This morning we're going to review some ground we've covered, but in doing so, hopefully learn some new things and then step into a bit of a language study that we might understand how God, in using certain words in his word, draws us into an understanding of these great promises that have been placed for us here. These first five verses of Romans chapter 5, build one chain link onto another, describing for us the gifts that God has given to us. When I say gifts, I mean not those that are talked about in other parts of the New Testament, but justification, peace, standing, hope, endurance, and those characteristics that are formed in the believer. Let me read the first five verses of Romans 5. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we exalt in the hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also exalt in our tribulations knowing that tribulation brings about patience, or perseverance, or steadfastness even. And perseverance, proven character, and proven character, hope. And hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Now as I go over and have read over each one of those things, what I want to show a couple of times through my remarks this morning is that you can go from the fruit back down through the tree to the root and examine where it came from, or we can go in this passage from the root out and see what it has produced. It's the justification by faith in verse one that has opened the door to all of these other blessings. It's because God has chosen to justify us by faith that we get peace, number one. In verse 2, we have obtained an introduction, and we stand in grace. Third, also in verse 2, we exalt in hope. Fourth, we exalt in tribulation, which brings about steadfastness. And the steadfastness in verse 4 brings character, and the character brings hope. Hope doesn't disappoint. and then it winds up by telling us about the Spirit of God who was given to us. So that we start with the Holy Spirit and move backwards up the text and include all those links, including being justified by faith, or start with justification by faith and wind up with the Holy Spirit indwelling us, producing these things, It's true either way, but what's interesting is that if you just take one of those links out, the others can't connect. This is all part of what every Christian receives. It's very much like Galatians 5, verse 22, where the fruit of the Spirit is listed. Here is another cluster in Paul's writings, which is of a deeper kind, a more doctrinal kind, than the simple characteristics. When I say simple, I mean simple to understand that we read about in Galatians 5. Nothing is said here, note, about personality changes. One of the things that I believe that the Word of God affirms, actually by its lack of saying anything more than anything else, is that when you become a Christian, your personality is not in for a big change. What happens is that the Holy Spirit is forming in you. He is in you, forming the character of Jesus Christ in you. And so that the new nature becomes more and more like Christ. We've been given the mind of Christ, we're predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, and we have the spirit of Christ within us. Think of those three things. The spirit of Christ in us, the mind of Christ given to us, and a predestined plan by which we are to be conformed to his likeness. The old man and the old woman is still in there. The personality traits with which we are born become victim, a good kind of victim, to the power and the onslaught of the growth of grace within us. The day is going to come in heaven when the battle of the wills will be over. The battle of the will of my old nature and the will of my new nature in Christ is going to struggle hand and foot to the grave. After the grave, one of them never moves, not even a twitch again. One of the heart factors of Christianity is that just as a symbolic light was housed in the mobile tabernacle and tent and the candlesticks, the very light of God dwells within the believer in the person of the Holy Spirit. What you see in this passage in another way is growth by way of illumination. It gives a kind of expectancy. A couple of nights ago, we had a beautiful full moon. Anybody who was outside saw it. If you looked at it last night, you'd see, oh, it's shrinking. And you wish it would stay full for a while. It's so magnificent to look at. And you know that when the new moon forms, there's a little bit of a crescent, and then it grows and grows and grows to the full point of illumination. So much of the Apostle Paul's teaching in the New Testament about our Christian character and just hoping for heaven is like that. The fact that you get a sliver of hope at the beginning is a promise of the fullness of the light and the promises of God to come as we grow in grace and as we actually arrive at his presence in heaven one day. In the Old Testament in Daniel we read about the three men in Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. After they had been in there for a while, someone took a look and said, I see a fourth one wandering around in there with them. And we read, of course, and we know that this is one like the Son of Man, picture, of course, of God with his people in the fiery trials of this life, which is what Romans chapter 5 opens with. Just the fact that you have Jesus Christ within you at the new birth, at the beginning of your Christian experiences, shows you, by God's giving an illustration in the moon and other things in the natural order, it grows until the full day. Jesus Christ is being formed in you. Philippians 1.6, he who began a good work in you will complete it under the day of Jesus Christ, namely his return. So these first