As I get started this morning, I want to kind of give a disclaimer up front that I think the upcoming celebration of our nation's independence, the July the 4th celebrations, are a valuable part of our civic life, okay? So if you hear something in the sermon that sounds like I think otherwise, please remember this disclaimer here, sort of the Surgeon General's warning right off the bat. I think that one of the strengths of being a part of the United States of America is kind of that strong vibe that you pick up that extols the good virtues like independence and self-sufficiency and kind of a gritty work ethic and sort of an optimism despite sort of difficult circumstances. But a wise person once said that if you want to look at a person's weaknesses, just look over the shoulder of their strengths. And I think that's true of nations as well, not just individual people. If any of you remember when Jeremy and Gina Sink were preparing to go to Japan, they kind of gave us the thumbnail sketch of what Japan is like. And they talked about how the Japanese people are known for their strong work ethics. And that's combined with a fierce loyalty to family, to traditions, a fierce loyalty to their working relationships. But if you look over the shoulder of those Japanese strengths, what you'll see is a people being crushed by the weight of their own virtues. Many of those people are full of hopelessness. A lot of Japanese people are trapped in a fatalistic view of the world. There's a plague of suicide in Japan to the tune of 90 suicides a day in the Japanese people. 90 suicides a day. I'll let you do the math and figure out how many a year that is. So here in our nation, in our nation, we're fiercely independent. An individual's ability to choose is inviolable. Nobody can violate someone's ability to choose and that is protected at all cost. Self-determination rules the day here in the United States. And if you follow a person or you participate in a movement, it's because it's my choice and not someone else's. And you can't force me to choose otherwise. And the most powerful people in the nation, well, we put them there, right? Because we voted. And now you look over those independent, self-sufficient, and confident American shoulders and what do you see? You see our weaknesses. We hate to be ruled. We hate the word submission. We question almost every form of authority unless I'm the one wielding the authority. We hate to think of our circumstances that can't be controlled through some form of technology or some form of sort of psychological trick to help us adjust. We chafe and we broil about the people that don't seem to be affected by any leverage we have on them. because they're out of our control. Now you take all of those weaknesses that we tend to share as Americans and you bring those into the church of Jesus Christ. You bring those weaknesses into the people who Jesus purchased with his blood and what do we have? We have a church who has no idea what it means to have a king. No idea what it means to be a part of a kingdom. We have a church who struggles to understand what it means to submit to the words written by your king. The king who's telling a story of what his kingdom looks like. And he's calling us to die to our own little personal kingdoms and to come and live in his transcultural kingdom, his transhistorical kingdom, one that has been marching through history from before Adam and Eve fell in the garden. And then we come to Psalm 21. And Psalm 21's all about the king. Psalm 21 talks a lot about what the Lord has done for the king and what the king is like and what the people expect of their king. And we're like, you know, why do I care? I'm not the king. I didn't vote for him. I didn't know we don't live in a nation with a king. What does this got to do with me? And that's precisely the problem. We don't think in terms of having a king, at least not outside of these walls. We don't. So let's read our Psalm this morning, read Psalm 21 and, and see if we can see how having a king might actually make a difference in our lives Monday to Saturday. So Psalm 21, hear now the word of God. Oh Lord, in your strength the king rejoices. And in your salvation how greatly he exults. You have given him his heart's desire and have not withheld the request of his lips. For you meet him with rich blessings. You set a crown of fine gold upon his head. He asked life of you, you gave it to him. Length of days forever and ever. His glory is great through your salvation, splendor and majesty you bestow on him for you make him most blessed forever. You make him glad with the joy of your presence for the king trusts in the Lord and through the steadfast love of the most high, he shall not be moved. Your hand will find out all your enemies. Your right hand will find out those who hate you. You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear. The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath and fire will consume them. You will destroy their descendants from the earth and their offspring from among the children of man. Though they plan evil against you, though they devise mischief, they will not succeed, for you will put them to flight. You will aim at their faces with your bows. Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength. We will sing and praise your power. Will you pray with me? Gracious God in heaven, you have delivered us the word of the king. And we are the people of the king, we are part of your kingdom, and we serve at your pleasure according to your word. But we often fail to know your word. We often fail to remember who you are. And so Father, enliven our hearts and our minds this morning, send your spirit and turn the preached word into the very word of God this morning, that your people might know you more intimately and that we might follow you more closely and follow you with more joy than when we came in here this morning. Father, would you do these things according to the riches of your grace and mercy and according to the name of our King Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. Well, as So we begin to look at the text this morning. There's a close link between this psalm and the one that Chris preached on last week, Psalm 20. Psalm 20 is a cry for help in the midst of troubling times, and Chris wove the story of King David throughout his sermon, showing us that David was acquainted with trouble, acquainted with grief. And then we get to verse 1 of our psalm this morning and it shows us that the king has received deliverance From those troubles that he was asking help for back in psalm 20. And so what was the king's impulse in verse 1? He says O Lord in your strength the king rejoices and in your salvation how greatly he exalts the picture here in verse 1 is like those times, you know when we were When we're kids and you're having one of those kind of silly playground arguments about whose dad is the strongest, do y'all ever have those? I hope so because I'm going to feel mighty lonely if I'm the only one ever had those arguments growing up. But yeah, you know, it's like my dad can beat up your dad. Oh, my dad's got a shotgun and, you know, stuff like that. Well, I remember I was a little boy. You know, you watch your dad do just dad stuff. You know, the jar of pickles nobody can open. Hey, dad, will you open this? Sure. And you're like, wow, I loosened it for you. Stuff like that. It picks up stuff that nobody in the house can pick up. And you're packing up the car to go on vacation. And you get your pillow and your two little toys with you. And your dad's got four suitcases and two duffel bags and something tucked under his neck. And he's walking out to the car with it all at the same time. You're like, wow, that's my dad. Well, that's what it looks like to rejoice in the strength of another. That's what we're getting at here in Psalm 21. Then there was a time when I was 13 or 14 years old and we were dropping off a friend at his house after a camping trip and I got out the car to help and his German shepherd came trotting up to the car and I put my hand out just for the dog to, you know, sniff my scent, check me out. Evidently I smelled pretty good because he He chomped down and tossed his head back and forth. And one minute I was looking at the dog and the next minute I was looking at the back of my dad. And what he had done is he had snatched me up around my little 14-year-old waist and tossed me behind him and put himself between the dog and me. And I didn't have time at the moment to to think about and reflect on dad's use of strength to protect me and save me. Mainly because it was the first time I'd ever said a cuss word in front of my dad. I was more afraid of him at that moment than the dog. I thought it was going to end my life right there. But it wasn't until later, after the shock and the pain died down and I realized that he wasn't going to kill me, that I reflected on what had happened and I realized The dad had saved me from danger. And I exalted in his saving me. And here in verse one, that's what the king does. The king does just that. The king's like a son whose father has just saved him. He's rejoiced in and he's exalted in the power and the salvation of the Lord that he himself has experienced. Now, of course, the immediate historical application is to King David. And King David has experienced salvation by God's covenant keeping hands during his lifetime. But this inspired poem here in Psalm 21 has a greater application, a further application in that Jesus, the son of David, saw salvation when his heavenly father raised him from the dead. It's hard for us to think of Jesus as experiencing salvation. But that's exactly what happened. Jesus was saved from the power of sin and death and was given authority and great glory as the eternal son of David, the eternal Davidic king. And that's what we all want, isn't it? Glory. We all want glory, right? And if we can't have glory, we wanna be close to someone who has it. That's, it's a basic human trait. You know, you see the little kid, the little toddler in the grocery store, they live in a world of, you know, fingertips