Well, good morning, all. Nice to be back. This is, I think, my fourth visit this summer, and I drive the hour, but it's a joyful drive. It's 61 miles. That's fine. It's fine. Occasionally, I've driven 100 miles to Cleveland. This is a lot better than 100. So here we are, and we are visiting, once again, the visions of Christ that are inside the book of Revelation. And if you've been heeding, you now know that there are seven such visions. They're not numbered like the other sevens in the book of Revelation. If you know that book at all, you know that there are seven letters to seven churches, and there are seven seals on the great scroll of destiny, and there are seven trumpets warning their warnings to the impenitent, and seven bowls of wrath, oh my, and all kinds of sevens and sevens and sevens, very often numbered, seven visions of the Christ. not numbered, but we are invited to discover them. So we've heard from Revelation 1, the first of them, Revelation 5, the Lamb upon the throne. We skipped number 7, chapter 7, the Lamb upon Mount Zion. Last visit, we heard of the great angel Colossus, who is the Christ angel in chapter 10, who rules over land and sea and sends his gospel. And today we're in chapter 12, one of my favorite chapters in all the scripture. Please open your Bibles to Revelation chapter 12, and let us hear and consider with care the word of God. Revelation chapter 12, the word of the Lord. A great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven, an enormous red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns and seven crowns upon its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1260 days. Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down, that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth and his angels with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say, now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. And they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens, and you who dwell in them, but woe to the earth and to the sea, because the devil is going down to you. He is filled with fury, because he knows his time is short. When the dragon saw that he'd been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of a great eagle so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she'd be taken care of for a time and times and half a time out of the serpent's reach. Then from his mouth, the serpent spewed water like a river to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her children, namely those who keep God's commands and hold fast to their testimony about Jesus. And the dragon took his stand upon the shore of the sea. So far the reading of God's own word. Thanks be to God. So the woman, the child, and the dragon, our topic today. Revelation 12, a woman clothed with sun, moon, stars, a newborn child born to rule the nations for the throne of God, a monstrous dragon who eats children. Oh, my. A newborn child caught up to heaven, a fleeing woman, a war in heaven, a dragon cast out of heaven, war on earth, a woman with eagle's wings, a dragon spewing not fire but water, to drown a woman, the earth swallowing the water to save the woman, and the dragon making more war, but now against the woman's other children. There's our story. It's really weird, isn't it? Which makes this book one of the weirder books in all the history of the world. But it really is quite beautiful. It's like cinema. It's a movie in the mind. Now John the Revelator, there he is on the island of Patmos, seeing these things unfold in vision as the gift of Jesus to him. The first chapter tells us that. He's in persecution. He's been exiled from his adopted city of Ephesus. He's been on that island of Patmos since about 94 AD. He's there for probably two years to the death of his emperor, the persecuting emperor named Domitian, who wanted people to proclaim him as Lord and God. Get along fine with you. Just call me Lord and God and all shall be well. and the Christians wouldn't do this. So, of course, John is on the prison rock of an Alcatraz, off the coast of Ephesus in the Aegean Sea, and Jesus appears to him in vision and grants him access to the courts of heaven and to the visions of what God is doing behind the scenes of history. It's a movie in the mind. for him, and he writes it in words that are so vivid that it's a movie in our minds too as we read it. So why does this book called the Apocalypse major in what looks to us like cinema? There are no cameras in John's day, but the book is full of pictures. Why a biblical book so filled with images? What wisdom of God is at work in producing a book such as this last book on the Bible? So think on the fact that in the gospel God ordained for us, not the word alone, but as we see today, the word and the sacraments. We have Bible, we have baptism, we have scripture, we have the sacred supper of the Lord, Calvin for whom your church is named, called the sacraments of visible word, the gospel made tangible. And that's a fine description of what we experience today in the hearing and the celebration of the sacrament. And in the same way, the word itself comes