five verses tell us that much by way of review. That once God has founded his light in you, it's going to increase. Once the truth of Christ is in you, it grows. Once you become a child of God, you grow into the inheritance spiritually and of course really when we actually arrive in heaven. What about heaven? When we think of the future life, we ought to think of heaven in the highest possible terms. Now, I recognize that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man what God has prepared for those that love him. And so thinking about heaven is difficult because the Bible's already told us that we can't even imagine what it will be like. Conversely, nor can we imagine what hell and the place of torment will be like for the wicked who spurn the gospel of Jesus Christ. These words are not adequate, even the ones that Jesus gave about the smoke of their burning going up forever and ever, and the worm that dies not, and weeping and wailing, gnashing of teeth, being cast into outer darkness. These are just poor human language terms that maybe brush up against some semblance of the meaning of the horror that awaits those who are not covered by God's grace. just so heaven is far, far more wonderful than we can imagine. But there are some things about heaven specifically spoken that can be documented. Heaven is a real place. I don't know where it is, but I know it is. One way to help you think about that is to realize that the universe, which the scientists say is infinite, is not. You cannot have an infinite God create anything that is other than finite. God has created the universe and placed all of the stars that are there. I don't care how many billion light years they may be away, there is an entity called the universe. It is not measureless. God made it. The whole creation record drives this home. God puts borders up everywhere. He puts luminaries in the sky to give light. He separates the light and the darkness. He separates the firmament from the water. God is a God of measurement. He's a God of precision. And he created all this, but beyond this universe that he has created for us, he dwells. And there is a place called heaven, and we know that there is no night there. No night can't be in our universe. We know that there is no sorrow there. We know that there is no crying there. These things are known about heaven. That's what's wrapped up in that word, hope, there in verse five. Hope does not disappoint. Knowledge yields hope because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts. And once the love of God has been poured out in your heart, you have started on a journey. You've started on a journey of knowledge. You've started on a journey of conformity to his will and to his person. And where it all ends up is with you in heaven with him, being like him. It all started out with us being separated from him, antithetical to him, at war with him, and we end up with him, loving him, and being like him. This great transport from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light is the gospel of Jesus Christ, justification by faith. Our text shows us a double source of hope. You know what it is to be the have-nots and the haves and the have-nots. Well, we hear about it all the time. Christians are the haves and the have-yets. We're the ones who have, but have yet to have. When you read through these verses, you see it coming. We have, verse one, peace. We have, in verse two, a standing. We have, in verse three, also the ability to rejoice. Doubly, we're able to rejoice, not only in the good things, but also in the tribulations. And our hope is realized in the anticipation of our perfection. Is there any Christian in this room right now who doesn't believe that God is going to be able to finish the job that he began with you? I don't believe there's any Christian in here that really thinks that. So take it to heart. God is going to finish the job. He's going to take you to heaven. He's going to make you perfect. He's going to make you like Jesus Christ, and He is going to have you with Him forever and ever. That is His promise. That's hope. That is our hope. We have hope here. We have hope that is yet to come. We've been speaking about tribulation. In fact, last week we talked about it uniquely, solely, and the refiner's fire that we speak about in scripture and the fuller soap brings two very interesting things together, and God has given us an illustration of that in another natural order promise that he gave after the flood of Noah. The blessings of the Christian life and the sorrow and the suffering of the Christian life blend to make a special promise of hope in the Christian. Rain and sunlight combine to produce a rainbow. Sorrow and blessing combine in the Christian life to produce an art of hope in us. It's there, but it only comes from those two ingredients. You don't get a rainbow with just water. You don't get a rainbow with just light. You only get a rainbow with both. And you only get the full-blown picture of hope in Jesus Christ when the blessings of God and the tribulations of God combine in our life. And when they do that by trial, by testing, God in the suffering shows the color spectrum of His grace and His character in us. You don't see the character of Jesus Christ in the Christian, excuse me, in the person, not the Christian, in the person who only suffers but who has no light of truth in them. You don't see the character of God in the Christian who doesn't suffer. You don't get it in the non-Christian who doesn't have Jesus. You don't get it in the Christian who doesn't have suffering. You have to have both the life of Christ within you and the tribulations combined to show the power of God in us. That's why he