Good morning. I feel blessed to be here, blessed to be invited to get to know some of you this weekend, especially blessed to worship our great God with you today. I want to bring you greetings from my church family, West Lafayette. They say hi. My family would always love to travel with me, but they say hi too. So I bring you their love as well. We're going to read this morning from Philippians chapter 1. If you're using a Pew Bible, that's on page 1151. In Philippians 1 this morning, I'd like us to focus on verses 12 to 18. But in order to get the context, I'm going to begin in verse 1, get the flavor of what the Apostle Paul is bringing to his people. I'd like to pray before we read. Fathers, we come to your word this morning. We need help or I need help to preach clearly and passionately with authority and humility. Lord, we all need help to understand. Help to believe, help to obey. And so we proclaim, Oh God, our dependence upon your Holy Spirit right now. But if he is not here, If he is not moving and working, this will be a fruitless time. So please visit us and in your grace, open our eyes, our hearts, and prepare us to obey your word. We pray for it in Jesus name. Amen. Philippians one Paul and Timothy bond servants of Jesus Christ to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi with the bishops and deacons. Grace to you and peace from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making requests for you all with joy for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now. being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. Just as it is right for me to think this of you all because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as both in my chains and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers with me of grace. For God is my witness. How greatly I long for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, and that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. But I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happen to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the gospel. so that it has become evident to the whole palace guard and to all the rest that my chains are in Christ. And most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. Some, indeed, preach Christ, even from envy and strife, and some also from goodwill. The former preach Christ from selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my chains, but the latter out of love. Knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the gospel, what then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preached. And in this I rejoice, yes, and will rejoice. This is the word of God. It is important to have not just the right pieces, but to have them in the right order. It's important to have the right things, but to have the right amount of those things or to have them in the right place. Imagine trying to put our solar system together. If you had all the right planets and all the right moons and the right sun, but you didn't put the sun at the middle, physics tells us you would have some serious problems. Or maybe you're a baker or a chef. You can imagine getting your recipe out, having all the right ingredients. You have them all there, but you don't have them in the right proportion. You don't put them into the sauce at the right time. Whatever comes out at the end is not going to be very good. And so it must be with the gospel. It's not enough to have the gospel in your life somewhere. It's not enough to have the gospel in your church somewhere. It must be at the very center. The gospel must be the main thing for the Church of Jesus Christ. And that's really what's at the heart of our passage we're considering today, verses 12 to 18. As Paul is writing to the Philippians, the first portion we read, of course, is a very normal greeting. Paul introduces himself, he says hello to the church to whom he's writing, and he prays for them, or he tells them what he's praying. That's all pretty typical in Paul's letters. And he begins really the meat of his letter in verse 12, and he begins by addressing a problem. There's a problem in the Philippian church. There's problems in every church, but there's a problem in the Philippian church. And the particular first problem he addresses is the problem of their anxiety. They are a church that is worried, not about everything in general, but about Paul in particular. You see, Paul's in jail. Paul's in prison. We don't know where Paul's in prison. The best guess is that when Paul wrote Philippians, he's in Rome. Other scholars think he might have been in Caesarea or something like that. We don't know. Rome's a pretty good guess. But Paul's in jail. And he has found out that the Philippian church knows that he's in jail. And further, he's found out that they are deeply concerned for him, that they are beside themselves with worry. And so the first thing he wants to do in writing to the Philippians is to assuage their worry, to bring them some comfort in their worry. And so that's why he begins by talking about himself, which isn't necessarily normal for Paul. Now, Paul, when he relates the fact that when he talks about his imprisonment is not going to relate the facts of it. He doesn't tell us where he's in jail or how long his sentence is. He's really going to relate the effects of his imprisonment to the church. He wants to comfort a disconcerted church. But Paul's a very wise teacher, of course. And Paul, realizing their anxiety, now he knows and he sees, I've got an opportunity to teach them. Not only does he want to bring them comfort, but