I invite you to turn in your copy of God's Word to the gospel of Matthew. We will be looking at Matthew chapter 1, verses 18 through 25. And you might be saying, wait a minute, we've been going through Matthew since July. We're now up to Matthew 6, so why are we going back to chapter 1? You might remember when we started this series in July, we did all of chapter 1 in one shot, including the birth narrative of Jesus, along with other things in that chapter, and we tied them all together. And you might have wondered then, why didn't we take the time to focus on something so important as the incarnation, the birth of Christ? And that is because we were holding on to that for here, for Christmas time. So we're going to continue our series through Matthew, but we're going to do so by going back to chapter 1, and looking at verses 18 through 25, the birth of Jesus. So with that then, as we celebrate that birth at this time of year, let's hear the word of God. Matthew 1 verse 18. Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. and her husband, Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus. With us far, the reading of God's word. May he bless it to our hearing, especially as it's preached to us this morning. Well, people of God, we live in an ordinary humdrum normal world, right? A world of alarm clocks, a world of calendars and to-do lists and grocery lists and coffee breaks and commutes. We are, after all, muggles living in a mundane world. Some of you will get that reference. But if we take a moment to look, we will see so many marvelous things in our mundane world. So many spectacular events. Like when we see the beautiful colors of a sunrise. Or when we see a little baby taking his or her first steps. Wonderful events like a solar eclipse. Or even man-made wonders like the pyramids or the Chrysler building in Manhattan. When we listen to the magnificent compositions of a Bach or a Mozart or can enjoy the sublime art of a Da Vinci or a Michelangelo or a Vermeer, there are so many wonderful and spectacular and splendid things in this mundane world. And yet the most spectacular thing, the most marvelous event that ever took place in the history of this universe is the birth of Jesus Christ. You might say, well, how so? Well, think about it. God, who is high and inaccessible and above all things, God entered into his creation. And he did so as a vision, not just in a dream, but he entered into his creation by taking on human flesh, by becoming one of us. This truly is the most spectacular thing that has ever happened. Theologically, It's an unfathomable mystery. We have been debating and discussing it for over 2,000 years. How can the divine dwell with the human in one person? How many wills does this Jesus have? We can go on and on and we have been studying and talking about it for a long time. It's something that we'll never be able to comprehend fully. And yet as magnificent as the birth of Jesus is, the question for us this morning is what difference does it make in your life? You can believe in the incarnation. You can study the incarnation. You can marvel at the wonder of the incarnation. You can adore the one who is incarnate. But does it matter to you day to day when you go about your regular business? And as we look at this passage, we're going to see that, yes, it does. We're going to see that the birth of Jesus tells us three things. That God is committed to us, God relates to us, and God fixes us. God is committed to us, God relates to us, and God fixes us. So let's look at the first of those points. God is committed to us. Now, there are two Gospels that tell the story of Jesus' birth, Luke and Matthew. Luke tells the story from Mary's perspective, and here, Matthew tells a story from Joseph's perspective. And he starts our narrative in verse 18 by telling us that Mary was betrothed to Joseph. In other words, they were engaged. And if you know a little bit about this period in time, Jewish engagements are a little bit different from the way that we do engagements nowadays. They are legally binding. So when you entered into an engagement, you were legally married, even before living together, even before having marital relations. And this engagement typically lasted about a year. The girl would remain with her family, and then at the end of that period, the father of the bride would throw a huge wedding feast, and the husband would come and take his wife to live with him. And it's during this period of time that Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant. Now you can imagine what a dilemma that puts him in. It is a legally binding relationship and yet they're not supposed to be having marital relations. In fact, the scripture tells us that we're not to have not only marital relations outside of marriage, but also before marriage. And so he's wondering, what am I going to do? There are two avenues that were open to Joseph. You can read about him in Deuteronomy 22 through 24 that deals with this very subject. The first thing he can do is he could take her to court. He could charge her with infidelity. And the whole purpose of doing that is to establish that he's not the one who was unfaithful. He did not break God's law in getting her pregnant. She would be the one then that would be exposed for her infidelity. And the court would then take care of it. And in the Old Testament law, such infidelity was