We turn to Proverbs chapter 16. Proverbs chapter 16, we will read together the first nine verses of this chapter. Our text is taken from the first three verses of the chapter, so if we pay more particular attention to those three verses as we read them. Proverbs chapter 16 and reading from verse 1. The preparations of the heart in man and the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but the Lord weigheth the spirits. Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. The Lord hath made all things for himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. Everyone that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord, though hand joined in hand, he shall not be unpunished. By mercy and truth, iniquity is purged, and by the fear of the Lord, men depart from evil. When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him. Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right. A man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps. Amen. Thus far we read in God's Holy Word. Beloved congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, every day that we live, we are doing things that have consequences, that have consequences for us further down the track in our life. And in fact, every day that we live, we're living with the consequences of what we have done in the past, decisions that we have made and attitudes that we have had. It's very obvious in certain ways, isn't it? If you're a student, if you're someone who's learning, whether it be at school or at university, you have assignments to do and exams to do and you apply yourself to them, you do them, you hand them in and you get the paper back and there's a grade on it. There's the result, the effort you put into it results. right there before you. In fact, when you look at it more long term, how much you apply yourself in school and how much you learn depends on what you will have and know to be able to apply it in the future. If you end up finishing school and you can't read or write, hmm. But this is true of the whole of our life. Every single day, We are making decisions, deciding how we will think and our attitudes in life that will actually have ramifications for the future. If you like, we reap what we sow. That's how the scripture puts it, isn't it? These things will bear fruit. Right now, today, we're aware of those things, of what we've done in the past. We're reaping the results of it. If you eat too much, then you're overweight. If you haven't paid attention to your garden at home, then the weeds grow up and it's full of weeds and there are virtually hardly any good plants. That's the situation we are in right now. There are all sorts of things in our life which are the results of what we have already done, the decisions that we have made. That's where we are now. But what about the most important things of all? What about the foundational spiritual things of life? Because those things have far-reaching consequences, not just for the whole of our life now, but for eternity. This is what our text this evening takes up. Our Covenant Heavenly Father He directs us to turn our attention to the decisions that we're constantly making in life. Often we don't actually really think about our thinking, do we? It just kind of happens automatically and things just roll on. But our Lord tells us that though we may think that we're doing a pretty good job with our thinking and our attitudes and so forth, that we ought to stop and think again about our thinking. In this text God informs us that we all too quickly assume we know what we're doing and that our thinking is right. But God says stop and do something that is so very important. He says allow God, allow God to examine our ways and our thinking and our decisions. We need God to weigh the spirits. That's the way our text puts it. We need to allow God to weigh the spirits. We come this week to Presbytery and this applies very much to us as Presbyters as we come together this week to spiritually care for the Church of Jesus Christ. Let's not too quickly, men, assume that we know. That what we think and what we know and what we want to do is already right and good. We need God to weigh the spirits. And that requires humble, careful and prayerful effort. Resting and relying upon the Lord and upon the truth of his word. But as we do so, whether it be the Presbyters this week or all of us in our lives, we can be sure of a wonderful blessing. Let's take up our text under the theme The Lord Weighs the Spirits. We'll consider it under three headings. First of all, about man's preparations. Secondly, we'll look at Jehovah's weighing. And thirdly, at our life established. The Lord Weighs the Spirits. Our text here speaks of the preparations of the heart in man. The preparations of the heart in man. To understand this just a little better, that verse 1 perhaps could be worded in this way. The preparations of the heart are in man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. In other words, But getting ready to do things and preparing and the planning and the decision-making and all of that sort of thing, these things are all found in the heart of man. The Bible is stating here something that ought to be pretty obvious to us, shouldn't it? In the whole of life, Our minds, our hearts are constantly going, aren't they? We're constantly thinking about things. We're thinking about what's going on around about us and our relationships to other people and the circumstances of our life and what we're going to be doing tomorrow and what that meant last week. It's going on all the time, isn't it? It may be that