Manoah knew that he was the angel of the Lord. And Manoah said to his wife, we shall surely die for we have seen God. But his wife said to him, if the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering at our hands or shown us all these things or now announced to us such things as these. And the woman bore a son. and called his name Samson. And the young man grew and the Lord blessed him. And the spirit of the Lord began to stir him in Manhattan between Zora and Eshto. Here is the reading of God's holy word for this night, may his name ever be praised. Let's turn our hearts to God in prayer. Our dear Lord, we remember your words to us from the reading this morning. While you have light, believe in the light that you may become sons of light. We thank you for the illumination you give us by means of your word and spirit, and we turn to you expectantly tonight, asking you again to meet us in your word and in the exposition of that word that we might behold your light and seeing it, believe it, and in believing it, serve you as sons of light forever. We pray in the name of the one who declared himself to be the light of the world. Amen. Last Saturday morning, a week ago, I saw a large event in a restaurant parking lot near our house. It was this annual car show, or semi-annual. It happened several times a year in this big parking lot. And all these glamorous Lamborghinis and Ferraris were crowded into this restaurant parking lot. And you know, I was struck by the crowds of people there. I'm always amazed by the numbers of people who just love fast, shiny cars. One of them is my own son, who never missed one of those shows when he lived here in Charlotte. As for me, I have what I would call a derivative appreciation for such vehicles. Derivative because the people I love, they love them. Aaron loves them. Bill Cooper loves them. Bill's sons love them. Guys like that. Therefore, I like them. I like cars, that is. When I see those cars, I think of those men and the joy that those cars bring them, and I smile. So you might say I have a derivative appreciation, a kind of acquired derivative pleasure in fast cars. But you have to understand, I'm not about to buy one. You get the feeling when reading through the book of the judges that there were many people in ancient Israel who have what we might call a derivative appreciation of the Lord. They did know of some who were passionate, who burned with devotion to God. Their fathers of old certainly had loved and served the Lord, famous Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and Joshua. And in their own day, the priests ministering in the tabernacle were certainly more religious than most, although even in their own time, they had the example of Eli and his two sons who were so far below that, especially the two sons, that is. And as we've seen in this sermon series, occasionally one of these great judges would appear on the scene with an intense devotion to the Lord of the Covenant. Remember that, or you may not know this, but I didn't know it until I was reading through this material this week, that Jephthah is still active in the eastern part of the country when Samson is born in the western part of the country. There were these judges. But in general, in this era when the Spirit of God was not as widely distributed or as deeply distributed, we might say, as it is in our blessed age, in the age of the New Covenant, it didn't seem that many ordinary folk had close personal encounters with the living God, resulting in a burning devotion to the Lord. Instead, there was, I imagine, a lot of this derivative appreciation. And as our chapter begins, we see just where all this derivative appreciation for God leads to. And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, so the Lord gave them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years. That all sounds painfully familiar to us now, doesn't it? Israel doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord, the Lord giving them over to their enemies. In this case, the Philistines who were operating in the western region of the country, the coastal region. But did you catch what was different this time? It's something that's missing. It's very different than the cycles we've heard before. Here's what's missing. They did not cry out to the Lord. In the previous cycles of sin and oppression and divine deliverance at some very desperate point, Israel would cry out to God, if not in repentance from sin, at least in sheer despair and pain. But not this time. It's just silence. Powerful Philistines have become their masters in their own promised land, and the Israelites Well, they've grown used to it. They now saw their humiliation and their misery is inescapable and inevitable. They don't even complain about it. They don't tear down the shrines to Dagon, the chief Philistine deity. As I said in a sermon not long ago, they put coexist bumper stickers on their oxcarts. Later in Chapter 15, when Samson is delivering them from the Philistines, they actually ask their judge. They actually say to Samson, Samson, what are you doing? Don't you understand? They rule over us. This is the way it is. I want you to step back from that story for just a minute. It had been 300 years since Joshua's brave men had taken the land. The folks of Samson's time could not have known it, but the time of the judges was drawing to a close and a future king of Israel named Saul was soon to be born. One era is ending. Another is about to begin. But across the spiritual landscape of Israel, deadness still prevails. The common people were now resigned to their situation. I think of the scenes from the old Western movies in which a tumbleweed blows through a dusty town with empty streets. Spiritually speaking, that's what Israel was, especially Western Israel at this time. But then something happens. Something seemingly small. In one of the smallest tribal regions. In a nowhere place. to a remarkably obscure family. There was a certain man of Zorah of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah, and