in comforting them, he wants to teach them about the centrality of the gospel for the church and for their lives. Just as a side note, as we go through the passage this morning and through the sermon, Paul uses this word gospel. He doesn't define it because for the Philippian church, he doesn't feel like he needs to define it. But let me define it. When we talk about the gospel, especially here in Philippians, we're not talking about the gospel very narrowly considered. It's not just how people are saved by Jesus Christ. It's everything that God is doing to advance the kingdom of Jesus Christ. This is the gospel broadly considered that our God is a saving God and that he is advancing his kingdom in the world and that grace will win. That's what he means when he says the gospel is advancing. It's not just person by person, but as a whole, the church is advancing. The gospel is the truth that Jesus is going to save the world to God. And so it's the gospel broadly considered that Paul is interested in as we consider it this morning. And so what he wants to bring to them then is not just comfort, but in comforting them to teach them what happens when the gospel is the main thing. When we put the gospel in the right spot, what is it that happens? And the first thing he teaches us is that when the gospel is the main thing, we will be content with the sermons that God preaches. When the gospel is the main thing, we will be content with God's sermons that he preaches with our lives. Now I want to have you notice first what Paul doesn't say. When he writes to the Philippians and he knows that they're worried, he doesn't downplay the situation. He doesn't say, it's really not that bad. He doesn't write to them and say, it's OK that I'm in jail. I have a corner office. I have a corner cell. My roommate plays the harmonica, and we have a great time together. He doesn't say, it's really not that bad, because it probably was pretty bad. Just as a side note, we can learn a lesson from this when we try to help other people. It is not often helpful to people when they are struggling to tell them it's not all that bad. If you've ever tried to help somebody and the words come out of your mouth, it's really not that bad. You're probably not going to help them at all. That doesn't help. What does help is not to downplay the problem, but to elevate the Savior. And that's what Paul is going to do now. So he doesn't say it's really not that bad. What he does say is what has happened to me has been used by God for the furtherance, or some of your Bibles will say, the advance of the gospel. What has happened to me by me being in jail is that the gospel has gone forth. It has been advanced. And that word advance is an interesting word. It's a word that would be used in a military history. If you're going to talk about a small military force, that was going in front of the large military force to clear the way. A small kind of strike team that was going out like a wedge, getting rid of sentries and preparing for the large force. And Paul says, that's what's happened because of me being in jail. By me being in jail, the gospel has more room. It's been advanced in this world. And so Paul says, because of my chains, the gospel is being preached. And he says, first of all, the gospel is being preached externally. And by that, I mean outside of the church. By me being in jail, the gospel has come to people to whom it wouldn't necessarily come otherwise. And he mentions one particular group. He mentions the Imperial Guard, or what sometimes we call the Praetorian. And the Praetorian was a powerful group of soldiers. If you were in the Roman army at this time, and you had some good connections, or you were very skilled, at some point you could work your way up to be in the Imperial Guard. You got the best posting, you got paid twice as much, and you got a lot of prestige, including being there in the palace, which is one of the best places, I guess, for a soldier to be. And Paul says, because of my being in chains, the gospel has come to the Imperial Guard Now I don't know if any of you know, not just soldiers, but have you ever met an army ranger or a navy seal? Some policemen I know are like this too, but there are groups of men in this world who are so trained together that they are sort of closed off as a unit to anyone else. And it's very hard to become friends with the Navy SEAL, because they already have all their friends. And they're not going to let you in. It's very hard to break into a circle of policemen, because the only people they really open up to are other policemen. And so here you have this Imperial Guard, and how is it that the gospel could come to them? How could Paul, and maybe even we can imagine Paul praying for the Imperial Guard. Well, I want to see the gospel go to this part of the Roman army. I have no way to get it to them. I have no way to appear before them and preach to them. But now, all of a sudden, I'm in jail. And because I'm in jail, they found out not just that Paul's in jail, but that I am in jail, it says, for Christ. So all of a sudden now, because of Paul being in jail, the gospel is going forth to a new mission field, to a new part of the Roman army that would have been closed off to the gospel otherwise. And so Paul is rejoicing. The gospel is going forth in other parts of the world. We can even imagine Satan. being excited when Paul was in prison. Finally, I've got Paul in jail. Finally, I can press the mute button on that annoying apostle and I can begin to deal with other problems. Only to find out when he thinks that he's