Amen. Well, good evening. If you would, go with me to 1 Corinthians 6. 1 Corinthians 6, that's where we will be tonight. 1 Corinthians 6, beginning in verse 12. I'll read through the end of the chapter. This is the Word of God. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God raised the Lord, and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body. But the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that You would illuminate this text tonight, that we would be a pure and holy people set apart for You. And we ask that You would guard us, open our hearts to receive the Word with gladness, that we might go out and obey it. We pray for Your Spirit, in Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Well, we have come to the final week of the section of this series where in which we are dealing with the sexualized self. And I've called this sermon, The Modern Self, Sexual and Reproductive Sovereignty. So as we wrap up this section, the second of three sections of the series, I'm going to be dealing with some particular issues that may seem, in light of what we looked at the last two weeks, to be considered as respectable sexual sins. Now, that's an oxymoron because there is no respectable sexual sin. In fact, while the Bible does seem to highlight God's judgment against unnatural sexual sins in a very emphatic way, sexual sin from beginning to end, all throughout Scripture, is condemned. And we must see that the lies and attacks from the enemy in this culture are not only regarding unnatural sins. Any sexual expression outside of God's design is sin. No matter how respectable or accepted it might seem, the Bible does not have a category for, well, that's wrong, but it's not really that bad. Or, yeah, that's sin, but it's not as bad as this expression over here. No, God reveals to us His design for human sexuality, and it's emphatically clear. And so I just want to land there for a moment and hang out and ask the question, what is God's design for human sexuality? Now, for many of you, that sounds like a very basic question, and even elementary, but church, we must be rock solid in our understanding of what God has said about sexuality. We must know what the Bible says. Remember our foundational biblical warrant for this series. That we destroy strongholds and arguments raised against the knowledge of God. And bring every thought captive to obey Christ. So we must know what is authentic. What God has said, that way we may expose those things that deviate from it. And as I said, the Bible is crystal clear on this. God's design for human sexuality is that sexual intimacy be enjoyed only within the parameters of monogamous marriage between one male and one female. We see this in the very beginning in Genesis 2.24. Says, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. and they shall become one flesh." And then Jesus quotes this same text in Matthew 19 in a Palestinian context. And then Paul quotes this verse in Ephesians 5 in a Roman context. And even in our passage tonight, and this is showing us that God's design for marriage and for human sexuality transcends culture. It transcends location and time. It does not change as the world changes. It is the same throughout the ages. God designed it. God defined it. God gives no one authority to change it. And any expression of sexuality outside of God's design is sin. and it warrants guilt against God. The purpose of this union is for the blessing and the enjoyment of the married couple. Proverbs 5. Protection against sexual immorality. 1 Corinthians 7. And then ultimately, procreation. As we see in Genesis 1.27 and 28, we see God's very first command to humanity. And what does He say? He says, so God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created him. Male and female, He created them. And listen to this, and God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. We see in creation that God's design for human sexuality is that it be enjoyed within the context of monogamous heterosexual marriage, where two image-bearers covenant together in marriage before God with the general purpose of reproducing and filling the earth with God's image for God's glory. And this is all a blessing. It's a good design. We receive it as good, we rejoice in this, yet the modern self rejects this design, and scoffs at it, and opposes it. And just as we saw a few weeks ago that the highest form of virtue in this culture is self-expression, the niche of self-expression that's most important is what? Sexual expression. While the Bible clearly reveals God is the one who sovereignly sets the parameters of human sexuality, perhaps the most essential argument of our modern culture is that the self should be sovereign over its sexuality. When it comes to sexual expression, the self is God in this culture. We see this You can suppress the truth about God for lies, but you cannot remove God. You can deny reality, but you can't actually change reality. So let me ask from the culture's perspective, what is the primary hindrance to ultimate sexual sovereignty? Children. Pregnancy is the ultimate hindrance. So what has the modern man done about this? Well, through the perversion of science and technology, it has created ways to allow people to have ultimate