his wife was barren and had no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, Behold, you are barren and have not born children, but shall conceive and bear a son. We don't know at this point in the story what the implications of this announcement are, but already we can sense that God will not let his covenant end with spiritual tumbleweeds blowing through the ghost town of Israel's soul. He will not abandon his saving redemptive purpose. Unasked. Unsought. Unprayed to. With rampant idolatry of the Canaanite and Philistine gods and a mere derivative appreciation of himself, blanketing his people's cold hearts, still God acts to save. That is breathtaking to me. If you ever doubt that there is nothing in us that generates God's compassion and his desire to save, you should see it here. It happens. in a small border town between Dan and Judah, dangerously near the mighty Pentopolis of the Philistines along the coast. Pentopolis means five cities. There was this federation of Philistine cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, from where the warrior Goliath would later come. And at this little inland Jewish village of Zoar, about 14 miles west of Jerusalem, A meteor of God's providence quietly falls to the earth. An unnamed woman, she's never named. And her husband, Manoah, are visited by an angel of the Lord, who is, I believe, the Lord himself, as they'll later discover. And they are told that they are going to have a son. They have been just as barren as a couple, as Israel was barren spiritually. But no more. They will have a son. Remember that Sarah had named her unexpected son Isaac, meaning laughter or he laughs, this family would name their unexpected son Samson, meaning Sonny. This was a joyful event, a sunny event in their lives, not just for them, but for all of Israel. For as the angel of God's presence had told them about their miracle baby in verse five, he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines. He had a mission statement from birth. The pronoun he is emphatic, he shall do it, he shall say this one, or at least it says he shall begin to say I thought it was interesting this morning in our Old Testament reading from Zechariah 9, in that middle section about God as judge or warrior for Israel, it lists some of these same Philistine cities as coming under his judgment. Now that was written 500 years after the period of the judges, give or take. And so clearly Samson didn't clear out the Philistines in his day. But he began, he began to save Israel from their enemies. That's right. Samson was a savior of sorts. And everything about this man's life was emphatic. He lived boldly. And perhaps you haven't heard that about Samson. Maybe what you've heard through your Sunday school classes and such as children It's all about the negative example of Samson, how reckless he could be. He could be. How overconfident in himself he was. How easily seduced by women or or at least one woman. And indeed, like most of the judges, Samson has his flaws. There is this tragic aspect to this figure, but do not let that one great failing cause you to fail. To appreciate what this man did for Israel over decades, he began to save Israel. Samson was indeed a great judge, and while he never led an army against the Philistines, he was a mighty one-man wrecking crew against God's enemies, an ancient terminator, a fearless foe of false religions. So it is not wrong to say that unto Manoah and his anonymous wife in the city of Zoar a savior was born, which is Samson the Judge. You may have loved recklessly C.E. Delilah, but at least this man's big heart was no example of a cool derivative appreciation of Yahweh the Lord. No, Samson, this consummate man of action, Love God in His own way until His dying breath and His dying act prove that. The writer to the Hebrews, Liz Samson, is one of the greats in his hall of faith in Hebrews chapter 11, where Samson is mentioned in the same sentence with Samuel and David. Those, the writer of Hebrews says, whose through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight." Samson must have been in mind as the writer of Hebrews was writing that sentence. So much of it describes his accomplishments. When Samson was born, Into Israel's spiritual lethargy and deadness comes this new thing, this new dynamic, a bright new hope, a savior for Israel. Brothers and sisters, I saw tumbleweeds blowing down Tyvola Road last week. I saw tumbleweeds in Raleigh. and in Los Angeles, Hollywood, in New York, in Washington, D.C. I know we are still a strong and relatively prosperous nation, and all the social scientists tell us we're very religious still, very spiritual, for whatever that word means anymore. Lots of shrines to Dagon, to fertility gods, prosperity gods, sensual gods. And like the ancient Israelites, so many of our fellow citizens have simply given up resisting the dark oppression that we all know from our own minds and hearts, our new American Philistine values. Now, we embrace the darkness. Now we have anti heroes, not heroes. Now we celebrate what was once condemned. What is that a call to live a holy life, a call to celibacy and singleness, a call to modesty in clothing? Are you kidding me? A call to self-denial, Robert E. Lee. To delay gratification. A call to serve others. A call to love enemies, are you kidding? And friends, it's not all the result of the new paganism and the new atheism blowing the spiritual tumbleweeds through the empty streets of America's increasingly secular soul. That's a lot of it. But I want to tell you there's also a lot of derivative appreciation of God and the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage, which is a rich heritage of this nation among some. I mean, depends on which news station you watch, right? God is apparently still admired by many and referred to often. I don't believe any of that is of the kingdom of Christ, per se. All these false religions, all that self-religion, and yes, this derivative admiration, it all just blankets