punishable by death. So that was one avenue that opened to him. The other one was he could simply end the agreement. He could divorce her. As Deuteronomy 24 says, he can hand her a bill of divorce before two witnesses and just put a quiet end to that. Now, even in just a few verses, Matthew has a lot to tell us about the character of Joseph, of this man. He tells us in verse 19 that he is a just man. That is to say he is a righteous man, a man of principle, a man who is committed to follow the ways of the Lord. So he just simply can't ignore Mary's supposed transgression. He has to do the right thing. He knows he cannot remain in that relationship. You can imagine the pain that this must have caused him because he loved her. And now because of what he perceives as her having wronged him and having been unfaithful, he knows this agreement, this marriage will have to end. But we also read in verse 19 that he was unwilling to put her to shame. You see, Joseph may be a righteous man, but he's also a kind-hearted man. Those two can coexist in one person. He did not want to disgrace Mary publicly. He did not want her to be put on trial. And so, he chose the second option, to just quietly, as the Scripture tells us, to quietly divorce her, just put an end to the engagement. Of course, that would come at great cost to him because then he would be open to being accused of being the father. and then of being a coward and not staying with her even after he got her pregnant. That's the accusation that would come his way. But this is a righteous man and a good-hearted man. And this is what he's resolved to do. And it says that he's pondering these things. You know, he must be wrestling with how he's going to do this. All this must be weighing on his mind. And it is in that, then, that situation that the angel appears to him. We read about it in verse 20. And the angel sets his mind at ease and says, no, no, no, you don't have to divorce her. Take her as your wife. Because that child, he says, is conceived in her. The child that is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. Now, you can imagine in one sense, he might have not liked that as much as the others. Because he says, well, at least everybody else can understand the others, but nobody's going to buy this one. They're going to be convinced that we're just making this up. And can you imagine such a crazy story? And yet what we read is that he's willing to obey. He's willing to obey. The angel tells him you shall call his name Jesus. And Joseph does everything that he is commanded. He does not divorce Mary. He marries her. He names the child Jesus. And for as long as the scripture tells us that he was alive, he cared for that boy and provided for him. Some other time, we have to look at Joseph. He is a man worthy of study and emulation. But this is the Christmas story that Matthew tells us. And it's a wonderful story. But again, the question is, how does that affect us day-to-day? And the one thing is that when you look at the details of the story, you're going to see that the birth of Jesus reveals to us very clearly that God is committed to you. He's committed to the well-being of this world. And you might say, it doesn't seem like it when I look out there. We see wars and disasters and disease all around us. We experience failure and trouble and despair all the time. Mary Jo and I both have an uncle on each side of our families who's asking, where's God? They look and they see all the trouble in the world and they say, well, he must be absent, he must be indifferent because he doesn't seem to be doing anything. Maybe he doesn't exist at all. And of course, the problem there is not with God, but it's with us. We want to blame God for the brokenness of this world, but the reality is that it is you and me with our sin and our rebellion against God that has made a mess of this world. We're the problem. And yet, as we look at this passage, we're going to see that God is committed to us and has been committed to us not just as of recent, as of late, but from the very beginning. You see, the coming of the Messiah, the coming of Jesus to save this world, to undo the mess that we created, is no accident. It's not some idea that popped into God's head just some time after Jesus was born. We see some of this stuff, and maybe you're not reading this kind of thing so much anymore. I think it has dropped out in our postmodern world. But when I was growing up, liberal theology was found all throughout the churches. They were in Presbyterian churches, Lutheran churches, Methodist churches, Roman Catholic churches. Now there's no theology in the churches because we've become an anti-intellectual society. But at that time you would hear people talking about how Jesus discovered His mission and came to an awareness that He should try to do something to help fix this world. But that's not what we read in Scripture. This has been God's intention all along. was to send the Messiah to fix the mess that we made. And that's what we see right here in verse 22. That's why Matthew records, all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. And there he quotes from Isaiah 714, which we read earlier in the service. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel. Notice that this is a fulfillment of something that God had already said. These are not Isaiah's words. Matthew makes clear it is what the Lord had spoken. Yes, through the prophet, but they are God's words and they point to His commitment. It's a commitment that He had made and which now is being fulfilled, Matthew tells us. You can also see God's commitment also even in verse 20 in the simple words that says, Joseph, son of David. You might just think that's a genealogical detail just in there, but we have to remember that in 2 Samuel chapter 7 God had entered into a covenant with King David and he told him that the Messiah would come from his descendants, that it would be a son of David who would be the one to come to fix everything that we had broken. So you see the fulfillment of the birth of Jesus is a fulfillment of that messianic promise as well. so let's take a look at these two fulfillments that we have in this text the prophecy in isaiah 7 14 comes 730 years before the coming of jesus 730 years before jesus was born god had already declared his commitment to have the messiah come and do things for us but a thousand years before Jesus, he had already told David that his son would be, one of his descendants would be the one who would be the Messiah. So is that how far back God's commitment goes, a thousand years? No, it goes back even further. In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning, all the way back to the garden. where our first parents made a mess of everything. There in the garden, as soon as Adam and Eve had rebelled against God and sinned against him, God enters into the picture and he curses Satan for having tempted the woman and he says these words to Satan and I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers he will crush your head and you will strike his heel Genesis 315 what's often called the proto-evangelium which just means the first gospel and the first good news that God would be through a descendant of Eve that God would use that descendant to destroy the work of the evil one. He's promised to defeat Satan through Eve's offspring and that offspring is singular something that Paul, the Apostle Paul, repeatedly wants to remind us about in Galatians chapter 3. It's not offspring in total. It's not like you hear nowadays, the human race will be able to eventually evolve to a place where we can undo all the things that we've messed up. No, it is a singular human being who is going to be the one to come. The Chosen One, and no, his name is not Anakin. For all you Star Wars fans, the Chosen One is named Jesus. He is the fulfillment. So from the very, very beginning of the world being broken, God has committed himself to fixing the broken world. God has committed himself to our well-being. And you see it right here in this text. The birth of Jesus is no accident. And so committed is God to us that he actually took on our nature in order to become us. And that leads to our second point, God relates to us. He's so committed to us, first point, that he's also able to relate to us because he's become one of us. There's an exalted passage in scripture that really illustrates this. Let me read it to you. Makes sense? You all got it? Right? Oh, what a pity. You don't understand. That's the language in which the New Testament was written. Well, let's try another language. Let's try the second language of Christendom. Surely, you understood that one, right? No? Still no appreciation? Well, if it's not Greek, which is what the first passage was read in, or not language, in what language should we read this exalted text? Surely, you would not degrade such an exalted text by translating it into a common language, into a vulgar language like English, right? No, no, that would be crass. I mean, such sacred texts must be guarded. We can only allow the most learned people to be able to read them, right? Right? No, not right at all. It is true that we have to respect the original language of the Bible. Latin, by the way, is not one of those. It's Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New. We do need to understand what those are. It's a reason why we train pastors to be able to read them because there are some things in Scripture, the nuances of which we won't be able to truly understand unless we know biblical Hebrew and Greek. And yet the holy word of God was always meant to be accessible to us and always meant to be in a form that we can understand. So let's try it again this time in the vulgar language of English. John 1 14 and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory glorious of the only son from the father full of grace and truth. What an exalted passage it is. It tells us that this God, who was eternal, who was always the Word, always with the Father because he is God, took on human flesh, came to dwell in our midst, so that the glory of God, which otherwise we would not have been able to fully appreciate, is now something that is made accessible to us. The significance of this passage is that Jesus has made God accessible to us by his incarnation. That God, high and exalted and inaccessible, has become accessible. He's become understandable in Jesus. And that's why I read that passage in those other languages, in the same way that that language, that passage, was inaccessible as long as it was in a language that we did not understand. But by translating it into English, now we can grab a hold of it. So can't you see that Jesus, as it were, has translated God into a form that we can understand, a form that