sexual sovereignty by giving them ultimate reproductive sovereignty. And so I want to deal with the issues of sexual and reproductive autonomy with two major headings and then unpack several sub-points under each. So number one, sexual sovereignty. Look at verse 9 in our text. Go back a few verses and look at verse 9 in 1 Corinthians 6. He says, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Now, no Christian would argue with the statement that we live in a sexualized culture. That would be an understatement. And a sexualized culture is a breeding place for a sexually immoral culture. And I'm going to deal specifically with the issue of pornography in a moment, but listen to what Vodie Bauckham says. He says that part of dealing with the roots of pornography, and I would add all sexual immorality, are acknowledging the fact that we have been desensitized to it. And he goes on to say that if there's a pornography scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being engaging in the worst extremes of pornography, he says we live every day around a level 3 or a 4. So that means if you just turn on your TV, you are probably going to see a sexually immoral image. If you just go to Target or go to the mall, you will most likely see what could be considered a pornographic image. Sexual immorality is promoted everywhere. Music, movies, novels. And while homosexuality and transgenderism are becoming normal, heterosexual sin has been normal. And it's more than just normal, it's presupposed. I mean, I went to a high school in a very conservative town, politically, where all the students would scoff at homosexuality. And almost all of them would scoff at transgenderism. Yet, almost all of them were sexually immoral. It's very, very interesting. And let me just say that when I use the word enemy, I'm not just talking about the radical left. or higher institutions in the university, and things like that, those who are pushing these agendas. I am primarily talking about Satan, the spiritual enemy. And while the opposition to godliness that we see does come through human agency, it is demonic in its nature. It's empowered by the evil one. And we must remember that at the end of the day, we are in a spiritual battle. Ephesians 6.12, Paul says, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present age, over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. But what is very comforting is that the church has lived in cultures that were sexually perverse before. And I'm talking about 1 Corinthians and the church in Corinth. And God has spoken directly to Christians dealing with very similar circumstances that we are dealing with today. In fact, many scholars have argued that Corinth, the day Paul was writing to it, was very similar to modern day America. Commentator Leon Morris says that the city was wealthy and prosperous. It attracted the finest athletes. It was ethnically diverse and very cosmopolitan. And he goes on to say that Corinth was an important city. It was intellectually alert, materially prosperous, but morally corrupt. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? German theologian Von Dobschutz defines what he calls the Corinthian. And this is shocking. As you hear this quote, be thinking about what our modern culture says about the ideal American. The ideal of the Corinthian was the reckless development of the individual. the merchant who made his gain by all and every means, the man of pleasure surrendering himself to every lust, the athlete stilled to every bodily exercise, and proud in his physical appearance are the true Corinthian types. In a word, the man who recognized no superiority and no law but his own desires." And God spoke into that culture, and we have it recorded. in the epistle to the Corinthians. So by the grace of God, the gospel had gone to Corinth in this time through Paul, and a church was planted. But after leaving Corinth for a time, Paul hears that the church is not acting consistently with the Christian values and the Christian teaching that he had set before them, and so Paul writes a letter to the church. 1 Corinthians. And it's important to understand that 1 Corinthians is an occasion letter. You know, if you sit down and read 1 Corinthians in just one or two sittings, you will see Paul addressing those specific issues. Even in our text, you'll see quotes where they're, they ask him questions and he quotes them and responds to those questions and those comments. And one of the primary issues that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians is the issue of sexual immorality. And it appears from 1 Corinthians 5-7 that sexual immorality had actually crept into the church and the church was doing nothing about it. So if you flip back to chapter 5, in 1 Corinthians 5 verses 1, Paul says to them, it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, among the church, and of a kind that is not even tolerated even among pagans. For a man has his father's wife, and you are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. So let me just pause for a moment. I tremble at the prospect that the cross church could actually have sexual immorality among us. And yet, we'd be arrogant and not deal with it. And we become arrogant and boast in our