Well, we're going to read one more passage from Ephesians, which also is tributing to God a glory concerning His great love. Ephesians 3, 14 through 21. For this reason, I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height, to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who was able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us, to him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever." And all God's people said, amen. Father, as we approach your Word, we are considering a subject that is just difficult to fathom. But I pray that your Holy Spirit would open our eyes to get at least a glimpse and insight into the incredible treasures that you have offered to us by your presence within us and your love within us. Father, I pray that you would enable my feeble lips to be able to adequately explain the things that you have laid upon my heart, that you would bless the preaching of your Word. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, today we're going to be finishing off the miniseries on the practical applications of the attributes of God, and as you can see, this is the second Sunday that we are taking on the love of God. There was just too much stuff to do, and I kind of almost regret that I didn't do it all in one sermon, but it seemed impossible. Last week's sermon is absolutely foundational for what we're going to be talking about today, so I feel a little bit of stumped on how to do that. We looked at 14 aspects of God's love and how each of those aspects, when properly understood and applied, hugely strengthen the experience of God's presence in our lives. And though we delve deep into the doctrine of God's love, we also applied that doctrine in 14 different ways. So don't think of last week's sermon as being the theoretical and this week's is going to be dealing with the practical. They both deal with doctrine. They both were dealing with application, but point one we looked at last week was the character of God's love and the comfort and the challenges that brings. And today, and that was the heart of the sermon really, but today we're going to be looking at some of the results of experiencing God's love. And the first result I want to look at is the effect that it can have upon our fears. I used to be a very fearful person, and I can tell you that it was God's love poured out in my heart that has alleviated those fears and those anxieties, taken those away. And by the way, even human love can cast out fear. I watched a video of the world's most dangerous creatures. It was kind of a fun video, but one of the scenes in that video was a reenactment of a grizzly bear attack upon a couple, and that couple had been trained by the wildlife people that you never fight a grizzly. If it attacks you, you just curl up in a ball and play dead on the ground, even if it bites you and hits you. Well, they tried that and it didn't work. And the grizzly bear was hauling off the man. And the woman, when she saw that, the wife, she ran after the bear and hit it over the snout over and over again with her camera and chased the bear off. And she admitted it was kind of an irrational thing for her to do, but she said, all I could see was my husband, my love for my husband. I had to attack that bear. And it was kind of an interesting story. Now, if that's true in the realm of human love, how much more so in the realm of God's supernatural love does perfect love cast out fear? Look at 1 John 4 verse 17. This is actually one of several scriptures that speak of perfect love casting out fear. And I'm actually going to back up a little bit and start reading at verse 12. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us and His love has been perfected in us. So God's presence within us is a key to the perfected or mature love. It's not just a belief in doctrine. Like we saw last week, it's the presence of God with us that enables us to have, you know, these communicable attributes actually within our lives. And I'm not going to repeat what we said last week. Verse 13, by this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He has given us of His Spirit. So again, it's an experiential knowledge that comes from His presence with us. Verse 14, as we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world, whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God, and we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love. And he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. And so the context of this love, again, is God in us so that we can experience His love. And in verses 17 through 18, love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as He is, So are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love." So supernatural agape love and fear are incompatible. The true love drives out fear, and you might wonder why would that be the case. Let me suggest five reasons why that may be true. We saw last week that agape love is self-giving love, whereas fear is self-protecting. So those are two opposites. And you can think even on the lower level of that woman's preoccupation with saving her husband, she was giving of herself. It was going out. She was not preoccupied with the danger to herself. So, again, God's love can produce that to a much higher degree, to such a high degree that the Scripture says when we experience God's love, it enables us to love our enemies, those who persecute us. It enables us to bless those who curse, to forgive those who have killed our loved ones. We minister to those very people who have heard us, and I mentioned Richard Wurmbrandt and a number of other testimonies last week of people who have actually done exactly this. Second way in which they are incompatible, love and fear. is that love moves us toward others, even when there's pain, whereas fear tends to make us avoid people who bring us pain or even the potential of pain. Third, love asks, what can I do for my enemy, whereas fear asks, what will my enemy do to me? It's a different focus. Fourth, love thinks no evil, 1 Corinthians 13, whereas fear thinks of and focuses on all of the bad things that can happen to us. It's not focused on the promises of God. Fifth, love is so focused on today's tasks and responsibilities that it has little