solved a problem, he's just made it worse. When Satan tries to mute the church, he tends to amplify it instead. This is how good our God is. This is how powerful the gospel is. When Satan attacks it, what happens? He tends to attack himself in the end. And Paul is in prison. He's supposed to be shut up. And now the gospel is going to new places as well. So Paul says that my imprisonment has preached the gospel externally. He goes on to say, my imprisonment has preached the gospel internally. Look with me, not just at verse 13, but verse 14. He says, most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. So Paul's writing the Philippians. He says, I want you to know, first of all, that the gospel has gone out to the palace guard. Praise the Lord. But secondly, the fact that I'm in jail is making the church far more bold to proclaim the gospel. How weird. is that that's not logical at all. That doesn't make any sense, does it? That their leader, their greatest preacher, would be in prison. And then everybody else, it would seem to us, would think, well, that was a bad plan for Paul. I'm just going to keep quiet. I'm not going to preach. But that's not what happened at all. by Paul being in prison for whatever reason, the Holy Spirit's in the church, and the church looks at Paul and says, he was faithful to proclaim the word, he's in jail, now it's our turn. And we're going to proclaim the word of God as well. And this is true not only biblically, but historically. We can look throughout many times in church history where the leaders of God's people have been persecuted, and you would think that the church would be beat down and silenced. And the opposite happens. The opposite happens when the leaders of the church suffer because of the gospel. Because the church begins to rise up and proclaim the Word of God in their absence. And this only can be attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. And so Paul, the way he wants to comfort us, the way he wants to comfort the Philippians, is to say, not that it's not really that bad, but that the gospel is going forth. The gospel is going forth in the world. The gospel is deepening in the church. And so you, dear Philippian Christians, you can rejoice with me that the gospel is being preached. Paul was genuinely delighted, not at his imprisonment, but at the effects of his imprisonment. That because he was in jail, God was preaching a sermon with Paul's life that was a powerful sermon. And so the first lesson we need to learn this morning is that we need to be content with whatever sermon God wants to preach with our lives. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, make no mistake. God's intention for you is to make you a sermon. A living, walking, breathing sermon of the gospel itself. And He is going to write that sermon. And you need to be content with the sermon that He writes. Imagine with me that I go back home this week and next Sunday morning I'm going to be preaching Lord willing in the book of Genesis. Imagine one of the members of my congregation coming and meeting with me during the week and they come into the office and say, Jared, I'm so excited about Genesis. I've been reading Genesis. It's great. I've been looking at the passage you're going to preach on. I'm so excited that I've taken the liberty of kind of writing a few points of your next week's sermon down for you. I would say, well, I'm so glad that you're reading the Bible. I'm so glad that you're excited. But you know, I've been studying too, and I've got some ideas about what I might preach. And they come back, and they say, no, no, really. I really understand this passage. I really understand what you need to say. You can add some illustrations if you want, Jared, but here's what you need to say next week. And at some point, I would say, this is a little uncomfortable, but God's called me to preach next week and not you, so I need to write the sermon. Right. It's even, it would be even a little inappropriate for somebody to do that at some point. How much more when we go to God, the great preacher of the gospel, and we tell him what types of sermons he should write with our lives. We say to God, no, no, I don't want to be the sermon about suffering. I don't want to be the sermon about loneliness. I want to be the sermon about victory and consistent happiness in my life. I've got a whole point. God, I've got it written down for you. I'll give you the outline. You just fill in the blanks. This is what we do. But God says, no, I've got a better idea. I know how to preach the gospel. I know what kind of sermons I'm going to write with your life. There's another lesson that flows from this then, that when we pray about the hardships in our lives, we should pray more than simply, God release me from my suffering. Which is okay to pray. It's just fine. When you're suffering, pray for God to release you from your suffering. Absolutely. Paul did that. But you should go further than that. You should pray a better prayer than that. After you're done praying, God, release me from my suffering, keep going and say, God, if you're not going to release me from my suffering, then make it worth it. Give a purpose to my suffering. If you're going to preach this sermon with my life, preach such a sermon that no one will be able to ignore it and that many will be saved. God, if you want me to suffer, at least give it a purpose. And that's the word I want you to latch onto, that your life has a purpose and God is going to use you to preach the gospel. And if he chooses a purpose that you don't like, at least rejoice