and elbows and knees and they don't have any glory. They're this tiny little thing in the world of these giants. And so when they get scared, they cling to mom's leg because she's got more glory than he does. They want to be close to that. And why do people become bandwagon fans? You know that sports teams, you know the kind I'm talking about. They love the team that's winning all the games now, and then when that team starts to lose, where are they? They're off the bandwagon. Back when I was in high school in the 90s, the big team was the Dallas Cowboys. Everybody loved the Dallas Cowboys, even called America's team. But where are the, I'm hearing from the Redskins fans right now, and not everybody. But where are the throngs of Dallas Cowboy fans now? The Cowboys have lost their glory. Only losers root for the Cowboys now. I'm not just saying that as a Cowboys fan. I'm saying that as a red-blooded American. They've lost their glory, and so no one flocks to root for the Dallas Cowboys anymore. Or if a sports analogy doesn't do it for you, consider pop music. Back in the 90s, around the same time, Britney Spears, probably the most popular female music star around the same time. But how many people here would admit to enjoying her music still on a regular basis? You might actually enjoy it, but I doubt many would admit to it. And why is that? Yeah, somebody said who? I mean, yeah, really, how many people born before the year, I mean, born after the year 2000 wouldn't even be able to pick Britney Spears out of a lineup? She's lost her glory in our culture. And so nobody really pays attention to that. And just as a side note, you know if you rearrange the letters in the name Britney Spears, it spells Presbyterians. I'm not sure whether to be ashamed or proud of that. Or maybe, okay, if sports doesn't do it for you or music doesn't do it for you, what about in 2009? Does anybody remember the story of Michaela and Tarek Salahi? They were, they crashed. a state dinner at the White House. There was a state dinner in honor of the visiting Indian Prime Minister. They weren't on any guest list, and they breached two layers of security, one of which they had to present a photo ID. in order to get past it. And they weren't on the guest list, not on any, at any time. And yet they were able to get past both security checkpoints, all the way into the White House, all the way through the receiving line, and able to shake hands with the President of the United States of America. And they weren't found out to be party crashers until the next day when Mrs. Salahi posted pictures of their time at the White House on Facebook. Earlier, before they crashed the party, Mrs. Salahi spent seven hours in an upscale beauty salon near Washington, D.C. and borrowed $30,000 worth of David Uriman jewelry for the event. Now, why do people do things like that? We want glory. We all want glory, and if we can't have it, we want to be close to someone who has glory. But what happens when we hitch our hopes to human glory? It fades and you yearn for the good old days. Or maybe the glory, you achieve it and it's stripped away all of a sudden and it leaves you hollow, leaves you in despair. Or maybe you achieve the glory and once you get there, it disappoints you. Because after all that striving and years of straining to get the glory, when you finally get there, it's not very glorious. How many times have we heard of celebrities saying, once they achieve the highest place in our culture, the highest place of notoriety, they ask the question, is this all there is? Now consider verses two through six of our passage. The king has glory. The king receives lots of glory, but look at the source of that glory in verses 2 through 6. The king's glory is a gift from God. The you spoken of in verses 2 through 6 is the Lord. The Lord has given. The Lord has not withheld the request. The Lord met him with rich blessings. The Lord set a crown of fine gold. He asked life of the Lord and the Lord gave it to him, length of days. His glory is great through the Lord's salvation, splendor and majesty the Lord bestows on him. For the Lord makes him most blessed. The Lord makes him glad with the joy of his presence. The Lord is the source of the King's glory. But this passage is more than just about the glory that King David had 3,000 years ago. The psalm ultimately points us to the glory of the resurrected king, King Jesus. And if you look at the sermon notes page in your bulletin, I've given you two different ways of sort of looking at the psalm. There's an outline form and then there's sort of like a wheel diagram. But regardless of which way you slice this pie, the centerpiece The linchpin, the hinge on which this psalm turns, is the king. The king is central. Look at the things that find their ultimate fulfillment in King Jesus. Verse 3, Jesus is the one who is ultimately given rich blessings and a crown of gold from the Father. Jesus, after his resurrection and after he tells his disciples, gives them the great commission, say, go into all the world and tell them about