time to worry about tomorrow, whereas fear is so worried about all the potential things that could happen that it ignores the tasks and the responsibilities of today. And so one of the reasons that I urge you to seek the love that I described in great detail last week, is that it really can have a powerful impact on purging our hearts of fears and anxieties. This is not just theories. I've shared many examples with you, and I've experienced it too. It's an ever-increasing love for God and for others that has hugely helped me to conquer fear. The second result of tangibly experiencing God's supernatural love is that the more we experience it, the more our hearts are drawn out to Him. And if you have ever longed to enter into a closer walk with God, I would encourage you to begin putting on the 14 aspects of love that we looked at last week. 1 John 4, 8 says, He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. So to know God is automatically to grow in love and vice versa. The more we love God, the more we're going to grow in our knowledge of Him. Puritan writer Thomas Manton said this, We love Him because He first loved us. Love is like an echo. It returneth what it receiveth. There is no echo till the sound is heard. Our love to God is a reflex, a reverberation, or a casting back of God's beam and flame upon himself. The cold wall sendeth back no reflex of heat till the sun shines upon it and warms it first, So neither do we love God till our soul is first filled with a sense of His love. So he was saying if you want to grow in love, you must first become familiar with God's love for you. And we saw in our mini-series so far that that's impossible without practicing the presence. Third reason why I want you to pursue what we looked at last week is that experiencing God's love washes away hate, apathy, and bitterness that we might feel toward others. I should have put bitterness into the outline because that's the thing I'm going to be focusing on right now. Bitterness is so destructive. It always harms us. On Monday, Gary sent out a wonderful short little article from RW360 that was titled, The Stupidity of Bitterness. You might remember it. He likened bitterness to somebody that has meanly hurt us, maybe stabbed us with a knife, and we pull that knife out, and then we keep stabbing ourself with that knife. And we would never do that, right? That doesn't make any sense. And yet with bitterness, we actually do. He said, all too often, rather than turning to God for grace to respond to the wrong with wisdom and forgiveness, we choose to indulge bitterness. We keep thinking about that wrong. We play it like a video in our mind over and over. We stab ourselves with the sharp memory of the incident, feeling the pain again and again. The book of Hebrews says that bitterness is a vile weed that must be plucked up or it will defile many. If you hang around a bitter person too long, some of his bitterness or her bitterness is going to rub off on you. Okay? And so in your social relationships with each other and letting your children socially relate to others, you need to keep that in mind. Hebrews says, one person's bitterness, unchecked, can lead to more and more people becoming deviled. So how do we uproot bitterness? How do we throw it away? For some people it just seems impossible because it seems like that's a magnet that keeps coming into their hearts. Well, Sermon on the Mount calls us to appropriate God's conquering love, calls us to overcome evil with good, not to be overcome by evil. And that's something that does not come naturally to us. Christ said this, if you love those who love you, What reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? He's saying you're no different than unbelievers if the only people that you love are the lovable people. Right? Where's the evidence of your grace? God's grace in you if you never exhibit love for those who hurt you. He goes on to say, and if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Christ's point was that our lives should show the supernatural presence of God who reproduces His communicable attributes within us, love being one of those attributes. And Christ gauges whether God's love resides within us if we can love those who spitefully use us and persecute us and do all manner of evil against us. Now for many Christians, the words that Christ gave there just seem crazy. They seem theoretical. They seem impossible. And that's because they have not fully experienced God's love shed abroad in their hearts. They shake their heads and they say, nah, I'm skeptical of that. Christ said, blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad. Is that how you respond to people who are mean to you? It's not how Phil Kaiser naturally responds, at least not the natural Phil Kaiser, but I have responded in exactly those ways by God's supernatural grace working through me, and you can as well. There's no need to be controlled by bitterness, resentment, Anger, frustration, and inward seething. 1 John says, Agape love and hate are incompatible in the same heart. If we open ourselves to God's gift of love, and by the way, that is a hard thing to do because we feel like we have to nurse that bitterness. We don't want to relinquish it, but if we are to open our hearts to the love of God, that has got to be relinquished. And we will perceptibly find that bitterness being washed away. By the way, this is one of the things that has frustrated persecutors to no end. They try to make Christians hate like they hate, and sometimes they succeed, but when they see the supernatural love of the very ones that they are torturing, it sometimes is more than they can bear. And I read you some of those testimonies last week. Let me give you another testimony. This one was a former communist, told how he was a Secret Service agent who was part of the group that was torturing this one Christian. I was so frustrated because this Christian, they just could not shake the love and the testimony and the forgiveness that this Christian had. And so as one final act of spite, they threatened to kill this Christian in front of his wife, hoping that the hurt that this would bring to the wife would make this guy cave in. And it did not. He later recorded