we're thinking about how we're going to answer a question that someone just asked us. It might be something as simple as, am I going to have a strawberry or a vanilla milkshake? It may be What kind of a job am I going to apply for? It might be, will we commit the church to this particular decision in Presbytery? There are a multitude of decisions and planning and thoughts and ideas and attitudes that are there in our minds every day. The Word of God is talking about our mind here. It mentions heart, doesn't it? The preparations of the hearts in man. The heart refers to our mind or the central being of us. It's the me in me that looks out through my eyes. It's the me in me that knows that this is me and what's going on within me all the time, in my thinking, in my decisions. That's the heart. It's the seat of our being. And apart from when we're asleep, our brain or our mind or our heart, if you like, it is going flat out with all sorts of thinking and planning and decision making. We ought to know that the Bible calls us to do this thinking with our heart, this decision making, with a care, with a diligence. Proverbs 4.23 Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life. That word keep there, it means to guard. It means to carefully protect. Take a hold upon your heart. Guard it. Watch what's happening with your mind. Guard it from things that might come in and influence it. Guard it in terms of what's going on inside it. Keep your heart with diligence for out of it are the issues of life. Proverbs 23 verse 19, hear thou my son and be wise and guide your heart in the way. The way of course is the whole of our life. God says to us, guide your heart, guide it. Don't just let your thoughts ramble on and wherever they go and whatever you're feeling and just let it go. It says, lay a hold upon it and guide it. Make sure you're controlling what's going on with those thoughts and those attitudes. We're told in the Scriptures that whether we eat or drink or whatsoever we do, do all to the glory of God. And that means that's the way we're to guide our heart. My thoughts, my attitudes are to glorify God, not just the things that I do outwardly, but right here in my inner being. We're never, therefore, to be careless. with our thoughts, our attitudes, what's rolling on in our minds, that we're to guard and be careful about that. But there's a further matter to consider here and that is this, and that's the fact that our planning, our decisions, our attitudes and so forth that are in us, they seem right to us. That's what our text says here, isn't it? Verse 2, all the ways of man are clean in his own eyes, in his own eyes. Do you see what the Holy Spirit's saying here? When we take up any matter at all, and it's there before us, and we're going over it in our mind, and we come to conclusions, make decisions, we believe that we've got it right. We'd be a strange kind of person, wouldn't we, if we'd gone over something in our mind, thought about it, and say, well, I'm going to do this because I think it's wrong. If we thought it's wrong, then we wouldn't do it, we'd do what we think is right. When we take up matters, when we have applied our mind to it, when we've come to the decisions, then our tendency of our heart is to say, well, surely I have got it right, to say to ourselves, Surely, anyone else in my position would come to exactly the same conclusions and have the same attitudes and the same feelings and so forth. We say to ourselves, you know, I have thought about this thoroughly. And particularly when it seems that others might disagree with us, we start to say this sort of thing. No, no, you don't understand. I've thought about this thoroughly. I've considered all the different things that impact upon this and I know it's all perfectly logical and I have excellent reasons to think this way. I defy anyone to show me that I'm wrong. Do you recognise that in yourself? We all tend to think like that, don't we? And yet Proverbs 18 verse 17 says, he that is first in his own cause seems just, seems right. But, his neighbour comes and searches him. What that's saying is, yes, it may be that we just look at things according to our view of things and from our point of view and from our aspect and so forth. We think we've got it right, no obstructions. Clean, as it were, that's what the scripture says. The ways of a man seem clean in his own eyes. But, all that you need is another person to come along and look at it and pretty soon it becomes apparent that there are holes in it everywhere. Just to give you a bit of an example of that, I'll tell you about some pretty clean thinking and logic that I had when I was a young lad. I noticed that when I was young, we had a family car and My parents used to drive down the road in this car and the car had a hole at the back of the car and they used to pull into the local garage and they used to get this hose and they put it in the back of the car and they just sat in there, it went gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle and they always seemed filling it up and then when they got back in they were really pleased and they said that the car would go much better now, go for a lot longer. So I applied my logic to it, I applied my brain to it. I looked at this, considered all the different aspects of this and said, you know, It's a lot easier way to do this. We've got a hose at home. So I got the hose and put it in the back and I filled it right up, you know, the water coming out and yep, I said to myself, man, my parents are going to be so pleased. My parents were not pleased. What could be