we can see, a form that we can hug and hug back. That's what Jesus has done for us. That's why he is the Immanuel which in verse 23 Matthew reminds us means God with us. Remember that in the ancient world names were descriptive titles. They were not meant, they didn't name children in a particular way because you like the sound of it or because it was the name of such and such or whatever. We did it because of what the name meant. And the title Immanuel reveals the very character of Jesus. It tells us that this child is actually God. It assures us that God is in our midst and God is with us. As Paul says in Colossians 2.9, in Christ, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. It's a mystery of how that can be, as we said in the beginning, unfathomable, how the whole fullness of God can be in one human being. And yet, here it is. God, Jesus, has translated, as it were, God into a form that you and I can understand. He has identified with us in the closest possible way by becoming one of us. Isn't that always what we want? If only they will understand me. If only they can know what I go through. And Jesus, God, has become one of us so that he can understand. You see, the incarnation of God, then, means three things. The first one is that Jesus, as we just said a moment ago, reveals God to us in a way that we can understand. Otherwise, God would be unintelligible, but Jesus makes God intelligible. You know that familiar story in John 14, verse 8? Philip said to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father. We ask no more. And you can see almost, if this were done with emojis, there would be a... Jesus will be saying oh boy, and he says have I been all this time with you Philip and still you do not know me Anyone who has seen me has seen the father then how can you say show me the father? Do you not believe that I am the father that I am in the father and the father in me? You see, what Jesus is saying is that through Him, you can understand God. Otherwise, He would be unintelligible. In the same way that we translated that text, so it became sensible and intelligible, so Jesus translates God. Now, that entails some bad news that we have to lay out here. And it's simply this, every other attempt that we make as human beings to know God, whether that be Islam, or Buddhism, or Hinduism, or any other species of spirituality that you and I might come up with. You hear people saying nowadays, I don't believe in any of those, I'm just spiritual. Whatever version you've come up with will not succeed in enabling you to know God. It won't work because you simply cannot know God apart from Jesus. Just a few verses earlier in John 14 6, Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. You cannot know God apart from Jesus. But the good news, is you can know Him through Jesus. You can know Him fully, you can know Him intimately because Jesus is available to all people. He's available to you. You can know the God of heaven intimately through Him and only through Him. The second thing that the Incarnation means is that God has so identified with us in the closest possible way that He truly understands us. He gets us. I know that's a commercial, right? You guys have seen that commercial, have you maybe? Jesus gets us. Yeah, it's bumper sticker theology and there's a few things in there that make you sit there and say, oh. But they are getting at something that's absolutely true. Jesus gets us. He knows what it means to be a human being with all its joys, with all its pain, and with all its suffering. Jesus became weary. Jesus became hungry. Jesus became thirsty. Jesus was able to weep and to groan and to feel pain. There's nothing that you will ever face that Jesus has not already faced. He's experienced hurt. He's experienced suffering. He's experienced pain. He's experienced betrayal by those who are closest to him. He has experienced death. And because of that, the book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is perfectly suited to sympathize with us. Not just empathize and say, I feel your pain, as someone once famously said in the 90s, but to truly sympathize with us. Hebrews 2.18 says, because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested. And two chapters later in Hebrews 4.15 it says, ours is not a high priest unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tested in every way as we are only without sinning. So you can trust him even with your deepest sorrows because he has experienced them. He knows what you are going through. He's so identified with us in the closest possible way by becoming one of us and he truly understands us. And the last thing that I want us to see here in terms of what the incarnation means is that with Jesus being in our midst down here on the ground seeing our plight. He can actually do something about our trouble. It's one thing to sit there and see it and say, well, okay, I get what you're going through. It's another to be able to do something to fix it, right? Every time we have a natural disaster, have you noticed that everybody wants the president to come in and to see the disaster? Why? Because they want him to see it so that he will do something about it. And so it is with Christ. He is so committed to us, so identified with our hurt that He is committed to deal with not just our cosmetic problems, our surface problems, but to go to the very source of