that this man's words made him seek Christ and become converted, but the husband told his wife this as he's about to be executed. He said, you must know that I die loving those who kill me. They don't know what they do. And my last request of you is to love them too. Don't have bitterness in your heart because they kill your beloved one. We will meet in heaven. Now, this makes no sense if you have not experienced the supernatural love of God shed abroad in your hearts. It makes no sense to the natural man, but it makes perfect sense to those of us who have experienced this in a real way. Richard Wurmbrandt said in one of his books, several Christians have asked me how we could resist brainwashing. There's only one method of resistance to brainwashing. This is heart washing. If the heart is cleansed by the love of Jesus Christ, And if the heart loves him, you can resist all tortures. God will judge us not according to how much we endured, but how much we could love. I am a witness for the Christians in communist prisons that they could love. They could love God and man. And if they could do that in their circumstances in prison, you can do it with the far lesser circumstances that you are facing today. Point D says that God's love causes us to want to know God's will. What do I mean by that? Well, I've known Christians who don't want to study what the Bible says about a given subject because they're not so sure they're going to like what God has to say. They don't want to find out. They're afraid of that. They're not open to knowing the truth. But 1 Corinthians 13 says, love rejoices in the truth. Love rejoices in the truth. If you don't want to find out about aspects of God's law, it is an evidence of either the absence or the weakness of God's agape love within you, and you need to examine your heart on that point. And I don't need to bring up what the issues are. You know exactly what issues you've been arguing with the Holy Spirit on. If I were to bring them up, you'd successfully argue with me. But you know what those are. Philippians 1 verse 9 says, And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment. He says the more you grow in God's agape love, the more you're going to grow in discernment and knowledge. Why? Because love delights in the truth. Love tells the Lord, Lord, I'm willing to do whatever you tell me to do, even before I know what it is that you are telling me to do. And it's because I love you that I want to know more of the truth. Please open the Scriptures so that I can understand them. But God's love goes beyond merely wanting to know about God's will. It desires to do God's will. There is an old Latin proverb that you may have heard that says this, and you can see it all over the web. It says, love cannot be commanded. That is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Jesus said, this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. And to those who have tasted of God's love, they delight in God's commandments. They're not offensive in the least. Why? Because we know His commands are for our good. Like David, we should be able to say, my soul longs after your commandments. So have you experienced that kind of longing? Have you not? you need to cry out to God to give you the supernatural love that we looked at last week. 1 John 5 says, this is the love of God that we keep His commandments and His commandments are not burdensome. If you love God, None of his commands are burdensome. Doesn't matter how difficult they are, we delight to sacrifice for God. Christ said, if you love me, keep my commandments. And I think this is what distinguishes human love from agape love. Human love is often offended by commands. Human love bristles when somebody commands them to do something. Agape love delights in that, and holiness just increases the experience of love. Christ said, if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in His love, John 15, 10. And so if your attitude to the law of God is a smorgasbord attitude, or you pick and choose what you want to obey, then you are still immature. You might have phileo love for the Lord, but not this agape love, and you need it. each of these points I'm giving to motivate you to dig deeper into what we were talking about last week. Now, I think one of the verses that has convicted me of my need to cry out to the Lord for more of His agape love is Romans 9, 1 through 3. And in fact, I want you to turn there, Romans 9, because this is just an unbelievable passage. Very hard for some people to even fathom that this could be true. Like Moses of old, God gave Paul such a deep love and burden for the lost that he said that he wished He could be accursed from Christ, go to hell so that they could be saved. And I guarantee you, no one has this in themselves. No one. It's a God-given love. And that's why Paul remonstrates here that he really is telling the truth. He's not exaggerating. And he has to remonstrate because it seems false. Apart from grace, we are self-seeking. Okay, Romans 9, 1 through 3. I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." Okay, so agape love is so self-erasing and so self-giving that it produced that kind of compassion in Paul as it did in Christ and as it did in Moses. Now, I don't pretend to be anywhere near that level of love in my own life. I have grown in love. It's a growth process you go through. But I don't have anywhere near Paul's measure of love for his enemies. But here's the point. If you have difficulty having a burden for the lost, you have no desire to go out witnessing, you have no desire to share with your neighbors, you don't have a burden for the lost, God's love is a solution. So hopefully you're beginning to see by now that we're not just talking about a doctrine, we're talking about a supernatural experience of God's love within us. And the beautiful doctrine that we looked at last week must become an experiential reality communicated to our hearts. Point G, experiencing God's love is the highest and strongest motivation to service. Let me tell you a story. There were a bunch of people who were applying for the job to be missionaries on the new missions board that Hudson Taylor had set up in China. And each of them was giving their motivations for