has predestined both of them for us. Now look specifically at verse five. The hope here that is mentioned says it does not disappoint. Some of your translations may say that hope does not bring shame or it is not to be ashamed. The love that is shed abroad in our hearts is a picture of a tree. Trying to draw an illustration for you. So if the hope in verse five is a picture of fruit, If the love of God shed abroad within our hearts is a picture of the tree, then the Holy Spirit at the end of this verse is a picture of the root. The Holy Spirit comes into our life and produces growth, which we'll call the stump of the tree. It's the trunk. It's that which the Holy Spirit gathers from the Word of God and drives like sap up into our being. It permeates our being so that we can produce fruit, which is hope. You got it now? The root of our being is God's life in us, the Holy Spirit. The substance of the growth is what we call the love, and finally, the hope is the fruit that is born. Hope does not disappoint. Why? Because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has given to us. If I can paraphrase it in another way, I would say hope, the fruit, doesn't disappoint because the love of the tree is planted in our hearts because the Holy Spirit has given it to us. Root, love, fruit. Root, love, fruit. Holy Spirit, love, fruit. If you have the fruit, you can trace it to the Holy Spirit in your life. If you have the Holy Spirit in your life, you know that fruit is going to come. It doesn't matter which way you go up and down this tree. A Christian has all three of them. You can't have the Holy Spirit without having love and without having fruit. And if you have fruit and love, it's because the Holy Spirit is within you. And so there's a little checklist here that God has squeezed into verse five to give the Christian reader assurance that in the middle of this tribulation, if you're able to hope in God fulfilling the promises that he's made to you, you know that you are a Christian. God has given us a number of verses in the Bible that we can look up and say, yep, I'm a Christian. And all of us wonder about that from time to time. Am I really saved? Could this happen to me and me be a Christian? Could I really lust after that and still be a Christian? And we hold the Bible up and we say, yep, I'm still a Christian. Now it may grieve us and we may be driven to pray about some things we never prayed about before, but God has given us some wonderful, clear, barometric pressure signs in scripture and temperature readings that prove to us as seeking Christians that we have not wandered from the path, indeed wandered away from his grace. Now I want to focus upon just one word, or two words, really, in verse 5. See where we've gone this morning? I've tried to give a review of verses 1 to 5, that God starts with justification by faith and moves down through the links of this chain, ending up in hope. Let me look specifically at verse 5 with this picture of the tree. And now I want to look specifically at this individual, this person of the Holy Spirit who indwells us, who is the root of our Christian life, and examine how this Word has come down to us and all of the wonderful spiritual pieces of knowledge that come along with it. A lot of things happened to the English language after William the Conqueror came to England along with the Norman conquerors, and there was a blend of German and French that got sandwiched into English in some interesting ways that come out in the Bible as we read it in English. The Germans use the word holy in their language for ghost, whereas Holy Spirit has come down into English more from the French side. For instance, in the German Bible, you will have in the Gospels, Holy Matthew, Holy Mark, Holy Luke, Holy John. In the French Bible, you get Saint Mark, Saint Matthew, Saint Luke, and Saint John. In English, We use the word holy, we take from the German side, descriptions of inanimate objects. But when it comes to animate objects, it's interesting that we use the French word. For instance, we speak of holy communion and holy week, but we speak of the communion of the saints and Saint Paul. When it comes to people, it's the French word saint. When it comes to things, it's the German word holy. And this same fusion takes place with the word ghost and spirit even in the Bible. I'm gonna turn to a passage in Luke chapter 24, verse 39. where Jesus refers to himself, not as a ghost, which is typically referred to in English as a departed spirit. You will go to a, you know, if you're easily spooked, you'll believe that ghosts hover around cemeteries. That's the word that would normally be used. Jesus says in Luke 24, 39, in his post-resurrection appearance to the disciples, says in verse 37, they were startled and frightened and thought that they were seeing a spirit. And he said to them, why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See, look, in my hands and my feet, that it is I myself, touch me, see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And that word is translated sometimes ghost in English, sometimes spirit, definitely talking about one who has departed but is now returned. Of course, in the case of Jesus Christ, you have a resurrection where that is real. What is the word spirit? In verse 5 of Romans it says, the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Now the word spirit comes to us from the Latin spiritus, comes to us from the Greek hagios, and it comes to us from the Hebrew ruach, and you can hear air in all those words. Spirit, hagios, and ruach. I'm not clearing my throat unnecessarily. That's how a Hebrew would say that. And God has put these words in these languages to show that this