It's a pleasure to be back in the pulpit and to open up God's word. So take your Bibles this morning and turn back to the Gospel of Luke, Luke chapter 18, and we will read our passage for today. and draw out a few applications. Luke chapter 18, verses 35 through 43, reading from the New American Standard Bible. And it came about that as he was approaching Jericho, a certain blind man was sitting by the road, begging. Now hearing a multitude going by, he began to inquire what this might be. And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. And he called out, saying, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. And those who led the way were sternly telling him to be quiet. But he kept crying out all the more, Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus stopped. and commanded that he be brought to him. And when he had come near, he questioned him, What do you want me to do for you? And he said, Lord, I want to receive my sight. And Jesus said to him, Receive your sight. Your faith has made you well. And immediately he received his sight and began following Him, glorifying God. And when all the people saw it, they gave praise to God." As we come to the close of Jesus' ministry, this is one of the final miracles that He does in His ministry. In fact, the only miracles that He has left are the cursing of the fig tree, the healing of Malchus's ear that Peter inadvertently sliced off. He's actually aiming for his head and just got his ear. And then if you want to include the resurrection itself, are all the miracles, the only miracles that remain before Jesus ascends? If you count up the miracles in the gospel, there are about, if you count right, including the resurrection, 37 miracles mentioned in the gospels. But obviously, The text tells us over in John chapter 20, John says, there were many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book. So in reality, in reality, he, by the way, that's the memory verse, right, Doug? Yeah. In reality, Jesus did probably hundreds of miracles during his three years, most of which are not even recorded. You see, when God wants to intervene into the life of people here on earth, he does it in one of two different ways. He could do it miraculously, or he can work what we call providentially. Everything that God does, he does either miraculously, or he does providentially. You say, well, I've never heard of that word providence. Well, here's one definition I found. Providence, divine providence, is God's continuous involvement with His creation, whereby He preserves and governs all His creation from the greatest to the least, so that, in accord with His perfect will and design, He sovereignly orders everything He has made to accomplish everything He intends for His own glory. Now, we're going to talk more about that here before we get to our text. The introduction might be on the long side this morning, so just hang on to your seats. But you know Romans 8.28. Romans 8.28 is one of those favorite verses of many of us, and it is a verse that testifies to the fact that God is providentially working. Paul says, and we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. God causes all the various details of life to come together to work out His plan and purpose. Providence is more complicated than a miracle. A miracle, God can just go, boom, and it's done. Providence is God taking all the loose strings of life, tying them together to work out his plan. It's much more complicated, but nothing is more hard for God than something else. I mean, anything is as easy as the next thing if you're God. if you're God. And so an example of providence is, think of the life of Joseph. God allowed Joseph's brothers to kidnap him, sell him as a slave, and then lie to their father Jacob for years regarding his fate, and Jacob believed it. It was all wicked, and it all displeased God, and yet at the same time, all of their sin and all of their wickednesses worked towards a greater good, so that Joseph ended up in Egypt, where he was made the prime minister. Every little detail. worked out. And so at the end of the book of Genesis, you read something like this. Joseph's brothers are quite at this point, very fearful that Joseph is gonna retaliate, Joseph has to lovingly just calm them down, and he lets them know that he realizes God was in on all this. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. That is divine providence. That's divine providence. It's God taking all the decisions that people make, good decisions, bad decisions, wrong choices, right choices, random incidentals thrown in, working it all together to bring about His perfect will. One man, I heard one man say, this really, I think it was a pastor at a convention or somewhere, he said, the most contented I can be is to be in a situation where I do not know the outcome. I'll say it again. The most contented I can be is to be in a situation where I do not know the outcome, but I know that the Lord knows the outcome. That's contentment. You see, I don't know the outcome of We don't know, we just don't know. And yet God's working it all out. Sadly, one of the underlying presuppositions of the charismatic movement today is that unless God is doing all these miracles, miracles, miracles, miracles, miracles, miracles, all over the place, if God is not doing miracles wall to wall all the time, then we've got an absentee God, he's not there. But I know that God is working everything to His