the hearts of our people. It is not biblical religion. It is not Holy Spirit enabled faith in the crucified and risen and ascended son of God. I don't know that God cares what you or I appreciate, whether you or I appreciate what he means to others, whether it be our parents, our grandparents or our ancestors. Or whether we prefer all things considered to live in a Christian civilization where we might be more safe and prosperous whether we occasionally give some kind of tip of hat to the Lord. Samson understood, as we'll see in coming weeks, Samson understood at an intuitive level what many folk today never comprehend, that Christianity is not a halfway religion. It is all or nothing in its essence. The house of God is a house of fire, of flaming hearts and large kingdom ambitions and risk and sacrifice and bearing the stigma and pleading with prayer. If we're not here for those reasons, brothers and sisters, we're not here for the right reasons. What we learn from Judges 13, first of all, When we live in a time of spiritual tumbleweeds and general apostasy in the nation, we must make sure of one thing above all, that we ourselves have a direct and personal experience of God. In every age, in fact, we must have a direct and personal experience of God. This is exactly what Manoah and his wife experienced in that day. Because God himself visited them. Do you believe God visits you? Does God visit you? If you do not think God has visited you personally and providentially. With fatherly care and redemption in his wings, if you do not believe God speaks to you through his word and gives you a spirit of adoption. which tells you that you belong to the eternal, supernatural family of God, causing you to cry out in the spirit of your very soul, Abba Father, Abba Father. Then how do you stand, frankly, going to church here week after week and singing these hymns and songs? Manoah and his wife experienced the presence of the Lord God And they believe the promise of the messenger about a saving son to be born to them. And they offered a sacrifice to God. Do we who have such better promises than they did, do we count on the promises of God? Do we bank on them? Do we count the promises of God as the very substance of the gift given by God in this age? And that marvelously suggestive phrase from Hebrews, have we obtained the promises by faith? And have we offered the Lord not a burnt sacrifice of a young goat, but something far more precious and difficult, a daily living sacrifice of grateful service and praise to God. Our promises are better, our sacrifice must be better. Or has it been too often a begrudged, grumbling, half-hearted obedience? Brothers and sisters, let us learn from the man who would pull down the house of sin upon himself in order to serve the Lord. Let us learn from Samson's expansive and emphatic heart and from his parents' obedient, humble faith. And there's another thing that we can learn from this chapter. about casting out the tumbleweeds of soul deadness. In that spiritual fool's gold, which is a derivative faith. This is kind of counterintuitive, counterintuitive, so stay with me here. All this direct personal experience of God of which I speak. All this living faith in the promises given. All this. dynamic of spiritual life and newness coming into our lives, it all comes out. Of tradition. Of tradition. You didn't expect me to say that, did you? This is what we see here in Judges 13. This radical encounter with the presence of God in the village of Zoar, this great new thing that God is doing in Israel, this saving act of God, in one sense, does come like a meteor suddenly falling out of the sky. But in so many more profound ways, it is all embedded in Israel's historic faith and tradition. Let me make just a couple or actually more than a couple, five quick bullet point observations. Number one. This whole dynamic of giving fertility to barren women is a well-established and favored method of God to reveal his saving purposes to his people. You can think of Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and later Hannah. In the New Testament, of course, there's Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Number two, notice that throughout this text, The special historic covenant name of God, Yahweh, the Lord, capital L-O, capital letters L-O-R-D is used. These may have been spiritually barren times, but God's name was still God's name, and to know God's covenant name with faith was salvation. Number three, Surely an appearance of a messenger of the Lord who turns out, I would argue, to be the Lord himself is not a surprise to careful readers of the Old Testament or even the Book of the Judges. Remember Gideon? This is not a one-off miracle, a theophany, just for this family. This is a part of what we might call a theophanic tradition in Israel. Number four. One of the most important aspects of Samson's life is that he was called by God from before his birth to be a Nazarite. This was a centuries old tradition, a centuries old tradition by the time of Samson, given by Moses back in Numbers chapter six. You cannot understand Samson without understanding that he was a Nazarite. In many ways, it's the single most important factor about his life. He was one who was called, as Nazarites are, to separate himself unto God. And it involved three commitments that were not binding on any Jews, typically, but binding on Nazarites. No wine or strong drink or any product at all of the grape. No cutting of one's hair. And no contact with any dead bodies. Now, it was not because these things were sinful for the ordinary people of Israel, typically not at all. But it was simply done to separate them, to separate the Nazarites, sort of visually, as it were, from the other Israelites, a set apart people within a set apart people. In other words, I want you to catch this. The Nazarites were a sect to remind all of Israel who they all were to God, the set apart nation, the special nation. Now, usually people took this vow for a period of time, they took it