person of the Holy Spirit is the one who breathes life into us, breathes credibility into the inscripturated Bible, and a couple of other things that we need to mention. So we have a lot of words in the English language that have to do with air. We have aspire. A person will throw their head up and aspire to go and do something. Four of us can put our heads together and conspire to do somebody in. Your skin breathes by perspiring, and God breathes into you when he inspires you, and when you die, you expire because your last breath goes out and doesn't come back. Now, when God breathes into man, he inspires him. And this is how we receive the inspiration, what we call the indoctrination of the inspiration of the scriptures. God breathed himself. Don't picture the apostle Paul here and God going, got another idea for you, Paul. No, the spirit of God indwelt. the apostle Paul, and the movement of the spirit within that man prompted him to write. So it's the holy breath of God that dwells within you as a believer, dwelt within him for the express purpose of having him write down the chronicles of the acts of the church so that we can read about them, comes from the same God. The Greek word for breath is pneuma. We get two words. We get hagios is one. Hagios is the Greek word for holy. Pneuma is the word for spirit or wind. And so when someone gets the disease called pneumonia, literally in Greek, it's a disease of the breath box. And so people who get that, well, without proper treatment and medicines, they die. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is the holy breath of God. And in Acts chapter 2 and verse 2 at Pentecost, you remember the story there that there were flaming tongues of fire and something else. It is never recorded again in the Bible. And a one-time happening is a rushing wind. Never again in any of the glossolalia events, the tongue-speaking events of the New Testament church, was there ever again a flaming tongue of fire or a rushing wind. That was unique to Pentecost day. But you get that picture of the rushing wind of God, the person of the Holy Spirit that we're talking about in Romans chapter five, who is the root of our hope and the cause of our fruit, is the living breath of God. It's in the believer. So God reveals himself to us by thoughts that were inspired to the apostles who wrote them down. Now turn with me to 1 Corinthians 2. I want to show how God's breathing truth, his truth into the word of God, only can be understood if the same breath that inspires these words makes sense to a person who has that breath of God within him or her. God breathes into the word, it's his word. God breathes into the Christian his spirit, his breath, that's the person of the Holy Spirit. Only the person who has the breath of God within him can understand the words that came from the mouth of God. It's proven to us in 1 Corinthians 2.14. If you have not memorized this verse, please do. It is absolutely critical for most questions that you will primarily be asked of those who wonder why you're a Christian and why should we believe the Bible. It says, but a natural man, an unspiritual man, does not accept the things of the breath or the Spirit of God. Why? For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because these truths are spiritually, breathly appraised. The reason that a person can come in here or some other church where the gospel of Jesus Christ is being read and preached and listen with these ears even if there's no wax in the canal and don't get it, don't see that Jesus is the Christ, don't see how sin can be forgiven, don't understand the conviction of sin, and they can sit under sermons year after year after year and it literally goes in one side of their head and out the other and never goes into their heart is for one reason only. And that is that the Spirit of God is not within them. Else they would be able to hear and understand things that are spiritually given. So if your spiritual appraisal doesn't work, it's because there's no breath of God within you to discern the words that are coming from the scripture. God is the unique dispenser of the Holy Spirit. I can't do it. You can't buy it from a priest. You can't come in here and pray for it as a non-Christian. You can't demand of God that he give you life. God gives life to whom he will. And those who do not have the life of God in them are not unhappy about it. There's no such person in this world who's saying, come on, God, I've been asking you for your spirit and you don't give it. That prayer has never been uttered. You have to recognize whether or not you have fallen beneath the truths of this word. What the Holy Spirit uses to bring you to a knowledge of himself is to first indwell you with himself so that when you read these words for the first time, they come off the page and they say, that's you I'm talking about. So when you read Romans 3.23, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and Romans 6.23, for the wages of sin is death, and that just comes up and grabs you by the throat and says, you are the sinner that I'm talking about, and you are convicted of that sin, and begin frantically to search for the redemption that is in Jesus Christ, you'll know the breath of God has been blown into you, or else you could not react that way. And so 1 Corinthians 2.14 tells us that the Spirit of God is necessary in us to understand the breath words of God that have been inspired to the apostles that have been written here. You know, there was a time when people believed the earth was flat. And if you know the difference between plain geometry and solid geometry, you know that in plain geometry, words like depth and cube don't have any meaning, because