end. It's all working out for good. R.C. Sproul, some of you have heard of him, used to talk about the sovereignty of God, and he would say things like this. He says, if there is one rogue molecule anywhere in the universe, if there is one rogue molecule, one molecule that's gonna do its own thing, then God is not sovereign and he's not in control. When you think about the magnitude of the universe and all the stuff that's in the universe, then that's a lot of stuff. So God is controlling it all. Providence is His continuous involvement with His creation, whereby He preserves and governs all of His creation from the greatest to the least, so that in accord with His perfect will and design, He sovereignly orders all things. I think providence is a greater miracle than a miracle, when you think about it. It's constant, it's every day. I mean, I can think about my own life, how I didn't know what I, when I graduated from high school, you know, all my friends are going to college, and I looked at, I went to college visitation, and nothing really zapped me. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know what direction I wanted to pursue. I knew I wasn't very good at math, so I had to eliminate anything that dealt with math. And so I decided, I was walking down the street one day, and there was an Army recruiter's office right there in Storm Lake, Iowa. And I walked in, and I said, what do you got for me? Something like that, I don't remember. And he opened up all the books, what you could do in this man's army, and he shared with me how I could be all that I could be. That was their slogan, until it became an army of one. I think that's been discarded, thankfully. No one's ever heard of an army of one. But he opened up the book, and I decided I wanted to go into military intelligence. which sort of sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? Kind of like grape nuts. They're not really grapes, and they're not really nuts. You can probably think of other illustrations like that. But I went into military intelligence, and so I went to Morse code school, and I went to teletype intercept school, and the next thing I know, I ended up in Augsburg, Germany. I could have ended over in Okinawa. I was glad I went to, I wanted to go to Europe, and I got Europe. And not too long after I got to Europe, I ran into somebody who was, that I knew back at, when I was doing my training at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and they were, there was a couple of them, and they were going through these cards, verse cards, memorizing Bible verses, and I asked them what they're doing. They said, we're memorizing Bible verses. I said, you're what? I thought I was a Christian, because I grew up in a Lutheran church, but they said, well, we're just memorizing God's word. I said, oh, that was really strange to me. You memorize the Bible? Anyway, they invited me to this church, which was off-base, not to be confused with an off-base church, called the American Bible Church. And I went there, and on that first Sunday I was there, I heard the gospel in a very powerful way. The pastor just started a series out of Galatians chapter one, verses eight and nine. Paul says, if any man preach a gospel contrary to the gospel which I have preached, let him be accursed. You know, those two verses in Galatians one, verses eight and nine. And he shared the gospel. I mean, not just shared it, it was powerful. And I realized this Lutheran boy didn't have the full, complete picture. I didn't have the complete picture. I understood now that I was a sinner, Jesus paid for my sins on the cross, and I needed to receive him by faith. But you see, all God's providence worked it, from my going down the street and going to that recruiter's office to managing to pass my schooling and ended up over in Germany, but all this stuff being tied together to work out his will, And I could go on in other illustrations. There's so many in our lives. You could talk about Johnny Erickson Tada and so many illustrations. But to have an understanding what the scripture teaches about God's providence would cure a lot of what we struggle with. If you understand that God is sovereign and he is in control, yeah, we can't sit on our duffs and do nothing. You say, well, if God's gonna do it, I don't have to do a thing. I just cross my arms and eat bonbons in my house all day. No, that's not what I'm saying either. But God is, don't get your knickers in a knot. God's gonna work it all out. God's going to, He's going to work. Now, so God works providentially, but we're coming back to Luke, I've got to get back to Luke 18 here. Jesus is doing another one of His miracles. So God can work providentially or He can work miraculously. And Jesus did hundreds of miracles during His lifetime. Started with the wedding at Canaan. where He did His first miracle, despite what some of the Roman Catholic books of the Bible, what they include as books of the Bible, the Apocrypha, has Jesus doing miracles when He was 10 or 11 or 12 years of age. That's why those books are discounted as not being true, because they counterdict what other Scriptures say. Jesus' first miracle was the miracle at Canaan. His last miracle before His resurrection was the healing of Malchus' ear. That's the last miracle, unless you want to count the resurrection. Then that was His last miracle. Christ's miracles were never denied by His enemies. They all said that He did miracles, albeit