why they wanted to go into missions. Some of them said they had a deep burden that the Lord has given them for missions. Others said there's a huge need and nobody's going, so I'm volunteering to go. Others said that they didn't want their consciences to be guilty of the blood of other people. Anyway, they gave various motivations, and here's what Hudson Taylor said. All of your motives are good, but I fear that they will fail you in times of severe testing and tribulation, especially if you are confronted with the possibility of having to face death for your testimony. The only motive that will enable you to remain true is stated in 2 Corinthians 5.14, for the love of Christ compels us. Christ's love constraining you will keep you faithful in every situation. And I will admit, I have had times, even in my ministry, where I have ministered out of motivations of guilt, or fear, or duty, or the expectations of others. And I'll tell you, those are lousy motivations. It is like the difference between running with 40-pound weights on your feet and skiing down a mountain slope. You can do either one of those. But one is a burden, and the other is delightful. It's freeing. It's exhilarating. To serve compelled by the love of God gives joy, freedom, enthusiasm, and perseverance. In fact, 2 Corinthians 8, 7 says that our love is actually tested by the diligence that it produces. What kind of love do we have? Well, take a look at your diligence. Next point shows that experiencing God's love produces strength to conquer sin and Satan and anything that enemies might throw at you. If you're constantly defeated, it could be another motivation to seek the love that we looked at last week. 1 John 5, 3-4 says this, For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. 4, here comes the reason why God's commandments are not burdensome, why they're not walking with 50 pounds on our feet. Four, whatever is born of God overcomes the world. God's love produces a conquering strength. Where men have struggled and struggled with sin before, once they have begun to experience God's love in this supernatural way internally, their obedience is now a joy and they've found victory. So what makes us more than conquerors in Romans 8? It's that nothing in creation can separate us from God's love. It's God's love that enables us to endure tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword. It's the love of God. Let me read Romans 8, 35 through 39. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, for your sake we are killed all day long. We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And then finally, experiencing God's love in a tangible way protects us from embracing theological errors. Why? Well, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13.6, love rejoices in the truth. David said in Psalm 26.3 that as long as he had God's loving kindness before him, He longed to know more of God's Word. But if we have more love for the praises of men, or if social pressures dominate, we'll be tempted to compromise our doctrine. In fact, in our culture, there are more and more evangelical pastors who are compromising the most obvious, gross ways, doctrine, because they've been living for the praises of men. Okay? They have pressures to please others, and the outline has other examples of love motivating us to embrace the truth. Now, I want to finish off this sermon by going through the steps needed to be able to fully enter into the enjoyment of God's love that we looked at last week. And the first and the most basic step is believing that this is even possible. believing that it's possible. Maybe some of you were skeptical last week that this might be true for Phil Kaiser, but it just can't be true for me. The outline last week should give you plenty of ammo to shore up your faith that God is indeed willing to manifest His love toward you. In Hebrews 11, He says that without faith it is impossible to please God, and of course we can't have faith without God's grace. Spurgeon says that it's impossible to produce this kind of love with a legal spirit. You know, what Brother Elliot was preaching on earlier. It comes from God, it must be received by faith. Over and over in John 6, Christ repeats, no one can come to Him unless the Father draws him. Now, that's obviously true at salvation, but it's true the rest of our lives. We need Him. Hosea says to the church, with loving cords the Lord draws us, right? Luke 10.22 says we can't know the Father unless the Son reveals Him to us. But I love the picture given to us in Revelation 3.20, and some of you probably have this memorized. It pictures Jesus in a strained relationship with the church of Laodicea. He's outside the church, and they're inside worshiping, and it appears that this seeker-sensitive church is having a blast. They're having a great time worshiping, and he says Christ is not even there. He's not present with them. God says they profess love. but they're really a loveless church. Only the presence of Christ can supply that lack, and Jesus invites them, just ask any individual in that church. All they have to do is ask, and I'll give it to them. He delights to give us. He says, behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him and he with me. Now, they're already Christians, but they were not experiencing this close walk with Jesus, and he promises that closeness is the solution to their lack of love. So, it's an invitation, but it takes faith. Second thing that needs to be present if we are to prevent these constant ups and downs in our Christian walk is daily devotions. Now just imagine what would happen, you know, to a couple You know, the couple's courting each other, and six times out of seven, the other person doesn't show up for the dates, and just doesn't seem to show much interest in spending time with that person. I don't think that courtship was going to last very long, would it? And yet, how often do we break our appointments with God every morning? God had daily appointments with His people that had this passionate love for each other. He had them daily with His people. I'll just point to one. Adam and Eve. God walked with them in the cool of the day. Okay, that's one time a day. There's this close walk. And