reformed theology, and boast in the fact that our pastors speak on this issue, and the fact that we have a building, and the fact that we do all these things yet not deal with the sexual immorality in our midst, and rather than mourning over it and dealing with it through calling each other to repentance, walking along one another toward purity, and if necessary, going through the process of church discipline, we would be accused by God of being arrogant. I pray it isn't so. I pray it isn't so, brothers and sisters. How can we be a faithful, prophetic witness to the world if sexual impurity is in our own midst? One scholar says about the Corinthian church, that the church was in the world as it had to be, but the world was in the church as it ought not to be. And because most of the Corinthians would have been sexually immoral before conversion, and because they live in a sexually immoral culture, Paul is speaking directly into this situation. He gives extensive space to it and reaffirms God's design for sexuality. So look back at chapter 6, verse 13. going down to the second part, he says, the body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. The word that the ESV translates sexual immorality is the Greek word pornaya. In the New Testament, uses the word to denote any act of sexuality that deviates from God's design. The KJV translates the word as fornication or fornicators. So this includes sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, any sexual expression outside of God's design. And it was extremely common and accepted in Corinth, and it is extremely common and accepted today. One study from 2006 found that 95% of Americans have had pre-marital sex. That's almost 100%. And that would include everybody who claims to be a Christian. This is the day and age in which we live, and we are absolutely naive to believe that it is not affecting us and our children in ways that we don't even consciously understand. This is why the church must, as Paul says in Philippians 2.15, be blameless and innocent children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation among whom you shine as lights in the world. The church must not only stand strong against attacks on God's sexual ethic. We must not only be prophets. We must be pure. We must be pure. Look at what he says in verse 18. He says, flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Why is it such a serious thing to commit sexual immorality and to sin against your own body? Because he says in verse 19, do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own. We do not have sexual autonomy. We do not get to do whatever we want with our bodies. So although humans today, as a result of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and then Freud's theory building off of those theories, although people see us as primarily sexual objects, and the body is seen primarily as instruments for immorality, God has designed our bodies for a glorious and specific purpose. What is that purpose? It says in verse 20, so glorify God in your body. When we submit our bodies and our sexuality to God's design and play the game by His rules, we glorify Him. It is not a light thing. We glorify God with our bodies. And church, listen, it will not get any more radical than this, in this culture. Where sexual immorality is celebrated and glorified to say, I am not my own. I belong to Jesus. I am one with Jesus. And I will not join myself to any other but the spouse that He has given me within His design. What an opportunity we have to shine, to show forth God's good design in this broken world. It's amazing. It's amazing. And yet, I believe that the greatest threat to the church's purity is not homosexuality, or transgenderism, or even fornication. But the greatest threat to the church's purity today and possibly the greatest threat to the church in this culture in general is internet pornography. Let's think about this for a moment. Picture a situation where a demonically inspired enemy wants to turn a culture upside down and destroy the nuclear family and pervert children and mesmerize them with immorality and flip all the godly values around and destroy truth and eradicate truth and destroy that society's values and morality, but it can't because that society is full of strong men who won't let that enemy destroy their families and pervert truth and destroy their children What must the enemy do at that point? Well, Jesus taught that if the enemy would go into the strong man's house and plunder his goods, what did he have to do first? He had to bind the strong man. So if the enemy cannot overthrow a culture because of its strong men, it must first find a way to bind all the strong men. Because it can't fight confrontationally as in a fist fight. It must employ a slow, subtle, and passive-aggressive tactic in such a way that the strong men don't even realize they are being bound. You remember this. from Samson and Delilah and the Philistines. The Philistines couldn't take Samson physically. So what did they do? They sent Delilah in to make him weak so that they could bind him. How has the enemy bound all the strong men in our culture? Primarily through internet pornography. Internet pornography has paralyzed the men in our society and has