to us in many ways. The gospels are essentially biographical reports, selective. We get about 30 days total out of all the life of Jesus, 30 some years. We get reports of about 30 days in total, that's all. And the focus is upon those last from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. About a third of the total gospel text, the words, the ink on the page is that story of Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday in the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And in those gospels, we also get parables, which are literary fictions. There is no particular woman with the lost coin. We can't go to her party, at least not literally. But through those literary fictions, Jesus teaches deep and divine truths that God rejoices, heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents. Okay, so the lost coin is found. There's not a particular coin. The coin is a person. All right, parables. And we have the erudite epistles from St. Paul that sometimes, as Peter says, are perplexing, hard to understand. Yeah, even Peter the apostle says that about St. Paul. You ever get perplexed by Paul? Peter was too sometimes. All right, we're in good company. And then we have the laments of Jeremiah and the cries, the pleas of the book of Psalms, and then followed by their majesty and their hallelujahs that end the book. And so all these genres in the Bible appeal to all the senses and all the emotions and all the powers of our mind and imagination, proverbs and laws and exhortations and oracles and the center of it all. not actually the geographical center of the Bible itself, but the center of it all is the four gospels, which tell the story of the earthly mission of the Lord Jesus, who's the only savior of the world. The book of Acts tells how Jesus, now in heaven, leads the church by his spirit to worldwide mission, to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. You'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Acts chapter one, verse eight. And after the Gospels and Acts, we have the epistles, which expound this in detail. They line out the intellectual consequences of the ministry of Jesus, and not really the intellectual consequences, but the life consequences for how we must live as devoted Christians. Words that are designed to produce careful reflection by hearers and readers, and then careful living. within the gift of faith and repentance. And in light of all that, the apocalypse stays a bit apart, distinct in its design, distinct in its function, unlike anything else in the New Testament. In fact, only one other book is quite like it in thoroughness, and that's the book of Daniel, which we sometimes call the Old Testament apocalypse. And here in the apocalypse, the very word itself, by the way, means revelation or unveiling or disclosure. And the very first line, as you've heard, labels the book as the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants about what must soon take place. That's sentence number one. That's the title of the book. The revelation that is the unveiling, the disclosure of Jesus. It's about Jesus. It's from Jesus. It focuses upon Jesus. And it does so by way of weird images, a movie in the mind. Are you with me? And by the end of that book, the grand story of the Bible comes to a stunning conclusion. A grand story from Eden to the end, not the end of the world, but only the end of the world as we know it, and we'll feel fine. From the garden of Eden, Genesis one and two, to the new Jerusalem, the garden city that comes down from heaven to earth. And we abide with Christ. in this city from heaven to earth. And as I mentioned in the past, that boundary line between heaven and earth now doesn't matter anymore, because God lives face to face with us. In the final metaphors of the Bible, and metaphor, of course, always means more than it can by mere words. Metaphors and symbols are never less than they seem, they're always more. The Lord's supper is not less than bread and cup. It is always more. The words of the scriptures are always more. Heaven is behind them. The words are frail and human, infallible, yes, but they're human words. They speak a divine truth without error, but they still don't mace out all that heaven is, do they? And our minds come to the end of our powers of thought and imagination, and there is still more. Hallelujah. And so in our book of Revelation, God stretches our imagination, if you will, to the limit, and it's gorgeous. It's wondrous. And here we see in this story in chapter 12, what looks like the victory of the dragon. That is, he's able to kill the saints. He makes war against the rest of the children of the woman. Namely those who keep God's commandments and bear testimony for Jesus. That's us, that's believers. The dragon is enabled to make war against us. And the text tells us that they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. But as it looks like the devil wins. But the thesis today is altogether different. What looks like the victory of the dragon and the death of the saints is actually the victory of the saints, the defeat of the dragon