wrong? What could be wrong with my logic? What could be wrong? What's the problem? The problem is we are so limited. We're so limited. We're limited in our ability to actually know and understand everything about whatever matter it is that we're considering. I'm so finite. I can only see things from these eyes. And I can't see things from everywhere at all. I'm limited in not knowing all the different ways that you could approach and deal with this issue. I don't know all the resources that might be available to deal with whatever it is. But do you know the thing that really limits us? It's sin. It's sin. Sin terribly affects everything that we do. And that goes especially for our thinking and our decisions in life. Jeremiah 17 verse 9, it tells us, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Now, that's talking about the natural heart. And yes, when the Lord comes and saves us, He gives to us a new heart, a heart that then loves the Lord, loves truth, loves righteousness, desires after that. But we need to always remember that although that is now the true center of me as a child of God, it doesn't take away from the fact that I have another law in my members. That in me, in my real being, in me, in my flesh, Paul says, dwells no good thing. I still have that old corruption within me. I still have that which is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. That's in me too, as well as a heart that loves truth and righteousness. That part of me is constantly going to want to lead me in wrong directions and with wrong ideas and wrong attitudes. It's deceitful. So that same heart is one that constantly rises up and gets in the way as I make my preparations and plans and decisions in life. We need to be aware of that. Presbyters, we need to be aware of that, but that's who each one of us is as we come together. But these truths, therefore, necessitate much more than simply being careful in life. There's no doubt, we've just looked at that, the fact that the Word of God says, guard your heart, be diligent about this, have a care. But if the central part of me is so badly affected by sin, then it's not just a matter of trying harder, spending more time thinking about it, or spending longer in the consideration of things. You know, the other thing that we can do also, and we need to be careful of this, is that sometimes we can say, I know, what I need is the Word of God. So what I do is I say, right, I think this is the right way, I think this is the good way, this is the way that I want to go. Now, where can I find somewhere in the Bible that will tell me that I'm right? That's wrong. We kind of then use the Bible as a kind of a backup plan to kind of bolster me along the way that I want to go, and therefore I'll be looking at the Word of God, not to find out what God says, but to find somewhere where it backs up what I want to do. We actually need something outside of ourselves, don't we? We need that to which we can take all of our thinking and our planning and our decisions, this, so that all of these things would be weighed up light thrown on them. We need the one who sees and knows all things perfectly. We need our God and our Saviour. We need Jehovah's weighing. Jehovah's weighing. Let's look at that in the second glance. If we would truly and practically do this, that is, take everything to God, take everything to His truth to be weighed properly, Then we need to do that by first of all remembering who we are. We need to remember who we are. Something that we tend to forget to do. We tend to forget who we are. We tend to forget the fact that we're sinners. We tend to forget about that deceitfulness that's within us. And then we forget that we've forgotten. We are blind to who we are and then we're blind to the fact that we're blind. It's a bit of a sad state of affairs, isn't it? We need to be reminded. The Word of God constantly brings it back to us. Presbyters, we need to be reminded. As we enter into this week, let's remind ourselves who we are. We're creatures. That for a start. We're creatures of God. God has made us. He's brought us into existence. He is the one that planned for us to have our lives, to be living right now in this world, in all the circumstances that we have, and He's planned for that for His own glory, not for ours, not for our personal happiness. He's planned it for His great glory. He's the perfect, beautiful, holy, and righteous God who sets before us all of His truth, and He says, now walk therein. for my glory and for your blessing. But we also need to remember not only that great truth, but the fact that we're fallen creatures, and not just creatures, but fallen creatures. We've brought upon ourselves the most horrible depravity, and that we are depraved in every part of our being. As our confession puts it, we are by nature wholly inclined to all evil and that continually. Wholly inclined to all evil and that continually. Yes, we have a new heart that now, instead of there being only that within ourselves, now we have a new heart that is inclined to all good, and that makes the warfare. The flesh against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh. But don't forget the reality of what's there. Don't forget that you are a fallen creature, as well as one who's redeemed in Christ. It's very humbling, But it's important to realise. Next, practically speaking, we need to remember not just who we really are, but we need to remember our calling. Our calling from God. What's our calling from God? It's to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. That first and foremost. That is