He did it by the power of Satan. is what they would say. So Jesus had all these miracles over demons, disease, death, nature, all kinds of miracles, even miracles over death itself. And so we come here to one of his last miracles here in Luke 18. And he's going to do it to a blind man that Luke mentions here. Now, if you read the similar account of this passage, the same passage over in Matthew 20 and Mark 10, have this same account. They include that there's actually two blind men here. Luke only mentions one. Mark actually gives us his name. Mark says his name is Bartimaeus. So when you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you read all three Gospels, you get a full accounting of this passage, but Luke doesn't give us all that. And so Jesus heals, it's gonna be, he's actually healing two blind men here, but only one is mentioned. You read the other Gospel accounts, and both, they're both mentioned. And Jesus here is going to do this, he spends his last days with with people who are the outcasts, two blind men. And then next time we're gonna see spent time with a tax collector, another outcast. And then the next time something big happens was the thief on the cross, another outcast. And then after Jesus died, there was a Roman who said, surely this must be the son of God, a Roman soldier and another outcast, at least in the Jews' minds. Jesus does some great things in his final days to people who were considered outcasts. The Jews, the religious people of his day just ignored him. So Jesus is on his way to the cross, and he's going through Jericho, and we find in our outline here, we'll just skip that, we find three points there in the back of your bulletin. We find point number one as we look at this passage and unpack it, the request of faith. And we're going to see here in verses 35 through 37 the misery of a certain individual here who's blind. Now, bear in mind that Jesus, going all the way back to Luke 9, verse 51, has been on His way from Galilee up in the north, working His way south to Jerusalem. And that starts way back in Luke 9, verse 51. At that point, He's making His way. So ever since Luke 9, verse 51, He's making His way south, south, south, going from village to village, village to village, doing this, doing that. And He's getting closer now. And as he's approaching Jericho, on his way to Jerusalem, this event occurs as an object lesson of what he can do, that he can deliver a blind man from his blindness, and he can deliver him from his spiritual blindness as well. Now, bear in mind, verse 35, it says, and it came about as he was approaching Jericho. Now, we all know about Jericho. We go back to Joshua chapter 6 and know about the old Jericho that was destroyed. And in fact, even today, you can go to that place and you find the remains of old Jericho. Obviously, it was there in Jesus. There were actually two Jerichos. There was old Jericho and new Jericho. And old Jericho was just northeast of new Jericho. And I'm sure in his day, the remains of that old city, Jericho, where the walls came tumbling down and they fell out, the Bible tells us. And when the archaeologists, this is a side note, did their archaeology work at the site of Jericho, they found that the walls had actually went out when they were destroyed. They fell outwards, away from the fortress itself. Archaeology, by the way, is a a science that has affirmed the Bible every time it's done. Every time the archaeologist turns his spade and finds a new site, and he compares it with what Scripture says, what they find lines up with Scripture every time. The Bible is a book that has been affirmed. We don't need their affirmation, but it's nice when we get it. It's nice when we get it. And so there are two Jerichos. There's the old city, but now here is the new city, the City of Palms, it was known as, because in the city of Jericho, it was a thriving city even in Jesus' day. It's six miles north of the Dead Sea, and it was a city that was fed by some springs. They had all kinds of irrigation systems where they grew not only figs, but they grew almonds. The climate was warm in the winter and really hot in the summer. a very hot and dry kind of climate that demanded that if they're gonna grow stuff there, they had to bring the water in, and they had those springs there, and they could do that. And I like that kind of climate. It's the same kind of climate where my son-in-law and daughter out in Grand Junction, Colorado, they have a lot of, they grow peaches out there and other fruits out there in western Colorado. I love the climate out there. It's a nice, arid, dry, It's very hot in the summer, and the winters are very rare do they get much snow there because it goes over the top of them and into the Rockies. So it's not very snowy there in the winter. That's to my liking as well. And so I think of Grand Junction, Colorado when I think of Jericho. And so here's Jesus. He's on his way to Jericho. By the way, Jericho was a place that Mark, you've heard of Mark Antony, that historical, he gave the city of Jericho to his, his girlfriend, Cleopatra. I don't know if you knew that or not. I found that out in, I think it was Josephus. Herod loved Jericho so much that he built a fortress there and a palace, and then at the end of his life, he went there to die. Nice place to go and die. Jericho. And so here's Jesus. He's on his way to Jericho. And by the way, just a few weeks before this, before we come to