and the triumph of the lamb. And that makes excellent gospel sense because after all, isn't it in the cross of Jesus that we find our greatest victory and what looks like the conquest by the powers of darkness, the son of God dying on the cross. It looks like the kingdom of God has come to an end. Well, what happens next? Three days later, we sang of it. Christ the Lord is risen. And the church meets on the first day of the week, which Revelation 1-9 calls the Lord's Day. Why the Lord's Day? It's the day of the Lord Jesus, the day of resurrection. And what looked like cross and death and doom and the end of all God's goodness for the world ends up being the greatest good. And out of death comes atonement. And so we Christians, what do we do? Verse 11, they overcame him. That is, believers overcame this terrifying, monstrous power, this dragon, this serpent of old. They overcame him. How? Verse 11, by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. And they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Wondrous. Wondrous. And so let us expound the text then in a bit more detail. We have first in verse one, a great sign that appears in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with moon under her feet, stars, a crown of them upon her head. And lest we think this is simply Virgo or something in the constellations of the heavens with Hydra, the dragon monster, also another constellation. Okay, John evokes the constellations here, but it's far beyond that. And the symbol actually comes by way of Genesis 37 where Joseph has a dream of his father and his mother, sun and moon, and 11 stars bowing down to him, the 12th star. Sun, moon, and 12 stars in Genesis 37, in the dream of Joseph, is the symbol of all Israel. And who is this woman? She's Israel, from whom the people of God are given their birth, from whom the Messiah must come. She is Sarah, and she is Rebecca, and she is Rachel, and she is Leah, and she, in a way, is also Mary, the mother of the Lord. And by the end of our story, we see that she's also the church. And so the ancient fathers rightly say that the one who has God for his father also has the church for his mother. The Bible knows nothing of those lone ranger Christians who were detached. No one can be saved that way, but let's not try it. It might not work so well. All right, so to have God as your father is to have the church as your mother. And she, in this passage, is something like, yes, the mother, church. In verse 2, we see that she's pregnant, and she's pregnant with none less than the Lord Jesus. A child, a male child, says verse 5, who will rule the nations with an iron scepter. That's Psalm 2 being quoted. And what is Psalm 2? The psalm of the rebellion of the pagan nations against the Lord and against his Messiah. And God, from his throne, speaks to the Messiah in that psalm. And he says, I've given you the nations as your inheritance. You will rule them with a rod of iron. Therefore, kings, wise up. Now get smart, you judges of the earth. Kiss the son, lest he be angry and you perish. And so Psalm two, a Psalm of the reign of the Lord Jesus over, yes, even the rebellious nations with the warning for them to repent. Yes, this is the Psalm evoked by verse five. The child who will rule the nations with an iron scepter. And we see in verse five that this dragon, this monster is not able to devour the child. That devouring evokes the cross, it does. But we see by the end of the verse that this child is snatched up to God into his throne and he begins his heavenly reign. In other words, this is ascension day. in metaphor, in beautiful cinematic imagery. This is the ascension of Jesus in 30ish AD. And we have within a single sentence, the whole gospel story all summarized from birth, okay, Christmas to ascension day, three, I'm sorry, 33 some years later. And so our story is especially about the effect of the ascension upon the history and the destiny of the world. In light of the ascension of the Christ who is destined to rule the nations, is it possible for the dragon to win? Is it possible? And the answer is no. He cannot win. And so verse five is the birth. It is the threat of devouring. It is the cross. It is the resurrection. It is the ascension. And thus Jesus has begun his heavenly reign in 30-something AD. And on the eve of that ascension, what does he say? The last lines of Matthew's gospel have it rather well. Quote, all authority in heaven and on earth. Some of you can quote this with me. Give it a try. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go. make disciples of all nations, teaching them, I'm sorry, baptizing them into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey, there's the word, obey everything that I've commanded you and indeed I'm with you always, even to the close of the age. Matthew's gospel climaxes with that final sentence. Revelation 12 is about that same reality of the authority of the ascended Christ to evangelize the world and to save his church from every danger. And so in verse six, we see the woman then fleeing into the desert and given the wings of an angel to get her there. I'm sorry, the wings of an eagle to get her there. And that evokes Exodus 19, where God brings Israel out of Egypt, quote, on the wings of eagles. And I brought you on the wings of eagle to myself. says God to Israel through Moses, Exodus 19 verses five and six, it's glorious. And so she has performed in Exodus in verse six, to the place prepared for her by God in the desert, and she's taken care of. Now the numbers are weird. The math of the book of Revelation is very weird. We see that she's taken care of in verse six for 1260 days. We later see that it's time, times, and half a time. And then we see elsewhere in the book that it's 42 months. Now, if you do a bit of math, you know that 1260 is three and a half years, roughly. 42 months also is three and a half years, something, and a time times, and half a time is also three and a half years, and all three of those evoke the time when Antiochus IV, known as Antiochus Epiphanes, desecrated the holy altar of Jerusalem in 167 BC and began to sacrifice pigs on it dedicated to Zeus Olympos. How long did that desecration of the altar happen? How long were the Jewish believers in the 160s BC persecuted to the death? About three and a half years. And then Judas Maccabeus delivers them and restores the temple and Hanukkah begins. First Hanukkah was December 164 BC. The altar reclaimed, rededicated, purified. and the temple cleansed of paganism and persecution ending. And so our symbol here in Revelation 12 is the symbol of the brevity of this deadly opposition that the serpent, the dragon does against the people of God. And so can the dragon win? Okay, his time is brief, says the text. And it so happens in the history of the church that persecution tends to be sporadic and brief. Even in the Roman Empire, Hollywood movies get it wrong, persecutions in the empire were usually local. Often it was only Rome or the environment of Rome. Sometimes it was Rome in Asia minor, that is Western Turkey, rarely was it the whole empire. And rarely did such episodes last more than a year or two. And so persecution rare, sporadic, and it fails. So the last persecuting emperor was Domitian who died in 311 AD. He had an empire wide persecution for 10 years. But on his deathbed, he realized that the persecution did no good. He wanted to unify the empire under his pagan emperor worship. It didn't work. Persecution disrupted the empire and was bad for business. So even Diocletian ends the policy of persecution. He gives a decree of toleration for the Christians. All right, that was the worst of all the persecutions. And we find the principle within our text. Persecution is often brief, intense, but brief. In another aspect of the metaphor of the time, the 1260 days, the 42 months, the three and a half years, this is also, now you have to trust me on this, but this is also the metaphor for the entire time from the ascension of Jesus to his second coming. Now, why in the world do I think that? Because the counting of the days begins with the ascension of the Christ, which is 30-ish AD. And the time of the end of persecution? Well, obviously, when Christ returns. So this is a symbol of the whole time of the church, the church that lives under the cross. And we see that Jesus, of course, will be victorious in it. In verse 7, because Jesus is now ascended in this much more powerful and redemptive form, I mean, he was always God, of course, the Son of God, the Word from all eternity. He was always, always that, sharing fully the nature of the Father and of the Spirit. But now he rises in his redemptive power as the one who has endured both cross and resurrection. He is now the redeeming Lord, which he had not been before. And so, of course, in his power of redemption, war breaks out in heaven by the rebels. And in verse seven, we see that war as the result of the ascension of Christ, an intense rebellion by the devil and his angels. But notice who fights the battle. It's not God the Father. It's not the Holy Spirit. It's not even the ascended Jesus who fights the battle. Well, here we see, of course, that the dragon or Satan is no eternal power. He's not a deity. He's a created being, he's an angel, that's all, just an angel. An angel who rebels and leads others in rebellion. That sweeping of the stars, a third of the stars out of the sky might mean that something like a third of the angels joined him in his revolt. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But in verse seven, it's Michael who goes to war. It doesn't even need the power of God, so to speak. The power of the archangel is enough. Michael and his army of angels fought the dragon and the dragon and his angels, and the dragon and his angels, quote, verse eight, were not strong enough. Oh, and so they are hurled down, verse nine, hurled down and his angels with him. Verse 10 may be perplexing to many. Now have come the salvation of the power in the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ. It sounds like second coming. It anticipates that. But the reality is very likely this instead. You'll remember that when Jesus comes announcing the kingdom of God, in the early pages of the Gospels. Well, Mark 1 for one, verse 15. The time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the good news. It's one of the most important sentences in all the history of the world. It's the first sentence of Jesus in his preaching. I use that sentence a lot in my preaching. And we see that in the earthly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, culminating in death and resurrection and ascension, the kingdom of God arrives in a new and more powerful way than King David or the prophet Isaiah ever would have known. The kingdom of God, of course, was present in that Old Testament. I'm an Old Testament scholar. I do that for a living. You know, the kingdom of God is certainly present in the Old Testament. The Psalms celebrate it. The prophets declare it. But now with the actual Christ upon earth and having lived and been crucified and been buried and raised and now ascended to heaven, ruling over all heaven and earth, we now have that kingdom in a new and far more powerful way. And that's what verse 10 is about. And so no more room for the dragon there. He's cast down to earth. Now, lest you be terrified by that, We see that in the codes of revelation, as in verse 12, the heavens and those who dwell in them are not only the saints who were actually in heaven with the angels and the throne of God in those descriptions, but also includes believers. And so we believers are the heavenly people of God. And St. Paul tells us in Ephesians 2 that we are already enthroned with Christ in heaven. and we are citizens of the kingdom. Paul tells us in Philippians 3 that our citizenship is in heaven. That is, we are already the heavenly people of God through faith in Jesus. So rejoice, you heavens, and you who dwell in them. That is, we are fundamentally safe from this fallen power. But who is at risk? Verse 12 again, woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has gone down to you. In the codes of the book of Revelation, those who dwell in earth and sea are those who have not repented, including those who will finally and fatally refuse the offer of grace. Now I've skipped verse 11, which is actually my key verse. So let's go there and revisit that in my last, oh, how long? I've got a quarter after 11. Okay, I've got to hurry here. So notice verse 11. Verse 11, they triumphed over him. Who? The saints, the believers, the rest of the children of the woman. That is those who keep the command of God and who bear testimony for Jesus. They triumphed over him. How? By the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. What does it mean when the text tells us that they triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb? Well, that Lamb of God idea is all through that Old Testament. And when Jesus arrives for baptism at the Jordan River at about age 30, there's John the Baptist, and John the Baptist knows who this Christ is. What's he say in John 1, verse 29? Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Wow. Glorious. How do believers triumph over the powers of evil? We triumph by the blood of the Lamb who has taken away our sins. Now, this particular clause about the blood of the Lamb especially pertains to the dragon in his capacity as Satan. Satan is actually a Hebrew word originally, satan, it means accuser. And in the secular world, if you can describe it that way, of Israel's courts in the villages and towns of the Old Testament, the one who is the prosecuting attorney is called a satan, a Satan. And in Job chapter 1 and 2, it is a Satan that accuses Job. And in Zechariah 3, it is a Satan who accuses the high priest Joshua of his crimes, his sins, his filth. And we finally get thee, that is the proper name, Satan, a time or two in the Old Testament. And that becomes typical then in the New. Satan himself, now a proper name. And Satan means, are you ready, accuser. accuser. Now, if we were outside of Christ, would the accusations from Satan be true and powerful? And the answer is yes. But if we are in Christ, do those accusations have any power whatsoever? The assurance of pardon this morning from Psalm 103 says, as far as the East is from the West, so far I remove your transgressions from you. That's pretty far. The prophet Micah says, I cast your sins into the depths of the sea. Hallelujah. All right. Our sins are gone. We stand justified. That is counted as right through faith in Jesus Christ. And Paul says that is faith in his blood. That is in the fact of his death. The Lamb of God who takes away our sins. And so Charles Wesley, I'm sorry, John Wesley famously says back in 1737, in the moment of faith, he says that Christ had died for my sins, even mine. Yeah, even mine. I love that sentence. How do you triumph over this monster, this dragon in this capacity of Satan, the accuser? You triumph by faith in the blood of the lamb who has taken away your sins and who has made you to stand. justified by faith, adopted as the child of God, and therefore rendered guiltless, despite the continuing evil of your heart. We are mixed. We are mixed to the day of our final breath. Our motives are mixed. But