rendered millions, and I am not over-exaggerating, millions of men useless in the fight. Just in the last two decades, we have seen an explosion of production of pornography and accessibility to pornography in the age of viewership is getting younger and younger. And currently the age at which most children are exposed to pornography is at age 11. And with the growth of tablets and phones and everything we mentioned earlier, that age will continue to get younger and younger. And so instead of viewing the world clearly, seeing the beauty of God's design and the beauty of God's creation, the lens through which many see the self today is a pornographic lens. While I'm primarily addressing pornography's effect on men in a society, to refer to Baucom again, he says that one of the greatest mistakes that we make when dealing with the issue of pornography is acting as if it's an issue that only is concerned with men. But in reality, statistics are very clear that women struggle with pornography as well. And brothers and sisters, this also has detrimental consequences in church. The lack of joy. The absence of power in all the pulpits. The confusion of gender roles. The lack of mission success. The withdrawal from redemptive relationships. The sluggishness in corporate worship. the laziness in Bible reading and in prayer, the lack of men who lead in the church and who guard the truth of the gospel. How much of it can be traced back to the fact that our churches are full of Christians who are secretly addicted to internet pornography? And here's the thing, pornography is unhuman. It is unhuman. The Bible gives us a picture of authentic marital intimacy that pleases the Lord and is beautiful in His sight. But with the ability of technology to influence the way things look, directors creating scenarios and actors performing internet pornography gives an unrealistic and distorted view of intimacy. And studies are showing that viewing internet pornography actually changes the brain. And it has addictive elements that are similar to heroin and crack cocaine. It warps your view of people. And so when you view internet pornography, the lie is that you get access to the good stuff, right? That's the lie. That's what Satan tells us, but you're not. You're actually becoming more and more unhuman. As Psalm 135.18 says of idols, those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them. We become what we behold. We become what we worship. So brothers and sisters, the enemy wants us to believe that pornography doesn't harm us because the lie is that it can be done in private without harming anyone. But in reality, the consequences are massive and detrimental and they extend to the church and to the culture, to the world at large. And I know that this sin is very, very difficult to confess, but I am becoming more and more convinced that it is nearly impossible to overcome alone. Because of its addictive nature and because of the shame element, So if you are enslaved to internet pornography, there is hope in Christ for freedom. There is hope in the sin-breaking power of the gospel. and there is hope in the church, and you need the church. And I want to just very gently plead with anyone who is caught in this struggle to confess this to a mature brother or sister in Christ, to call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, to remember His gospel, to look to Him hanging on that tree, dying in your place for sin, and to begin the biblical path toward restoration. Now, I must move on to main point number two. I want to deal with reproductive sovereignty. As we know, the culture is screaming sexual autonomy is the highest goal, the highest form of virtue, to the point that it is not only advocating for it, it is now demanding it. It's not enough just to want that, to choose that, you must affirm it. It's demanded of our culture to give it. We will see over the next few weeks, when we talk about the political self, that there are actually political mobilizations that are being done to ensure that people have complete sexual and reproductive autonomy. As I said earlier, there's one hindrance to ultimate sexual autonomy. So what is the natural implication of intimacy? Pregnancy. And as we saw earlier, God blessed humanity and gave it the command to be fruitful and multiply. And God says, fill the earth with image bearers. Enjoy the world I've created. Fill it, subdue it, take it for my glory. Enjoy me as you glorify me on the earth. Cultivate it, populate it. Yet the modern self says that we actually need to stop populating the earth. and reduce the population so much so that there are countries who in 50 years will not even be countries. Because they are not populating in a high enough rate to sustain the population. God says in Psalm 127.3 that children are a heritage from the Lord. That the man whose quiver is full of them is blessed. Yet the modern self sees children largely as a nuisance and a hindrance to self-realization and success and freedom and ultimately to sexual autonomy. So what has the modern self done about this? It has created ways for women to be God over their womb so that they can be God over their sexuality. This is why feminism is so dangerous. Because it convinces women that God's good design is