verse 35, Jesus has just, he was up to his little place called Bethany, and there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was dead for four days, and Jesus raised him. And everybody knew about that. Here's Jesus coming to Jericho, and they know it's him, they recognize him, and the city is abuzz, if not just for that reason by itself. that Jesus healed a man who was four days in the tomb, who was already stinking from a rotting carcass, and he brought him back to life. And so here, Jesus enters into the city of Jericho, and there's a blind man sitting by the road, begging. And the plight of all blind men was to simply be a beggar. You were an outcast. And there would be all kinds of reasons that you could be blind. But he had it. And there was another man with him, as you look at the other two Gospels, as I mentioned. And that was probably a good deal for both of them, because they could help each other. They kind of hung out together. These two blind guys hung out together, and they could help one another to the best that they could. And so they're very debilitated. sitting by the road, and all they can do is beg. And Jesus is passing by, and the one man that's mentioned here heard all the commotion, and he's starting to ask questions. Now remember, again, their blindness was considered a judgment by God. We know that back in John chapter 9. Remember the disciples asked, why is this man blind? Was it his parents or who, that he was born blind? And Jesus said, well, it was neither. Remember that? They want to say, if you had blindness, it's because you were under the judgment of God. And so, therefore, you deserve to be blind, so why should we help you? If you're under God's judgment, I don't want to tamper with God's judgment on you. You're just going to have to endure it, buddy." And so, this man is very, very caught up in his own misery. And he hears Jesus coming, and in verse 38, as soon as he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he called out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Again, we know this guy. He's named over in Mark chapter 10, verse 46, his name is Bartimaeus. Now, just remember that, that he already has a name now that's given in the Gospel of Mark, so that what happens to this man, it's stuck because he became part, it seems like undoubtedly he became part of a solid group of believers who were following Jesus at that time, and so much so that he's named. And it says here in the text, in verse 38, that He called out, verse 38, He called out, saying, Jesus, Son of David. The Greek word there for called out is boeo, which literally means just to call out loud. But when you go to Matthew's account over in Matthew chapter 20, Matthew uses the word kras, which means to scream. Matthew's word, kroz, is a word that's used of describing insane people when they're screaming out loud, or epileptics, or demon-possessed people, or women in childbirth. I mean, the word that Matthew uses is describing a really, really very loud yell. Now, it's understandable. I mean, there's a massive crowd here, a lot of buzz, a lot of conversations happening, and this man is going to try to get his voice above the crowd in desperation to connect with Jesus. He's got to lift his voice up in order to connect with Jesus. Or at least that's, of course, Jesus being God, he can just hear me if I whisper, but he's not thinking that. And he addresses him, verse 38, as the son of David, So he already affirms his belief in Jesus as Messiah. He sees that Jesus is the Messiah. He sees in his spiritual heart, that is. Like all other Jews, we're waiting for the son of David to come and take his seat as Messiah. And they are all anticipating that Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, was going to do just that. I mean, here is an anguish called out by a man who knows what Jesus can do for me. Have mercy on me, he says. Have mercy on me. You find that phrase, have mercy on me, used by the psalmist over and over again as you read through the Psalms. This is a very penitent heart. Here is a man who already has faith in the person of Christ, it would seem. But he wants to connect with Jesus, because he has a request of Jesus. Here is a man who knows his plight, and that it is not possible for him to remedy his own blindness. It's a beautiful moment. It's a beautiful moment that's shaping up here. And you really won't hear any more of such kinds of moments like this until maybe the thief on the cross, remember the thief on the cross said, remember me when you come to your kingdom. So here we have this blind man who's calling out to Jesus, son of David, and Jesus is going to ask him a question, which is, well, when we get there, it's just telling. It's interesting. But all along the way, verse 39, this man's calling out very, very loud, but the crowd control people in verse 39 are trying to tell him to pipe down, be quiet, maybe even a little more strongly, just to shut up. They're trying to put the quietus on him. And, but he, this blind man, this Bartimaeus, as Mark calls him, he doesn't stop, because he's a true believer. Nothing's going to stop this blind man, this Bartimaeus, from calling out to Messiah. He's begging, and now his one shot at connecting with Messiah is right here in front of him. And he refused to be beaten back into silence. He's not going to stop calling and calling out loudly to Messiah. There was nothing that was going to stand between this man