it's just a plane. Here's the flat earth, we tip it up on its side and we just see a line, but there's no depth to it, there's no volume. Let me illustrate it this way. When the non-Christian reads the Bible, they see plain geometry. When the believer reads the Bible, they're looking at solid geometry. They've got it, height, depth, breadth, weight, cubic inches, not just square inches. See, the non-Christian can read the words, let amen regard us in this manner as servants of Jesus Christ, and then say, what's that mean? The Christian who has the Spirit within them can read, I'm just reading out of 1 Corinthians chapter 4, let a man regard us in this manner as servants of Jesus Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Now there's a whole depth and width and height and breadth to that verse for the believer because the Spirit within us takes the words given from the book that the Spirit put there and because it has three dimensions and now we have three dimensions, we understand it in spiritual dimensional terms. There's a verse in Isaiah 2, verse 22, which I'm going to translate this way. I'm not doing any harm to the verse, but sometimes it's a little awkward depending on your translation. Isaiah 2, 22. Cease ye from man, back away from man, who has only a noseful capacity of breath. What is his worth anyway? Cece for man who has only a noseful capacity of breath, what is it worth anyway? God is infinite. You and I have to keep coming up for air. When God breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of Adam, he did not need to inhale to get another breath. It's in him. He is the breath of God. He is wind. He is spirit. He is life. So that when you breathe into that Pile of dirt. Isn't that what the Bible says? That Adam was formed from the dust of the earth and God breathed into his nostrils and he became a living soul. Why? You know why Adam lived and the reason that you and I live and that our children will come into this world gasping for breath is because God determined that his breath float the race of Adam that is created in his image. But God didn't have to take a breath. after he breathed his breath into the nostrils of Adam, because God is infinite. You can't extinguish him. You can't suck him dry. He doesn't deflate when he becomes gracious to people. He is eternal and infinite, and there's enough breath in him for you, my friends, who may be here this morning who don't know Christ as your Savior. There's enough wind in him to make this word come alive in you by putting the Spirit of God in you. He has given us, why do you think God made us the way he's made us? We're created in his image. There's only millions of illustrations in the natural order that hold up spiritual truth. We're blind to a lot of them. I mean, why did God have us have lungs? Why? We can't do this all our life, why? It's because God has put into his revelation that he is breath, that he blows life into people. That when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, he said, Nicodemus, the wind comes, we don't know where it's coming from or where it's going, but we see the movement of it. The leaves move, but we didn't see it coming and we didn't see where it went. So it is with the Spirit of God. So God tells his creation, this is what I'm like, this is what my life is like. It comes upon people uninvited, it comes upon people unexpected, and it moves them, and they're never the same. I mean, that's what the heathen is supposed to do on his rock out there thinking about what? I have to keep breathing to stay alive. I need breath to stay alive. And the blood in my veins has to have oxygen or I die. And then some missionary comes into the village and preaches about the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that God breathed into the apostles words that give life. And that God breathes into the life of men and women. His own breath that gives them eternal life. And they say, life, breath, blood, oxygen. I get my life from him. I mean, they're just all over the place. The illustrations are countless. Well, our text tells us that God has given us the holy breath, namely himself, and that we no longer carry just a noseful at a time, but that we have the very life of God within us. And we have learned that by Jesus' death for us, we have eternal life. You know, it's an awful thing to be short of breath. And I suppose that's in the natural order, too. There are some horrible ways to die. I suppose emphysema, is about the worst thing I can imagine. In shrinking lung capacity, less and less air sacs every day, struggling to get just a little air. When you see the illustration that's in that, it's a painful thing to even think about. If there may be people in this room who have had relatives who have died from that, what a horrible thing. Not to be able even to get the little nose full of breath that Isaiah says all man is. and how they struggle to take a deep lungful and just hold it for a minute and say, by God, I can hold a lungful of air. Imagine how insignificant that is to the person who doesn't know about the forgiveness of sins, to the person who is weighted down into the wet of guilt and condemnation, who finds out and who experiences for the first time through the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ that they can be filled with the breath of God and it will never go out. They'll never expire. See, you expire in the body, but your spirit never expires. It's going to live on forever and ever and ever in one of two places. You need this eternal capacity to breathe, my friends, and I can't give it to you. My job here is to tell you what God has said, and what God says is that hope does not disappoint. Now you tell