the calling from God. It's what all human beings need to hear as the command from God. Repent. and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Repent means a change of mind. It means instead of thinking in this way, thinking with myself at the centre, that thinking needs to radically change, so that instead I have God in His glory, and I have Christ as my Saviour and my King at the centre of all of my thinking, and I think and live that way, to repent and to believe and cast my trust upon Jesus Christ alone for my salvation. I am not just a little bit condemned before God, but I am utterly condemned and I need entirely the mercies of Christ to save me. There is not anything that I bring to my own salvation. It is all of God and all of Christ. That's my hope. His mercy, His perfect sacrifice, His righteousness, His most powerful transforming grace. But you know, my ongoing hope is also in Christ. When we talk about repenting and believing, it's not just once. It's not just that we repent and believe once. We actually need to be confessing and repenting and learning to believe more and more every day. My thinking needs to be changed every day. There's a continuous calling to walk more and more in the covenant life with my Saviour and my King and for Him to guide me. to change me, to constantly be changing my thinking so I'm repenting more and more every day. I need my mind transformed every day. There's never going to be a time when I'm not going to need to have my thinking changed. You see, once again, my natural tendency is to think in error. I'm a Christian. and I needed the mighty power of God to bring me out of death and into life, and I couldn't do it by myself as a Reformed Christian. That's what we confess, isn't it? That it's all of God and He saved me. But then I start to think, oh, but now that I'm saved, now I'm right and I can walk in my own strength and my own power now that God has made me alive again. What foolishness, what foolishness. That's what Paul says in Galatians 3 verse 3. He says, are you so foolish? Having begun in the spirit, are you now made perfect in the flesh? No. I need the mighty transforming grace of God every day. I need the strength of Christ every day. I need the wisdom of Christ every day. And I cannot do one good thing without Him. Deuteronomy 4 verse 9, God says to us, only take heed to yourself, keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Don't forget what God's Word has told you. You have need of God's wisdom, of God's strength, of God's grace in Christ every single day to guide and to keep your heart. That's what James 1 was talking about too, that we read earlier. James 1 in verses 23 through 25 about the hearer and the doer of the Word. It's not saying, hear the Word of God and then go out and do it. It's not actually saying that. It's actually saying, if you would be a doer of the Word, it means come to the Word of God and see yourself there. It's talking about looking in a mirror and seeing who you are. To not be a doer is to look in the Word of God, see who I am, and then go away and live my life as a doer, if you like, but forgetting who I am, forgetting that I'm redeemed, forgetting that I live in daily dependence upon the grace and strength of Christ. And then you may well be keeping outward things that are commanded in the Word of God, but you're not a doer of the Word if you've forgotten to every day humbly rest in the grace and strength of Christ. Be a doer of the Word. Look into the law of liberty. That's what it calls it, the Word of God there in James. It's called the law of liberty, the law of freedom. The wonderful truth of Christ sets me free. It sets me free by being in bondage to myself and all of myself and following my own selfish heart, and it sets me free to be able to rest in Christ. It sets me free to be able to confess my sins, to confess my failures, to confess that my thinking is not what it ought to be, to confess my attitudes are wrong, to cast myself on Christ again, to know freely of my sins forgiven, to have the freedom to lay hold upon His strength and grace and to walk as I ought to. Our text therefore says, commit your works unto the Lord. Commit thy works unto the Lord. The word commit there is very expressive. It actually means to roll up or to roll over. As it were, the Holy Spirit's taking us to take all of our thinking and our attitudes in life and bundle it all up and roll it over to the Lord. I'm not going to hold on to any part of it. I'm not going to hold on to this and say, well Lord, I really like doing this and therefore I'm not going to expose it to the light of your word. No, we take all of it, we bundle it up and we roll everything over to God and say, Lord, In the light of your word, I commit it to you. We need to actually do this, don't we? We actually need to put it into activity. It's all very well to say, oh yes, yes, I should commit everything to the Lord, I should roll everything over to him, but we need to do it. Proverbs 28 verse 26 says, he that trusts in his own heart is a fool, but whoso walks wisely, he shall be delivered. If you go on trusting that, oh yeah, I don't really need to roll this over to the Lord, I've got that sorted in my life, I've already made those decisions and they're right, I know, God says you're a fool. Don't do that. Every part of it, commit it to the Lord. Commit every part of your life, every day, to the Lord. How do we do this? Let God weigh your plans. Let God weigh your plans. When it says, God weighs the spirits, notice it says there, God, the Lord, Jehovah, weighs the spirits. The spirits