and his Messiah. So he was relentless. to pursue Christ. He was not going to stop. And so we see the request of faith. The request of faith in verses 35 through 39. But then we see, secondly, the response to faith. Because in verse 40, there's gonna be regard by the Lord Jesus Christ for this man. Verse 40 goes on to say, and Jesus stopped and commanded that he be brought to him And when he had come near, he questioned him. Jesus just stopped. Jesus heard his voice. As you read Mark's account, interestingly enough, we are told that this blind man, that Jesus actually calls for the man out loud in Mark chapter 10. And Jesus then basically opens the door for the man when he says, he comes near to the man. And then Jesus, in verse 41, I love this question. I love this question. What do you want me to do for you? What do you want me to do for you? Wow. This is, this is personal. This is, there's a certain, what's the word, pathos here, a connection, you know, a unique connection, a pathos, that is between Jesus and this blind man, Bartimaeus. And with affirmation to the deity of Christ, verse verse 41, he said, and he starts off before he makes his request, he says, Lord, Kyrios, deity, Messiah, Lord. He knew to whom he was speaking. So he affirms the deity of Christ through the use of that term, Lord. It's not just simply The way humans would do it, you know, when we address somebody as Lord, if you go back to the mid-ages, middle-ages, you know, lords and serfs and servants and all that. No, this is reference to deity, to Jesus. And then he makes his request there in verse 41, and he says, Lord, I want to receive my sight. Now, the Greek word there, some say regain my sight, receive my sight. The Greek word is ana blepo, which suggests that this man may have lost his sight. He had it and then lost it. It seems that that could be a possibility here. He wasn't born blind, but he had sight, lost it, and he wants to regain it. He wants to get it back. And so, without effort, without fanfare, Jesus' heart is moved for this man. I just want to keep your finger here in Luke 18. I'm going to go back to the other passage over in Matthew chapter 20. Probably should have spent more time over there, but it gives you something to go back and study and compare it with this Luke's account. But in Matthew chapter 20, verse 34, Back in verse 33 is what we just read in the Luke account. He says, Lord, we want, here it says we. There's two of them here in Matthew's account and Mark's account. We want our eyes to be opened. Verse 34, and moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes and immediately they received their sight and followed Him. just a simple touch, he magnificently here grants their request, receive your sight. And by the way, if you go back to Luke, Luke says he made them well. Verse 42, he made, the Greek word there is sozo, which is where we, same word that's used for salvation sometimes. It's... It's translated here, made you well. It refers to deliverance or salvation, or sometimes the word saved. It's interesting, it's in the Greek, it's in the perfect tense again, so he's going to do this here, and it has ongoing results. In the perfect tense, as I've said before, it's the most interesting of all the Greek tenses. We got past, present, and future. We got three tenses in the English. In the Greek, there's five tenses. So it's a much more expressive language. It includes the tense called the perfect tense. So something that happens at a point in time and it has ongoing results. It emphasizes ongoing results. Like Ephesians 2.8 and 9, as I've said before, Ephesians 2.8 says, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. Well, in Ephesians 2.8 it says, for by grace you have been saved. Perfect tense, you have been saved, and it has ongoing results, because it's in the perfect tense. So here's a man who's been delivered, he's been saved, he's been made well, made well or saved physically, his eyes have been made well, and he's going to have his sight back. Now Jesus, in this case, he touches their eyes. Sometimes when Jesus heals, he does it with a word. He told one guy, you know, whose, I just forgot the story now, his son was at home, and he told him, your son is well. And he healed the man long distance. He wasn't actually in the presence, so Jesus can heal long distance. Sometimes he heals just by a spoken word. Sometimes he does it with a touch. Sometimes he used spit. Sometimes he spit in the clay or the dirt and he made clay or sort of a muck and then he applied it to him. Sometimes he put his fingers in people's ears. But no matter what gestures accompanied his healing, no matter whether people had faith, in this case he had faith to believe, there were people who were healed who had no faith. They were made well or healed regardless of having no faith. Jesus healed in all kinds of different ways. His healings were always total, instantaneous, verifiable, inexplicable. A miracle is, by definition, going against the normal rules of nature. Providence is God taking all the different natural things that are happening, all the events, and tying them together to work out His plan. Miracles are God superseding the laws of nature to accomplish His will. So God can work providentially or He can work miraculously. So here is this case, Jesus healed the man total, and it was verifiable. It's not like some of the ones you see on TV, where Aunt Betty comes in, and she's gonna see Benny