me that you found somebody in your neighborhood or in this town or where you work that is not a disappointed person. You say, what doesn't disappoint? My neighbors disappoint. My family's disappointing. Everything I've ever trusted in has been a big disappointment. Can you tell me anything that never will disappoint me? Yes, the hope of Jesus Christ that is breathed into you that God will never take away. Would you like that? You want to have that hope? You want to get away from what the world offers, which is one pitiful noseful at a time? and taking eternal breath into your being that will never expire, even though your breath box one day will stop working, and you're translated immediately from this life into the presence of the Lord, and you're going to meet the fountain of breath. You're going to meet the one from whom it all came. and who made those promises, everything that holds a Christian up as it just races through my mind has come from God. It says the word of God, Jesus, the word of God, the Logos, in the beginning the word, in the beginning the Logos spoke. Let there be light. I mean, it came out of his mouth. Let there be light, and there was light. We get light from the breath of God. We got water from the breath of God. We got man from the breath of God. We got the animal kingdom from the breath of God. We got all the promises from the breath of God. We got the life of Jesus Christ by the breath of God that dwells within us. And everything you read in this book came from the breath of God. Now can you see in Romans 5.5 why the root of the Holy Spirit, the breath of God in us, produces love and hope? What else could come from the breath of God but love and hope and eternal life? The gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news is that Jesus Christ has died for sinners. And then for every sinner that Jesus has died for and that that redemption is made applicable to, the Holy Spirit comes into the life of that person. That's a whole other issue. It's called the doctrine of application. The reformers talked about it. Anybody who's been in a dispensary or in a medicine cabinet understands this. I have a rash over here. I do. I have a rash on my leg. I use a cortisone on it. Wintertime's the worst. Now, I can have the cortisone in my hand. It's perfectly effective to deal with that rash. And there's the rash. But if I do not apply it to the rash, the rash doesn't get better. Here is the blood of Christ shed at the cross. Perfect remedy for the sins of all men and women. There it is. It's effective. It's perfect. There's nothing wrong with it. Here's the sinner who needs that. How does this blood, how does the death of Christ get over here to the sinner who needs it? The Holy Spirit of God takes the truth and applies it, puts it into the sinner, and says, I am Christ. I am his life. This death was for you. Believe it. Live in it. And that's how a person becomes born again, and they rise up in the truth, and they say, that Jesus is my Lord. That's how they wake up to the truth. But only God, the Holy Spirit, can apply what happened at the cross to your vacant heart that has no concept of the forgiveness of sins. Here you are, hopeless, godless, depressed, and daily disappointed. And here is the perfect remedy. And the sinner cries out, make me better! But instead of crying to Christ, they go over here to the dispensers of spiritual death, saying, give me another noseful, another noseful, another noseful, another noseful. And there are people who come into this church thinking they're just getting another noseful every week. They think that's what their spiritual life is. That's how they get to heaven. Go to church once a week, take another breath, and they go out. No, no. It's an eternal gift from God that comes in and never goes away. You need to believe that, my friends. Any man or woman who dies, In the flesh, without Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord, without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, dies with their sins on them. And then you must face God as judge rather than as loving Heavenly Father. Let's bow in prayer. Our God and our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the truths of this passage. I pray that you would apply it to our hearts as you only are able to do. Father, I do not know Who in this room has not been given the breath of life? I do not know. Who has read the claims of the gospel but only see it in terms of plain geometry because there is no ability within them to perceive the depth of the truth that sin kills and that all of us are sinners to the uttermost part of our being? My father, I know that you're the only one who can change the dimensions. in the sinner's life from unrepentant sinner to penitent one, as they are filled with your life and suddenly see within them by your very presence that they fall short of the glory of God. But then there's hope because they know who to cry unto for redemption. There be those here this morning who are not born again. that they would be driven to the word and to read it and to ask that you would give an understanding and that if by your grace you fill them with your very life, we know that they will start that moment on a trek to heaven that no man or the devil himself can thwart. Upon those who are your own, who know you and love you in this place, we thank you for the multiple promises in your word that have been given to us, the statements in your word that have been given to us that show us that it is by your sovereign breath that we have come alive in Christ, that we are able to hope that we cannot be disappointed and serve you as redeemed sons and daughters. We ask this in thanksgiving in Jesus' name, amen.