all our trouble. And that's our last point. God is not only committed to us in Christ from the very beginning, and by taking on our human form, he not only relates to us, but in that human form, God fixes us. As we continue looking through the gospel of Matthew on the whole, you're going to see that all throughout it, Matthew wants to highlight the fact that God is dwelling in our midst. That's why right in chapter one, he tells us that he is the Immanuel God with us and that theme you will see all throughout. the book of Matthew. In chapter 4, which we already looked at, we see that in Christ, God came to dwell with the sick in order to heal them, that he came to dwell with those who are demon-possessed in order to liberate them. In chapter 5, we saw that he came to dwell with the poor in spirit in order to bless them. In chapter 6, we will see that he has come to dwell with those who are troubled in order to rid them of that trouble. In chapter 7, we see that he has come to dwell with those who are critical of other people in order to warn them of their own danger and judgment. In chapter 8, we see that he came to dwell with the lepers in order to cleanse them, that he came to dwell with those who are diseased in order to cure them. In chapters 14 and 15, we see that he came to dwell with those who are hungry in order to feed them. In chapters 12 and 15, he came to dwell with those who are disabled in order to restore them. But above all, chapter 18 tells us, and we'll see it when we get there, above all, Jesus came for those who are the lost. He came to dwell with those who are spiritually lost in order to seek them out and to save them. And that's the most important thing that he has come to do. Jesus did not come primarily to deal with our worldly troubles. He came to deal with the root of our trouble, which is sin. That's why in verse 21, the angels told Joseph, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. The name Jesus literally means God saves. And that's why he was given that name. You see, that's our real enemy is that sin. It's not disease, it's not war, it's not hunger, it's not too much taxation, it's not relationship problems that we have and so on. Sin is the ultimate problem because sin is the underlying cause behind all those troubles. I'm not saying those troubles are not real. I'm not saying those troubles are not troublesome. They are terrible things. But even if we could deal with them momentarily, we can fix that relationship problem, we can heal that disease, if we can stop that war, you know what happens? We still die from a disease later, or we'll eventually have another war elsewhere because it's the root problem of sin that causes all of these things. Jesus could have come and dealt with all those surface things for the moment. He healed many people and we're going to see that there on scripture. Every one of his healings wasn't meant to be permanent. They were simply meant to be a picture pointing to what the new heavens and the new earth would look like when he returns when there would be no more sin and suffering. But every person he healed, even those he raised from the dead, all died. Maybe even a second time if they had already died once. No, what Jesus really came to do was to deal with that underlying cause of sin, because sin brings death. And death is the greatest enemy that no philosophy, no ideology, no other religion, and no government program has ever been able to eliminate. As Paul says in Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death. What are wages? Wages are the things that you earn, and our sin has earned us death. It's why you're going to die, and I'm going to die. This is mankind's greatest problem. Because of our rebellion against God, because of our sin, we owe God an infinite debt that we cannot repay. We also owe him a perfect life that none of us is able to fulfill. And yet, here comes Jesus to fix our greatest problem, to save us. And he does so by becoming our substitute, by taking our place. He lives the perfect life that none of us is capable of living, and he does it in our place. He doesn't just do it to show off, to say, haha, you can't do it, look at me. No, He comes to do it in our place, to do what you and I could not do. That's why in this passage in verses 18 and 23, talking about the virgin birth, that's why the virgin birth is essential to our salvation. So many people say, oh, that doesn't matter. You can just set that aside. But without a virgin birth that cuts Jesus out of the line of Adam by which sin is imputed from one generation to the other, Jesus would have been sinful just like the rest of us. And then His death would have only paid for His own sin. But the virgin birth is essential because it makes Jesus a holy substitute, one who is free from sin. And as our substitute, he not only lives the perfect life that we owe to God, but then he goes to the cross and there he pays God the debt that you and I owe him, an infinite debt of suffering. Isaiah 53 verse 5, famous words, he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." That's the gospel right there. Jesus serves as our substitute and takes upon himself the wrath of God that you and I so richly deserve. And so he dies. But three days later, because he is God, he rises from the dead. And in so doing, he gives us definitive proof that he has indeed defeated sin and death and hell