Hinn, and she's got a sore back. And Benny puts his hands on her, and all of a sudden, her back pain is gone. Shazams. Well, I don't know, did she really have back pain? to begin with, I don't know. But if you are blind, or if you are dead, and all of a sudden, that's reversed, that is verifiable. That is seen. I can connect with that. Here's a corpse laid out in front of me. You go to a funeral, and somebody attends the funeral who's gonna raise that body out of the casket. Now, that would be shocking. That would be shocking. That would be, I mean, or there was a trick to begin with. That would be fun to watch, though, even if it was a trick. Just to watch the reactions of folks would be fun. But I have a warped sense of humor, but I digress. So, here is this man who has had these two men who are blind, and they receive total healing. Verse 43, and finally this morning, and immediately, As we've said, they received, according to Matthew and Mark, they received their sight and began following Him, glorifying God. And when all the people saw it, they gave praise to God. We see here, after the response of faith, but thirdly, the reveling of faith, because they began glorifying God. You see the fervency of their faith, and you see the fruitfulness of their faith. You see, all of a sudden, there's a following of Jesus that's immediate. There's obedience that's immediate, immediate. There's worship, they're glorifying God. So there's obedience and there's worship, and that happens instantaneously as well. Two characteristics common to all true believers is that they obey and they worship. Two characteristics of all true believers is that they obey Christ and they worship Christ. This man, you could say these men, did not have to warm up to Christ before they were willing to bow to His Lordship and to follow Him immediately. It was complete. It was total. And I would like to suggest, since this man was named, he undoubtedly followed Jesus all the way to Jerusalem and was part of the triumphal entry. Some, I read, suggested that Bartimaeus, this particular man, as he's named by Mark, maybe he was part of the 120 who met in the upper room in Acts chapter 1. We don't know. It's just that there was a knowledge of this guy that stuck even to the day when Mark wrote his, many years later, he wrote his gospel. So it was something that stuck over the years until the day Mark wrote his gospel, which was not immediately after the death of Christ. It was many years later, several decades later. So there's a fervency to their faith, there's obedience, and there's worship, and there's a fruitfulness to their faith, because you see there in verse 43, all the people saw it, they gave praise to God. The healed man, these healed men, their obedience and their worship were so intense that others around them were influenced to look at the worthiness of Jesus as well. When you get excited about Jesus, it can have an effect on others. It can have a positive effect, or it can have a negative effect. I'll grant you that, too. Paul mentions that over in 2 Corinthians 2. He says, we are fragrance of Christ. Wherever we go, we're a fragrance of Christ. To some, we are a fragrance of life unto life. To others, we are a fragrance of death unto death. We're all fragrancing Christ, but for some, it causes them to come to Christ and have life. We're a fragrance of Christ, and for others, and probably most people, it's a fragrance unto death. God's mercy extends to all who come to Jesus by faith. That's sort of the point of this passage. God's mercy extends to all who come to Jesus by faith. So what? Well, just a few closing points here, and I'll, we'll bring it to an end. When we cry out to God for mercy, He is moved with compassion and exerts himself on our behalf. He is profoundly compassionate. You see that in the other Gospels, particularly. Profoundly compassionate. We see also the experience of God's mercy and grace is not an end in itself, but the means by which we become avid, passionate followers of Jesus. And what Jesus did for blind eyes, he desires to do for blind souls as well. And fourthly, he is able to do for us far more than any of us can ask or think. Let's close in a word of prayer, and then if Julie's here, is Julie here? No, she'll be here. Father, it is your truth, your word, that always penetrates our hearts. Lord, I don't know if anyone here this morning who's not connected to you by faith. If there's someone here who is not sure of their salvation, but I trust, Lord, that every heart here would have the assurance of faith. We thank you that only a few days after this blind man was healed and saved that you paid in full the price for their sins. It wasn't too much longer after this. And we thank you, Lord, for the sacrifice of Christ to which we remembered this morning. the necessary sacrifice for our salvation. Lord, I pray that you would save people here from being doomed and damned. I pray that people in St. Charles would come to know you. I pray that through the efforts of each of us as we share the gospel with our neighbors and co-workers and family and friends, that you would save those out of the tyranny of sin. out of a certain eternal hell that people would be brought into the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank You, Lord, for the joy of forgiveness. Thank You for the joy of knowing You. Do Your work in our hearts. Lord, we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.