dull and boring and oppressive. Under the guise of empowerment and freedom, it convinces them that power over men is the ultimate form of satisfaction. Not thriving as a wife and a mother, but overpowering men. So how does the feminist movement advocate for the modern female to have power over men? Through having total control over her sexuality and total control over her womb. I mean, think about the terms that are used today. Birth control. Planned parenthood. Reproductive rights. These are high priority political issues. I mean, think about the term reproductive justice. Think about that for a moment. That if a woman, not a marriage, not even the partner, but if a woman does not have total and absolute control over her reproduction, then injustice is being committed. How backward. How perverted is this? And now I know the question is being raised in some of y'all's minds. Is he saying that all birth control is wrong and that we should never try to refrain from having children? And I would say no. I don't think that the scriptures explicitly forbid married couples to responsibly refrain from having children for certain reasons in certain seasons of life. However, the Bible does condemn murder very clearly. Therefore, any attempt at family planning that induces abortion is morally unacceptable. This includes the IUD, the so-called morning-after pill, and there are even forms of the birth control pill that have what Mark Leiterbach calls a fail-safe method. where if the contraceptive measures of a birth control fail, there's a third mechanism that he says inhibits endometrium, making it incapable of supporting the newly conceived child should fertilization take place. So if this happens, the birth control is no longer functionally a contraceptive, but an abortifacient. So again, to be very pastoral, I know some of y'all who are hearing me maybe have never even thought about this. And you've never really considered these things. And I want to just say to us very gently, but seriously, if you are using birth control, please do your research. Please know what you are using. You have a responsibility before God to make sure that you are behaving in morally acceptable ways in this area. And so again, there may be very legitimate reasons not to have children for a certain season, such as health of the mother. Or perhaps if you're in my situation, you already have three really small kids that you're trying to train and raise them up. And that takes some time before you have more. Or perhaps God has called you to a very challenging missions setting. I think the Bible gives us freedom to think through this wisely and prayerfully and to use discernment as long as we keep it in the forefront of our minds that sexuality and gender distinctions in marriage are ultimately for good. And they are ultimately for God's glory. And God's fundamental design for marriage is that we would multiply and fill God's earth with His image, having children and raising them in the Lord is fundamental to discipleship, and it is central to human sexuality. We must remember this. So though sexual intimacy within marriage is a blessing to be enjoyed, it is not an end in and of itself. God's glory is the end of our sexuality. And so I just want to say something to those who have been unable to conceive. Because I know that the enemy would love, and already has, brought shame into your minds and tried to convince you of guilt. But the Scriptures are clear that God is the one who opens and closes the womb, and God is the one who gives the fruit of the womb, and He is sovereign. He is good. He is working all things for good for those who love Him. He is wise. His ways are higher than our ways. So I just want to say a few things. The Bible speaks frequently about people in Scripture who seek the Lord fervently, who are barren, and the Lord graciously answers their prayers and gives them offspring. And so I would encourage you to continue to seek the Lord for this. But even if He does not give to you the fruit of the womb, you can make spiritual children. through the preaching of the gospel and the Great Commission, seeing people come to know Christ and discipling them as spiritual mothers and fathers. And even over and above that, the ministry of adoption is an incredible ministry. And adoption in ways that are unlike any other show us something about the kindness of God. in that He reaches in and grabs His enemies and adopts them into His family. Those who are sons of Satan brings them into His own family and calls them heirs, joint heirs with Christ. Adoption is a beautiful thing, brothers and sisters. And so this leads, lastly, to the most tragic issue of our day, the issue of abortion. This is the greatest injustice occurring in America today, and it is not even close. There is no close second. Most of us are familiar with the numbers and statistics, so I won't get into those, other than the fact that there have been over 60 million abortions since 1973, when the Supreme Court gave the legal right to women to have abortions. What is very interesting is that while many countries in Europe provide almost unlimited abortion, many of them also do not allow abortion over 15 weeks. Yet here in America, not only is abortion an option well over 