my death and resurrection. Make disciples of everybody. And then he ascends to the father. His ascension is a symbol of his enthronement as king. He is ascending to the throne at the father's right hand. That's what the crown of gold ultimately points to in verse three. Verse four, it says King David would have an eternal reign. That he'd have length of days forever and ever. That's a poetic way of saying that King David's gonna have a long, rich reign and that his sons will dominate the kingdom of his people. But then the exile happened, didn't it? And the people of Israel The people of God were taken captive into Babylon and it looked like the line of David was broken, didn't it? Then Jesus comes. Jesus, a descendant of David. Jesus, the greater son of David comes and he comes and he seems really, really kingly and plays the part of a king and even has it over his head as his label. has it there on the cross. Imagine how heartbroken the disciples must have been when the man who they thought would be king died. But on the third day, Jesus was raised in power never to die again. There had been other resurrections or maybe we should say resuscitations. Jesus raised the dead all the time, but they died again. Jesus is the only one who has ever died and been raised from the dead never to die again. The eternal son of David has assumed his throne at the father's right hand and no human in this world, no demon in hell can threaten his authority or his rule as eternal king. In verse five, Having taken his seat as the eternal resurrected King, King Jesus now has great glory through the Father's salvation. The Son of God, he absorbed the wrath for sin that the Father poured out. But he received salvation when he was raised from the dead. And now Jesus basks in the splendor and the glory like none other. ever has or ever will. The splendor and majesty shines from his throne, whereas it says in verse six, he has great joy by being in the presence of his father. Brothers and sisters, this is your king. He is both human and divine, both God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. Now, why do I spend so much time talking about glory and the splendor of Jesus? But other than the fact that it's here in Psalm 21, I don't spend the time talking a lot about the glory of Christ first and foremost, because it's useful or practical. I do so because it's true. We spend, think about it, if we spend a great deal of time talking about the practicalities and the usefulness of a thing, we might come up with a wonderful plan of action, but find out at the very end of things that what we started talking about wasn't true to start with. But truth is rooted in eternity and in reality. Truth tears down walls and it splits open our pretensions. Truth evaporates our illusions and it has the power to break our chains. Truth, it digs down deep and lays a foundation that we can stand on. Truth fills empty vessels with living water. Truth burns away our dross and leaves us reflecting the glory of another. Truth does all this, not because truth is a concept, not because truth is an abstraction, but because truth is a person. And that person is the King. But you still might ask, what practical good is all this talk about the glory of King Jesus? Well, none, if you don't know Him. If you've never sworn a heart and soul allegiance to the king. If you've never submitted yourself in faith to his lordship, then the truth about the glory of his kingship, it's not just impractical for you, it's manifestly offensive. And it's offensive, I would say, because we're Americans. Like we talked about earlier, we didn't elect Jesus as king. I didn't put him on that committee. I didn't choose him to be on the throne of heaven and earth. I didn't choose him to be the one to decide who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. I didn't put him there. No condemnation without representation. That's probably what we would say in America. But if you have sworn your allegiance to King Jesus, if you have bowed your knees in faith before his throne, then the glory of Jesus is immensely practical. Because his glory is our glory. Dear Christian, listen to the glory that becomes ours when we are one with Christ through faith. And this is just a few verses out of Ephesians 1. In Christ, we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. And we could stop there and talk the rest of the time about that and not move on. But continue on, that's just one verse in Ephesians 1. In Christ, we are holy and blameless before the Father. In Christ, we are adopted as sons and daughters into a royal family. In Christ, we have received forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace. In Christ, we have obtained an inheritance, and the promise, the seal of that inheritance is none other than the presence of the third person of the Trinity. It's the Holy Spirit. So what practical good is the glory of Christ the King? Let me ask a few questions. Answer me this. Did anyone here this morning bring wounds and scars in here with them? Did you know that Jesus still