refer to our inward motives, our inward desires. It's all very well to look at the outward actions, but God doesn't look just on the outward, does he? God looks on the heart. God's word is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrows and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. We need God to weigh the heart, my intentions, my desires, my motives, and that's what I need to really be examining. What's behind what I'm doing? What's behind what's going on in my life and the decisions that I make? Allow God's Word to weigh up what's happening. Perhaps a couple of examples with that. How do we respond? How do we respond to others? As we live in the church, we live in the midst of the church, we live in the midst of families, and we're there as husband and wife, we're there in families and parents and children, and as we live in the larger family of God and in the congregation, we're people, we're sinners, we're stumbling saints and we offend against one another, We desire to do good to one another but there are plenty of times when we hurt or offend one another and we do wrong against one another, don't we? It happens all the time. Presbyters, we come to Presbytery and we're there and at times we disagree and one person says this and another person says that and we've got to work through those things. How do we respond? And particularly, how do you respond in your mind and in your heart? What rises up there when someone else disagrees with you? contradicts you, even criticizes you or perhaps even does something hurtful to you. What happens? Have you examined that? Have you taken that about what's actually happening in you and have you rolled it over to the Lord and said, Lord shine your light on my heart, on my motives, what's going on in me that I may really see there? We can do that ourselves, can't we? Just look. What do we do? Do we immediately, when someone contradicts us or criticizes us, disagrees with us, do we immediately get self-defensive? Get an offended tone in our voice? Quickly the inner lawyer steps up and tries to show why I'm right and you're wrong? In scripture, the light of the word then coming God's Word weighing us up. God's Word tells us that we need every other member of the body. Presbyters, we need one another. I'm very grateful that we do, in fact, have all of the men on the presbytery. I'm grateful for every one of the other elders. Because the fact is that if myself, if I made all the decisions for the Church, the Church would be a mess, they'd be gone. And that's true for every one of us. We actually need the multitude of counsellors, so that each one of them brings that which is necessary. God tells us that we need each other, every one of the others in the church, It's necessary. Not only are we to listen carefully and graciously to what they have to say to us, even if they don't come in a right way, even if they say things in not such a good way or a bit offensive or whatever, we're to listen. And not only that, but as they bring the truth of God's Word, we're to be positively influenced by that. Do you know, even when they bring that which is sinful to us, that's to influence us also. It's to influence us to show forth the grace of God in responding. What's our heart like? Have a look, take up, actively examine the response of your heart and roll it over to the Lord, examine it in the light of what God says. We really ought to actively seek the advice of others, shouldn't we? We really ought to not only roll things over into the light of God's Word and His truth, but we ought to be willing to use the communion of the saints to speak to us also, to look at our lives, to look at what we're doing, the decisions that we've made, and be willing to have others say to us, what do you think? What do you think of the way I am in my marriage? What do you think about the way I'm raising my children? What do you think about the decisions that we've decided to do as a family? To actually be willing to have the saints speak to one another, to be accountable to one another, to provoke one another to good works. This is what it means to be a body intimately connected to one another. Do we have a heart that desires that? What about our spare time? God says, you have time. I give it to you. It's my gift to you to use. And he then says to us, redeem the time. What do we do with it? You have to have time for sleeping, for eating, for your chores, your work, your housework, whatever it may be, but then you have all sorts of other time that is then there available for you. How will you use it? Do you simply say, I want to do this, this is what I feel like, what's wrong with it? Or do we say, God in the light of your word and the needs of others that I see around about me, And as I listen to others and I hear what their suggestions are as to what the best way to glorify and honor God, that's how I'm going to use my time. Do we take all things and roll them over to the light of God's Word and into the communion of the saints and the wisdom that is found in other people? Psalm 139, verses 23 and 24, we sang it earlier, didn't we? Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. I need to be led in the right way and therefore, Lord, search me." That's the true prayer of the honest and humble Christian. Such a person will truly take everything of their life and bring it into the light of God's Word. Knowing that we are forgiven, then there's a freedom to confess our sin, to confess that which is wrong, to be turning from it. It's a relief, in fact, to do so. Though at times it's hard. We can start radically changing the things that we do, gladly taking up the wisdom of God. As we do so, our life will be established. It will be established. Let's look at that in the third place. Our text says, the answer of the tongue is from the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. If we are wise, if we take and we commit every part of our thinking, our life to our covenant God, roll it over to Him, He will bring to us the answers from His Word. He has promised to do so. God graciously, He gives us the preaching of the Word, which is the main means of grace, but He's also placed into our hands the Word, so that we can take it up personally, and we can read there, we can study it. and the word we need to hear as God speaking to us for all of our life, to speak to our lives, really and practically. Let's come to the Lord. Let's seek from Him that true assessment of our life and our thinking and our mind. Let's pray to Him for such a thing. May I ask you, do that, do that even this evening. Presbyters, do that this evening. earnestly ask the Lord for a humble spirit to cast aside our own wisdom, particularly as it becomes obvious that we've been foolish, and seek for the light of God's Word to be that which guides us. Pray for the wisdom indeed to know that that's going to happen often. Sometimes we're kind of happy when we just sort of pick out some little thing in our life and we change it and we say, oh, there, I've been But it's true, we need to have our minds transformed, to be transformed. Let's pray for grace to know and to understand His Word so that we can be casting aside our own thoughts and attitudes and instead more and more have the mind of Christ. But know that the answer of the Lord, the answer of the Word is not just found in the word of God itself, whether it be in the preaching or whether it be in our own reading, it's also from the saints. God has placed us in the church for a reason, the beautiful blessing of the body of Christ. And God gives his word into so many hearts. transforming all of his people in various ways. He causes that word to lodge in their hearts, and different ones in different ways, so that they are brought to a greater wisdom in different ways. Let's hear the Word of God as it actually comes to us from all the different ones of God's people. Let's hear that wisdom. It's wonderful that in the Church, not only Is it all the truth that comes to us from others as they speak the wisdom that causes us to grow? It's even the faults and failings of others that make us to grow. When others sin against us, when others bring faults against us, it actually reveals our hearts, doesn't it? It actually ought to wake us up and say, whoa, look at the way in which I responded. And then we roll that over to the Lord. We say, Lord, what's going on in me? What's the attitude of heart and mind? And in that way, that's also the answer that comes from the Lord too, isn't it? God's answering our prayers when we say, Lord, show to me, reveal to me how wonderful it is to live in the church. Give thanks to God for his word and for the church of which God has made us a part. In the church, in the visible church, that's where Christ is to be found. That's what you heard this morning from Pastor Higgs, wasn't it? That's where Christ is, that's where he's active, that's where he's working, even through the other saints. Be listening for the answer of God as he teaches and instructs and leads us in the right path. But not only do we receive the answer of God when he weighs up our hearts and gives us that answer, but then our thoughts will be established. That's what our text says too. The end of verse 3, and thy thoughts shall be established. That word established, it means to make firm, to make solid, like being placed down on a very well made foundation that is absolutely solid. God is saying that when we do this, when we commit our works to the Lord and we have His wisdom that is shaping our thinking and our attitudes and our decisions, that then our life will be set down into a firm foundation. What's that foundation? It's Christ, isn't it? It's our Lord and Saviour. He's the rock upon which our life is to be built. It's to actually know that every part of our life arises out of Him. That's where my life is to be found. That is what I am to base all of my thinking and my decisions upon. Who He is to me. The fact that He's my Saviour, the fact that He's my King, the fact that He leads and guides me, the fact that I am dependent upon His grace and strength every day. Because Christ never changes, then the foundation of our life and daily living don't change either. And we come to that truth. Now that doesn't mean that suddenly one morning we're going to wake up and have everything right, no. This is a process that God continues to work in the whole of our life, isn't it? But, as we take up what God tells us here, as we remember it more and more, then our lives will be established more and more. They will be made more and more firm, settled into Christ and that blessed living. that leads to an assurance of a solid life. Ephesians 4 verses 13 through 16 speaks of instead of being children that are tossed all around the place, instead we become more and more settled in Christ. And we speak the truth in love and we edify one another. May we seek such grace from our Heavenly Father. Seek it earnestly. Have our Saviour weighing our life and establishing our way. Not only as individuals, but may the presbyters be praying and seeking for that as well as we enter into our work in this coming week. May the Lord bless us richly in this way. Amen.