that there is a purpose. At least rejoice that God is going to show the world the gospel through your life. Some of you know that one of my best friends, Dave Long, died three weeks ago. Dave was my pastor. He was my mentor. And for the last 10 years, I've been his pastor. And some of you know Dave as a great preacher or a leader in the church. You know him in his work with missions. And maybe he's been here to preach, probably. But many times over the last year, I met with Dave and we prayed. And we prayed many times that God would kill the cancer instead of killing Dave. But after we got done with those prayers, they would always pray, God, I'm not afraid of death. But if it's my time to die, make it worth it. Make it make it the right time, make people pay attention. And through the process of his death, even even the very week before, he sent out an email to all of his friends, proclaiming the gospel to them, telling them he was not afraid to die. And so we need to be content We need to be content with the sermons that God writes with our lives. The difference is whether your passion in your life is going to be your happiness, your security, or whether it's going to be the gospel of Jesus Christ. If all you pray is for your own happiness and your own sense of well-being, your own freedom from suffering, that might not be God's plan with your life. But if you pray, God, whatever happens, I want you to show the world the gospel through me. God will always answer that prayer. God will say, yes, I can get on board with that. We're on the same page now. I'm going to preach a sermon with your life. Secondly, we should not only be content with the sermons that God preaches, we should be joyful. When God preaches a sermon with us, when God chooses to show the world the gospel through me, we should be joyful and even amazed when the gospel is proclaimed through people like me and you. Now, when preachers get together, you might not know this. When preachers get together, we always compare notes, sometimes compare notes about who we think the really great preachers are. A lot of good preachers, there's only a few really great preachers. So we always compare notes about who we think the really great preachers are. And I'd like to tell you that when somebody gets up front in a church and they open to Romans chapter 8 and they preach a good sermon from Romans 8, the rest of the pastors aren't all that impressed. Because Romans 8 is amazing. It's such a powerful, packed vision of the gospel that all you have to do is read it, and people are going to start crying and get converted left and right. It's amazing. But when a preacher gets up front and reads a chapter from 1 Chronicles where it's just 70 different Hebrew names, and he preaches a sermon from that part of God's Word, and people's lives get changed, then we're in the presence of a great preacher. That's amazing. It's one thing when God can take beautiful, wonderful, amazing people and show the world how good He is. But when He can take you, when He can take me, when He can take weak and sinful and ugly people and show the world the beauty of amazing grace, we are in the presence of a great preacher. And so we should be joyful when the world gets to see how good our God is. When God can use me To show the gospel to the world and you. We should not only be content, we should be amazed because we are in the presence of a great preacher who can put his apostle in jail and still preach a great sermon from that. So when the gospel is the main thing, we will be content with God's sermons. Secondly, when the gospel is the main thing, Paul says the church will be united. The church will be united. Beginning in verse 15, we see that there's another problem. going on in the city where Paul is imprisoned. Not only is he in jail, there is a there's strife and dissension in the church. He says some preach Christ from envy and strife and some also from goodwill. The former preached Christ from selfish ambition, not sincerely supposing to add affliction to my chains. There's parts of this passage that are pretty hard for us to understand because we might not have many situations that are exactly like this. But in whatever city Paul's in, apparently there are two groups of preachers now and they're categorized by whether they are for Paul or against Paul. There's a group of preachers that loved Paul. They were sad that he was in jail and they picked up the mantle of the gospel and continued to proclaim the word of God. There's another group of preachers that were full of envy, and they wanted to undermine Paul. And for whatever reason, they thought the best way to do that was to preach and get glory for themselves, instead of getting glory for the Apostle Paul. Now, we don't necessarily have lots of illustrations like this, but we do have some. If you go back to the First Great Awakening, that one of the men most used by God in the history of the church was George Whitefield. And when George Whitefield would come from England and preach in the colonies, up and down the colonies, he would gather to himself. Well, the Holy Spirit would do it. The Holy Spirit would gather to George Whitefield huge crowds. And his ministry of preaching was so effective and so blessed by God that many thousands were converted under his preaching. And you would think at first glance that the pastors in New England and in the South would be joyful. George Whitefield is coming. Let's pass out brochures and flyers and get everybody here in the church. But that's not what they did. Many of them shut the doors of the church and