then one day, Adam and Eve are not there. And He says to them, where are you? And I think that's His haunting cry to many of you in this congregation. Where are you? We cannot expect to grow in love if we do not have our devotional times with God. It is impossible. And it's irrational to expect love when you break your dates with Him. The third essential is to have a passion for God. Deuteronomy 4 tells us how we are to seek Him. It says, you will find Him if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul. And you think, oh man, that's just so hard. That's too much sacrifice. And yet you're passionate about other things. There's plenty of things that you could be passionate about. I think this is many times the missing step. God communicates the greatest passion of love to those who are the most passionate in seeking Him. Matthew 7, 7-11 tells us that God gives good gifts to His children, but He says He expects His children to be seeking Him, and here's how He words it, There are no exceptions, there are no elite in God's kingdom, for everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. That's a promise. So, do you have a passion in seeking after God? One author wrote this, are you on fire for God or are you an ice cube? If we took a survey, I believe the average evangelical Christian would answer, well, I'm not exactly on fire for God, but I'm not an ice cube either. Where does that leave us? About lukewarm? And then the article quotes Revelation 3 that describes Christ's attitude toward lukewarm Christians. So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. What was it that Laodicea, the loveless church, lacked? What did they need to repent of? Jesus said they needed to repent of a loss of passion. That's how they fell from their first love. They were neither hot nor cold. And I think passion is essential if this personal relationship is to be developed. And in the introduction to the service, I pointed out Moses constantly was pressing into the Lord. He wanted to see more of God, more of his glory. And Psalm 42 speaks of longing for God as a thirsty deer pants for the water books. That's a pretty deep longing. Jeremiah 29, 13 says, you will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. So again, there needs to be passion, just like there's passion in marriage relationships. Another important step for growth in this area is practicing walking in God's presence. Now, I'm not going to actually get into this because sermon number two on omniscience of God dealt with in depth what it means to practice the presence of God. So I'll just leave that for you. But fifth, the Bible calls us to obey God. If you have an obedience problem, you're eventually going to have a love problem as well. And actually, this is misleading. I probably shouldn't have made it as a step. It's actually, how do we maintain a relationship? John 14, 21 says, he who has my commandments and keeps them, that is, he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. Now, we want Jesus to manifest himself to us, but it's through Loving obedience, not just a formal obedience that that happens. It's in relating to Him that He manifests Himself to us. Verse 23 says, Jesus answered and said to him, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. And I should caution you, don't think that this is calling for perfection. It is not. It's calling for the pursuit of holiness. None of us is going to be perfect. Jesus in one place said, if anyone wants to do his will, he shall know. Okay, so no one's perfect, but if you desire, Lord, I want to be more holy. I keep falling, but I desire to be more holy. God answers that kind of a prayer. He will draw you to Himself. He will manifest His love to you. So it's a growth process. And that brings us to point F. David was not a man after God's own heart because he was perfect, but because he wanted to do right and because he quickly got right with the Lord when he sinned. He couldn't stand it when the relationship was gone. So you're going to sin over and over, but how quick are you to be restored to the Lord? The last point deals with the context in which love flourishes. God delights to give us love when we are faced with unlovable people. It's really in our weakness, the scripture says, that his strength is made perfect. Over and over 1 John says that we have no excuse for exhibiting hate just because the other person is hateful. It's precisely the situation where God's love can be exhibited the best. We'll never have Paul's burden for the lost if we never hang around the lost. if we never witness, if we never mix it up with unbelievers. We'll never grow in our love for the brethren if we do not minister in their lives and spend time with them. We must put ourselves in ministry opportunities where the greatness of God's love then can be manifested through us. One of my favorite lines from William Shakespeare is, love sought is good, but given unsought is better. And I think it's in those situations that love shines the brightest. But that requires your personal presence in the lives of other people. God's not going to give you a love for your children if you're not spending time with them. He's not going to give you a supernatural love for your wife if you're not laying down your life for your wife and if you're not serving her. He will not give you love for Him if you are not practicing the presence with Him. And so may each of us not only glory in God's love for us, it's easy to do that, But may we lay claim to the same love to be lived through us. Christ said, as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Continue in my love. May it be so, Lord Jesus. Amen. Father, we recognize our weakness in this whole area of love. We are blown away by the depth of love that you brought to Moses, and you brought to Paul, and you brought to so many other people. And we long to grow more and more like the Lord Jesus Christ. And so to that end, we pray that your Holy Spirit would fill us and communicate your attribute of love richly in our hearts, that we may love the unlovable and even our enemies. and not be overcome by the evil that they may do to us. Bless this your people in this way we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.