voluntarily. Samson was called by God to observe it his whole life. Thus, he was different in this way from all the other judges. Samson, one commentator said, was the Israelite of the judges, the set apart one, even within the judges. So in a way, he's the most symbolic of the judges. And he's the only one described as best I can recall. I was going to confirm this with Sean McCann, but I forgot to do it for the sermon. I think he's the only one who was called Savior of Israel. Correct me if I'm wrong, Sean. Though, as we will see in later sermons, he may have violated all three of his sacred vows at one time or another. Samson was nevertheless a set apart man, a man devoted to God, like any sacrificial animal is devoted to the flames. This was a very traditional role assumed by this great leader. Finally, number five, Manoah's instinct to offer the visitor a burnt offering, a goat and a grain offering, which later becomes an actual sacrificial offering, formally speaking, comes right out of the Mosaic law. And the appearance of divine fire upon the altar also comes out of the history of Israel. And so you see that Manoah and his wife and Samson himself encountered the presence and power of God in this new way, right smack in the middle of the ancient Hebrew tradition. They were not looking for some utterly unprecedented new move of the Holy Spirit. They were not reinventing God. Or chasing a personal religious experience. They were trying to be faithful to the tradition of their fathers. and the God of their fathers arrived. Are we a traditional church? The answer to that question is not as obvious as you might think, no matter how you would answer. We are a Protestant church. which claims that the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined and all decrees of counsel, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men and private spirits are to be examined and in whose sentence we are to rest can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the scripture. And that sentence from our confession of faith about the scriptural authority being superior to the traditions of the church or the councils of the church. You know what that is? That's part of our tradition. And it's biblical. Of course, we rightly regard the Holy Scriptures as superior in their final authority to all tradition of the church and all its creeds and confessions, but that does not mean that the traditional creeds have no authority. Far from it. They have tremendous authority in the lives of faithful believers in the lives of officers of the church. Second, only to the Holy Spirit speaking through the word of God itself. You know, we often say, and we have for centuries, sola scriptura, scripture alone, as a way of saying that scripture is our final authority, but it does not mean it's our only authority. Yes, our Savior warned of following the traditions of men, but he also said he had come not to abrogate the Mosaic tradition, God's tradition, but to fulfill it, every jot and tittle of it. Make no mistake about it, though he shattered the preconceptions of people had about the law of God, Christ Jesus was profoundly traditional in the best covenantal way of using that word. We need to recover the word tradition from the dustbin of modern history, particularly as it applies to the confession of the Christian church, particularly that confession, which we would call essential Christianity. That which has been believed by all true believers everywhere and at all times, the faith once delivered to the saints, once for all delivered. We need to do this. Not because older is always better or because we're somehow more conservative by following old things. After all, heresies are old, too, aren't they? Or because there are no new understandings of the word which are ever valid, that's not true. New light still breaks forth from God's word. No, we should treasure the word tradition because the Bible does. The Apostle Paul praised the Corinthian church for getting at least one thing right. You remember the Corinthians? They remembered Paul, he said, in everything that he had taught them and held to the traditions just as he had passed them down to the church. First Corinthians 11 to chiefly that tradition being the Lord's Supper. In second Thessalonians to the apostle even uses the word tradition as a synonym for the good news. Scholar R. Scott Clark says in his excellent book Recovering Reformed the Reformed Confession, Scripture says that God efficaciously called the Thessalonian Christians to faith through our gospel. It is to that same gospel that Paul refers when he tells them to stand firm and hold to the traditions we passed on to you. Tradition also refers to Paul's moral teaching. In the same epistle, he says, We command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the tradition you receive from us, that tradition being if he will not work, he will not eat. At both the level of salvation doctrine and ethical discernment, the Apostle Paul wanted the church to be traditional in that sense that he meant it, gospel traditional. Brothers and sisters, a healthy sense of the Christian tradition keeps us from falling into the deeply self-centered narcissism and the heresy birthing habit of thinking that we read the Bible utterly by ourselves in a in an individualistic vacuum. And that we are competent to understand it utterly alone and by ourselves. I think in some ways this is the great era of modern secular humanism. That is, it sees man as a part cut off from history, a mere psychological and emotional animal cut off from all that has ever gone before. I saw this last week, a piece of an interview on a morning talk show with Hugh Hefner. I told our pastors this morning, I consider Hugh Hefner to be one of the great evildoers of the 20th century. the founder of modern pornography movement, the founder of the sexual revolution in some respects. The kinds of misery, degradation that have come to women and to girls, fatherless homes across our country. I think of Hugh Hefner like the