in Christ, all sin is counted aside. We are counted with the very righteousness of Christ, who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Satan cannot win. They overcame him by the word of their testimony. Again, verse 11, the word of their testimony. Now in Christian culture today, especially in evangelical circles, a testimony is your story of how you came to faith in Jesus. I had to give my testimony last Wednesday night at church camp. By the end of it, I was pretty well in tears. Okay, an emotional story of coming out of my rebellion when I was 16 years old in high school. But the word does not mean that here. Testimony is the technical term in the book of Revelation for the proclamation that Jesus is Lord. We proclaim Him. We proclaim His identity. And against the claims of Domitian, the persecuting emperor that puts John upon the island of Patmos, the emperor says, yeah, call me Lord and God. Christians say, no, no, no, Jesus is Lord. And to claim that Jesus, the resurrected Jesus, the Christ who is from all eternity and from the womb of the Virgin, the testimony that this is the Christ, the Savior, that is what revelation means by testimony. Now the word there is martyria in Greek. And the one who gives martyria is a martus in Greek. You hear a similar sound in English, martyr. In the first century AD, the word martyr meant one who gave testimony. By the second century AD, after the New Testament, it came to mean not only those who bore testimony for Jesus, but those who shed their blood, those who died because of that testimony. And so a second century saint is now named by the church, Justin Martyr, a Roman lawyer who became a Christian in midlife and gave his testimony before Roman courts and was beheaded by order of the Roman court. 165 AD, Justin through life, Justin Martyr thereafter. And he gave that testimony to declare the truth of Jesus. You can still read those testimonies from Justin Martyr. And so the third clause is true. They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. The first clause is about the blood of the lamb. The second clause, the word of their testimony, is their declaration of trust in this Christ, whom they rightly identify. And because of that blood and because of that testimony, their loves are now moved for the love of God. Love of self falls away, not totally in this life, but it falls away, and love for God comes to the fore, and we willingly suffer death for the sake of Jesus. And so can this dragon as Satan overcome us? The answer is no, because we are covered, so to speak. Our sins are covered by the blood of the lamb. And that other term for him, devil, diabolos in Greek, it means slanderer or liar. How do we overcome this dragon in this capacity as liar? We speak the truth. We bear the right testimony, the testimony of Jesus as the savior of the world. And then the original image of this terrible power is dragon, a monster that wants to devour children. How does the church of Jesus overcome this power of evil in his capacity as the monster that devours? They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. That is the willingness to carry the cross, that image of death. The willingness to drink the cup that Jesus drinks, to be baptized with the baptism with which Jesus is baptized, namely the baptism of death. The willingness to follow Jesus in his steps. This gives us, by heaven's strength, the power to withstand even that. And so in chapter six, we read of the souls of those who've been beheaded because of the testimony of Jesus. And they are comforted in heaven. And in chapter 20, we see that they reign with Christ. Hallelujah. Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, you are the Lord of the church and the savior of the church, the only savior of the world. And without faith, without repentance, we do not know you. but you bless us by your spirit and you move our hearts to trust no longer ourselves or some other power, but to trust you. And to have your atoning grace over our whole life, from the moments of our conception even to the moment of our death, so that all of our sins, past, present and future are covered by you. And no accusation of powers of evil can harm us. And by your spirit, Lord, you work in us the power of the truth, that we who believe testify rightly to Jesus Christ. That too is your gift. And we thank you, Lord, that in the midst of these gifts of faith and repentance, faith in your atoning blood, repentance from our evil works, you also work a love in us that is greater than the love of self, the love of God greater than all other loves. So bless us, Lord, in this day and hour. If we are not yet of this faith and of this repentance, Lord, work that in us and bring us into your holy kingdom. And if we are in that faith and that repentance, Lord, strengthen it in us and grant us every assurance that we indeed belong as the precious and beloved children of God who are protected from all ultimate harm. by your heavenly power. And we ask these things in your name, Lord Jesus, in the name of the one who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Amen.