said, you're not welcome here. And it was purely out of jealousy. It was purely out of envy. And so he had to go out many times to the fields and preach there. So we do see this every now and then. There's another example in scripture where Paul in Acts 19 is preaching. It says there's another group that rose up that were called the sons of Sceva. Sceva was a Jewish high priest, and he had seven sons that were watching the Apostle Paul. And they thought, that's amazing, we want to do what he does. This is just amazing ministry. And so they tried, and they would go into places and they would begin to cast out demons. It turns out that the demons wouldn't listen to them. So they began to say, we cast you out in the Jesus whom Paul proclaims. And then the demon began to come back to them and say, well, we know Jesus. And we really know Paul, too. We have no idea who you are. And one of the most hilarious scenes in all of scripture, one of these demons who's inhabited a man beats them all up at the same time, and they run away naked. Because all they're doing is trying to get for themselves glory, and not really trying to preach the word. So it's something similar to those illustrations that's happening in this city where Paul is. There's rivalries. There's two groups of preachers. And so Paul wants to address this to the Philippian church. But he says, not, this one's right, this one's wrong, or you need to fix this problem. He says, I'm just happy. I'm just happy. Look at the very end of our passage. He says, I will rejoice. How is that possible? Well, it's because the group that is sincere was preaching Christ, and people were getting saved. And the group that was insincere was preaching Christ, and people were getting saved. And Paul says, you know what, their motives, their sincerity or lack of sincerity, that's up to God. I'm not going to worry about that. If Jesus is being proclaimed and people are going to be saved, then I'm happy because that's the point. The gospel is the main thing, not whether they're doing it for good or bad reasons. The gospel is the main thing. Paul is not excusing bad preaching. He's not even excusing their bad motives. He's just getting past the petty arguments to the big picture. He wants the Philippian church to hold on to the big picture. Don't worry about who's doing what and why they're doing it. If the gospel is being proclaimed, then rejoice with me, because that's the point of our lives. The gospel to be preached through what we say and through what we do. And we, we need to hear this lesson this morning. Now, I don't know your congregation very well. I know mine and I know the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. We are a reformed church. We have a long list of things we believe and a longer list of reasons we believe them. We can argue with people until they grow tired of arguing. We can give you a list. You can point out any church in this city that's not Reformed Presbyterian Church and we can give you a list of their problems. It should not be this way. We shouldn't be this way. There's large churches in Lafayette, one of the biggest, really the biggest church in Lafayette. If you were to come, I could take you there. I could tell you all the things that they do that are wrong. All the reasons I did, they don't understand baptism, or they don't understand worship, or this or that. But you know what? They're proclaiming Christ and people are getting saved. And I should be happy. We should be happy. There's real differences between churches, and we don't want to minimize those. We don't want to say we shouldn't have convictions. But in the end, there's one thing that's important. There's one thing that unites every true church, and that is the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And whatever problems the churches down the street have, whatever differences they have from you, if, if they are proclaiming the true gospel of Jesus Christ, be glad every time you drive by. Thank God for them, pray for them, participate with them, join with them however you can, because we are all on the same team. We all have the same goal. You can also use this as a way to help you solve problems with other people in your church. As we, again, I don't know you very well at all, but I just know churches, there are people here who aren't getting along with other people here. That just happens, right? And what do you do when that happens? You can fight, you can drop your lists of disagreements, you can get counts and all this stuff. But if you would remember at the beginning of your conflict, we have the same goal. The goal of his life is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's the goal of my life. We start on the same page. We're on the same team. There's no reason for having long drawn out arguments in the church if we remember that the gospel is the main thing. When dissensions and disagreements last in the church, it's often because we have lost sight of the centrality of the gospel, not just corporately, not just from this pulpit, but in your lives. If the purpose of your life is to show the gospel to the world and the purpose of your brother or sister's life is to show the gospel to the world, you are on the same side. So there's no reason for us to not be united when the gospel is the main Now, Paul in this passage assumes something and I don't want to assume it. So what Paul assumes as he goes through this passage is that for the Philippian church, the gospel is the main thing. I don't want to assume that. So I want to draw to a close this morning by encouraging you to make the gospel the main thing. To make the gospel the main thing. Some of you will have learned the first question to our catechism. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And so when I tell you to make the gospel the main thing in your life, some of you might say, well, I thought the glory of God was supposed to be the main thing in my life. Right? Is that the gospels of the glory of God? Of course, that's one in the same, right? It's one of the same thing. So to say, make you make God's glory. The chief end of your life is to say, make the gospel and the showing and the proclamation of the gospel the most important thing in your life. And so Paul is showing us a path that we must walk by grace to gain this mindset. So what can you do to make the gospel the main thing for you and for your church? Well, you need to pray. You need to pray for your heart, because this is ultimately a work of the Holy Spirit in you. Only the Holy Spirit can take you away from your selfishness and your self-centeredness and make you focused on the glory of God. Only the Spirit can do that work. So pray for it. Pray this afternoon, God, make me more passionate about your glory than about my comfort. Make me more passionate for the advance of the gospel than my own success. Do that work in my heart. So pray that way. But secondly, pray often for the advance of the gospel. Pray often that the gospel would be advanced. Just as Tim did this morning, we need to be praying more often that the gospel would go powerfully into the world. We need to pray that way. I wonder if we were to get together all of our prayers for the last week, maybe they wouldn't even be that many, but if we were to get together all of our prayers and make a pie chart, I don't know what a pie chart is, right? How many of those prayers would be for the advance of the gospel? How big a slice did you give this week to praying that the gospel would go forth powerfully in this world in safe centers? Pray for yourself. Don't be afraid to pray about your sufferings. Pray for people you love. Pray for health concerns. But give more time to the progress of the gospel in your prayers. Pray that regularly. As you go through the process this year of praying and seeking a pastor, choose a pastor well. Because the pastor you bring into this church is going to make a big difference in whether the gospel is central or whether it's sort of this side thing that he brings along every now and then. Get to know the man that you want to call. Is he proclaiming the gospel regularly? Is it part of his life? Does he live it in front of you? Or does he just preach one evangelistic sermon every two months and then gets back to talking about just doctrine? You need a gospel preacher. You need somebody who's proclaiming the gospel to you week in and week out. Choose your pastor well. And finally, pray for your church. Pray for each other that you would be a gospel-centered church. Preach this to yourselves regularly. You can't too often call yourself back to what is central. It's very easy for churches who love the Lord and are faithful to scripture to sort of wander away, not from the gospel, but from the centrality of the gospel. It's easy for a church to become so full of programs that we lose the sight of the purpose of those programs. It's easy for us to get so full of social events and spending time together that we forget why we're doing it. So remind yourselves as often as you can that the purpose for everything we do, whether it's lunch this afternoon or whether it's worship on Sunday, is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Proclaim that to yourself regularly. The truth is that the gospel is the main thing. It is the main thing. God has told us that His passion is to put forth Christ and His saving power in this world, and it's His main thing. And as long as you make the gospel the main thing by the power of the Spirit, you will be on board with what God wants to do with your life. And so my question to end this morning is just this. Will you accept as your passion and your purpose what God has said His passion and His purpose for you is? The reason you exist is to be a living sermon of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Are you up for that? Are you willing to accept that as your purpose for existence? You go to work tomorrow morning, go to work for the gospel. You come home to your family, you spend time with your kids, you reach out to your friends. All of it is meant to show grace to the world around you. That's why you're here. So listen to what Paul says, not just to be comforted, not just to have our anxiety smooth the way, but that we might be reminded of why we're here, why we're here to show the gospel to a world that needs it. Would you stand and pray with me? Lord Jesus, we thank you for the Gospel. We thank you for living and dying for us. We praise you for the resurrection and the ascension and your coming return. And Lord, we confess that we believe the Gospel, but that it often falls to the back burner. We don't often try to keep it on the front lines of our mind and heart. So we pray God for forgiveness. To whatever extent we have made ourselves, our comfort, the purpose of our life, Lord, forgive us. Renew our passion for your gospel. Keep it at the center of everything we do. Lord, bless this church. May this be a place not just that has the gospel, but it has it right in the middle where the gospel is the reason for everything that they do and it permeates everything that they do. So bless us in this way. We pray for it in Jesus name. Amen.