mythical Hindu god Vishnu, destroyer of worlds. And he's interviewed this week and he says, you know, and of course the reporter's falling all over herself talking to him. And he says, you know, the key to my life was I reinvented myself continually. I kept throwing off all the past and living only for the future. He tells about a story when he was a teenager where a teenage romance happened and some girl hurt his feelings and rejected him. At that point he decided he'll never be committed to one woman again. He'll be the playboy. R. Scott Clarke points out that the idea that we can reinvent our own truths to live by is really an error of idolatry, of confusing the categories of creator and creature. Because only God is not situated in time and space and flesh. We creatures are always situated in time, in history. We're always in a tradition, in a flow of history, even if we ignore it, which we do only to our own peril. This is a way of thinking about it. I cannot become the new man, the new thing God wants me to be. Without knowing the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. The new is inextricably tied up with the old. In a very real sense. I encounter God and I speak As any of us would know, I encounter God, I have this direct personal experience of God exactly in the tradition of the church. Through word sacraments, psalms and and spiritual songs and hymns and prayers and the spiritual fellowship of like minded people, I make new. I hear ancient texts that are thousands of years old, read on Sunday morning and evening and in hearing them and hearing them exposited. I'm born anew. So while the scriptures stand supreme in their authority over the church, they are always to be read in the context of the historical church, not just the living church, not only your pastors, your elders, your teachers, But also the church through the ages, that great cloud of witnesses through the ages who also had the full measure of the Holy Spirit, no less than us. I love what one theologian called it. He said it is the trans-temporal relationship of the church, the trans-temporal, the cross-time relationship with fateful ones who've gone before us. Do you realize the way in which you and I are related to all Christians who have ever lived in any time? As a practical matter, folks, if you are reading the Bible in a brand new and different way than anyone else before you has ever read it, you are almost certainly dead wrong and dangerously in error. Even when Martin Luther and John Calvin were overturning centuries of medieval error in the Protestant Reformation, they labored hard to show that they were not teaching some brand new thing, but in fact, something that was very old that had been taught by the early church fathers and they profusely quoted. It's really just a recovery of essential biblical, that is traditional Christianity. The great reformed Professor John Murray once said, there is a Catholic, little C, Catholic, Protestant and reformed tradition. To try to extricate ourselves from it would be presumptuous and even absurd. For the reformed tradition expressed in the confessions of the church is the bond of fellowship, a bulwark against the incursion of errors, a testimony to the faith once delivered unto the saints and an instrument for the preservation of both its purity and peace. Thank God for our confession of faith and for all the historic confessions of the church. What we see in the first segment of the Samson story is that it's all right in this context of being situated in the traditions of Moses, the Nazarites, the covenant name of God, the sacrifices and such. It's right in that matrix of traditional covenant religion that God reveals himself. To be wonderful. to Manoa. Verse 18 Hebrew word is indeed wondrous and rich. God is essentially saying to Manoa here, my character, my glorious nature, it is so beyond you, you simply can't take it all in. It's too wonderful. Brothers and sisters, The traditional doctrine of the church and the means of grace he has given us to know him does not somehow him in God. It doesn't keep him in some kind of confining, limiting box. Rather, it protects the biblical truth of God from otherwise inevitable human reduction and diminishment and meddling. ensuring that we, like Paul, and like every thoughtful Christian before us, can finally but exclaim, O the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God. When with both hands of our hearts we embrace the tradition of our holy faith, we're not merely giving a nod to how much the Lord meant to others in the past. This is not merely some derivative appreciation of the Lord that we have. No. We confess that it is life itself. It is our life. It is God, the sovereign spirit. Coming to us as we are situated in our time and in our space and in our place. Condescending to our creatureliness. Speaking words of love and life. Making us sons and servants of God by faith. For while Samson may have begun to save Israel in his day, we know. From this faith once delivered to all the saints. That there is one. who has saved us to the uttermost, and His name is wonderful indeed. Even Jesus Christ, our Lord, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Bless God. Let's pray together. Our God and our Father, among the many things that You have freed us from, You have liberated us from the unbelievable burden of reinventing ourselves and reinventing our faith. Thank you for this great holy faith once for all delivered to the saints. Thank you for the promise that you abide with us as our God, even when we turn from you with neglectful behavior. Father, Your grace, your purposes are tenacious. You will not let us go. We praise you for that, above all, we thank you. That even as these this ancient family heard the promise of a saving son that would be born to them. We know of your saving son. And he has become our very life. And through this ancient path, we have discovered the newness of life itself. We bless you for this, our great living God. In Christ's name we pray, amen.