and the devil. And again, that's good news. Do I not hear any Presbyterian amens? Now, the bad news again is that every other attempt to remedy the world's troubles, whether they be religious acts, oh, I go to church and I give and so on, or good works, I help little old ladies across the street, or any kind of government programs, all those are doomed to fail because all of them are unable to address the root of the human problem. They might be able to do some surface cosmetic things, but they can never get underneath Salvation true salvation from what really ails mankind comes only through Jesus as Psalm 3 8 says salvation belongs to the Lord and Psalm 62 verse 1 says For God alone my soul waits in silence, for from Him comes my salvation." And in case we wonder, is that not the case in the New Testament? Yes. In Acts chapter 4, Peter says, there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. So that's the bad news. Salvation is not available through anything else other than Jesus. But the good news is that salvation that comes through Jesus is available to all people. There is no limitation on the offer of the gospel. Jesus comes to each and every one of us and offers to us that salvation Romans 10 13 says everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved if you will but just call upon him bemoaning your own sinfulness bemoaning your rebellion against God asking him to forgive you. He will save you. In Acts chapter 16 verse 31 Paul and Silas who had been in jail in Philippi told their own jailer who wanted to know how to be saved and he says believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved you and your household. That salvation is available to all who will respond. Jesus doesn't withhold. And again, you shall call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. It's not a partial salvation. When Jesus saves us, he saves us completely. He saves us from the guilt of our sin. He saves us from the pollution of sin. He saves us from the power of sin. He saves us from the punishment of sin. All those things have been removed through what Jesus has done. And of course, we have to say that not only can you be saved from something, but you also have to be saved to something. And Jesus doesn't just save us from our sin, but He saves us to a new life so that we don't continue doing the things that we have done before. A life that is full, a life that brings peace with God that transcends all human understanding, a life that brings unspeakable joy, a life that brings true happiness, a life that brings answered prayers a life that brings assurance of salvation. God fixes us in Jesus. So this is the good news of Christmas. This is what we celebrate at this time of year, that God is committed to this world, so committed that he has identified with us in the closest possible way by becoming one of us. He's experienced all our joys, all our sorrows. He knows what you and I go through. And being in our world, he chose to do something about all our trouble. There on the cross, He went straight to the source of our greatest problem, and that's the good news. John 3.16 says, God loved the world in this way that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. And that's the wonder of the incarnation. This God who was infinitely rich became poor for our sake. He assumed our human nature. He entered into our sin polluted world without being tainted by sin himself. He took upon himself our guilt. He bore our griefs. He carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. He went to heaven there to prepare a place for us. He sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts. He governs the entire universe on our behalf even now and makes intercession for us and has promised that he will come again to take us unto himself to a new world without sin, without suffering. That's the good news and that's what Christmas means. Let's pray. Father in heaven, how thankful we are that you have committed yourself to us from the very beginning, that the birth of Jesus was no accident, but it was the culmination, the fulfillment of your plan from the very beginning, from the moment that we had sinned, you had already revealed to us what you had in mind. And what an amazing thing. We didn't know how you would fix things, but what an amazing thing that you would take on human flesh, that you would enter into your own creation, broken as it is, and more so that you would enter and take upon yourself our suffering and especially the just judgment that we deserve for our rebellion against you. Father, as we have been saying all throughout this sermon, the mystery of the incarnation is unfathomable, and yet we revel in it, we marvel at it, we thank you for it, and we praise you over it. And we pray that it would give us assurance that indeed God is with us, walking every step of the way, understanding what we go through, comforting us through the most difficult times, and most importantly, knowing that you, O God, have done everything necessary so that all the problems of this world will one day come to an end. There are so many that don't understand this or don't believe it. Perhaps they're even seated here this morning or watching online. And we pray, Lord, that you would open their eyes and their hearts to be able to understand that you have committed yourself to your people through Christ and that you indeed will fix us.