15 weeks, we are also having discussions about putting no limit on abortion at all. we are actually having discussions about whether to protect a baby who was born as a result of a failed abortion method. I mean, it literally is inconceivable. This is Romans 1 playing out right before our eyes. And again, John Mark has said this a few times about this series. The church is too conservative to be called conservative. The biblical sexual ethic and the biblical view of human life is so clear and so unapologetic and so non-negotiable that affirming the authority of Scripture bounces us way further right than any political thing you can call conservative. We see this in the whole discussion about viability. Viability in its basic form is the point at which a baby can survive outside of the mother's womb. This is central to abortion in the debate in politics. The logic seems to be that if we can find out when viability is, then we can cut off abortion at that time. So if it's past viability, we won't let you have an abortion, but if it's before viability, we will allow abortion for those who want those. And there are a few major problems with that. And this is coming from very pro-life, conservative arguments. The point of viability is totally arbitrary. Because as technology and science gets better, that date is going to get younger and younger, right? The weeks are going to be fewer and fewer, whereby a baby could survive outside of the mother's womb. And more importantly, who gets to make the call on the point at which a baby is considered a human and worthy of dignity and protection and life. Do we get to decide that? Does the mother and her health care provider get to decide that? Does the Supreme Court get to decide that? No. God is the author of life. We see this all throughout Scripture with Sarah, and Rebecca, and Rachel, and Leah, and Ruth, and Deborah, and Elizabeth, and Mary, that God is the one who gives offspring. He is the one who causes human life to begin. And not only that, but He is sovereignly involved in the growth and development of the human in the womb. So we all know that beautiful Psalm 139, 13 to 16. It says, for you formed me in my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you. Listen to this. When I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth before the woman even knows she's pregnant. God is secretly working and fashioning the human life according to his good, sovereign design and plan. The Bible is very clear that life starts at conception. And in God's eternal mind, life transcends conception. Because it goes on to say in verse 16, your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. God says to Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. God knows us before the foundation of the world. God defines life. Bible scholar Andreas Kostenberger says, Scripture views human life as beginning at conception and that there is no such thing as a human right to take the life of an unborn child. Brothers and sisters, if the Scriptures are our authority, then abortion is not an option. It cannot be. It cannot be. And we must vehemently oppose it. Abortion is the very antithesis of God's design for humanity. We need to pray fervently that the Supreme Court would strike down Roe versus Wade, but even if it does, we should not rejoice. We should celebrate, but we should not rejoice. We should celebrate that thousands and even millions of babies will be born But as long as abortion remains a legal option, innocent blood is being shed. And God hates the shedding of innocent blood. So in a culture that will go to any means, literally any means, to ensure total sexual and reproductive autonomy, the church must stand unapologetically and uphold God's design for sexuality and His design for procreation. and we must uphold the dignity of human life. And the reason we can do this is because God came to the earth, wrapped in sinful flesh, and He showed us what it means to be a human. He never deviated from God's design in any way, tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. And he died in our place to restore us, to restore the self. And so that through Him, we can be reconciled to God and our broken sexuality, our broken humanity can be made new and is made new in Christ. This is why we preach to the modern self to say, you do not have to stay broken. God has died for you. You can be restored. you can have hope, you can be reconciled to God and Christ. Believe in Him. And as we come to the table, I want to just encourage our hearts in that, that Jesus died for the sexually immoral, Jesus died for the broken, and He gives eternal life to all who will call upon Him. and that if you are in Him, your name is no longer a dolterer, a fornicator, a liar, a swindler. You are called a child of God. Come to the table with joy and rejoice in what Christ has done for you. Amen, let's pray. Father, I thank You for Your Word. I thank You that You have spoken to us very clearly on these issues. And so I pray that You would renew our minds in them, and sharpen us in them, and give us grace and hope and love to proclaim Your Gospel to the world. Bless us as we come to the table. Fill our hearts with joy and hope. And I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.