bears his scars? Glorified, resurrected King Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father, still bears his scars, but They are now part of his glory. Can you trust that the wounds that you brought in here with you, that the scars that you bear from the battles of the past, can you trust that those wounds will one day maybe, those wounds may be made into part of your glory? Is anyone in here this morning come in here guilty? I'm not talking about the I rolled through a stop sign on the way to church kind of guilty. I'm talking about the kind of guilt and shame that if your heart could gag, it would. You think about what your king endured, your king on the cross. He took all of those defiling sins that you're guilty of, that I'm guilty of, and he took them into his body. And yet now he stands before the Father holy and blameless. Can you trust that the white hot brightness of his glory is enough to cause the stains and the darkness of the filthy sin that we are guilty of to be burned away? Kind of like Isaiah when he had the vision of God in the throne room. And he says, I'm undone. I'm a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips. And the angel takes a piece of glory from the altar, a hot coal, and touches it to his lips and says, you are clean. Your sins have been atoned for. Can you believe, can you trust that the glory of Christ is enough to burn away your shame and your guilt so that you stand before the Father holy and blameless as well? Or maybe someone in here feels orphaned or lonely, isolated. Sometimes the loneliest place to be is in the middle of a group of people who has loved ones around them and you feel like you don't. Your king stood alone in this world. He shared perfect joy and happiness and glory with his Father from before time began. The fellowship within the Trinity was perfect and blessed, and he stepped out of that and entered our world. No one, no one really understood who, no one understood Jesus. No one got him. No one could ever know the isolation he must have felt as he walked from day to day in this life. Can you trust that the King's glory is able to pluck up the orphan out of their isolation, pluck up the lonely and place them in families as his very own sons and daughters? So what is our response? What's our response to these great truths about the glory of Christ? Well, look at verse 7. What is David's response? Verse 7. The king trusts in the Lord. Verse 7 is the climax of this psalm, and it shows us this precise reality that The reaction to being exposed to the glory of the king is trust. And all the glories of the Lord's gifts to King David in the past, that's what gives him a deep root of trust in the Lord's faithfulness. The Hebrew word translated here as steadfast love, as I read it, some of your translations might say mercy, some might say loving kindness, but the Hebrew word is chesed. You gotta have a good amount of phlegm in the back of your throat in order to pronounce it. It's a word that's so full of meaning it's almost untranslatable. It's something like abundant mercy rooted in undeserved faithfulness to divine covenant promises love. It was this chesed love, this covenant faithfulness, that was the fountain out of which the king's trust flowed. And it was this steadfast covenant love. It was this covenant love that gave David confidence when he knew he had to face his and God's enemies. And that's where the Psalm turns in verses 8 through 12. Verses 1 through 6 has spoken of the king receiving all of the glory. And then verse 7 is the climax about his trust in the Lord. And now, after the receipt, the king receives the covenant blessing, now we read in 8-12 about how the king holds in his hands the covenant curses. The voice that's speaking in verses 8-12 is the voice of the people of God. It's a people waiting to see how their king is going to bring the kingdom to bear on their circumstances. It's a people waiting expectantly to see what the king will do with the kingdom. And part of that kingdom coming is going to include the destruction of the king's enemies. Now this creates a real problem for our modern ears and our modern minds. The secular person reads a passage like verses 8 through 12 and they say, You religious people, this religion breeds violence and hatred towards other people. You religious people are part of the problem. Well, yes, we are part of the problem, but it's not because of verses eight through 12. We're part of the problem because the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every person. And that's what our religion tells us. That's what the word tells us. The liberal mainline churches, They often look at passages and they blush and they're ashamed of things and they say, see, not all of this is God's word. You know, I mean, these are really just the words of an unenlightened kind of barbarian back in the Stone Ages. But Christian, neither one of those options is open to us. Neither one of those is open to us. We have to take passages like verses 8 through 12 at face value. where the Lord is clearly depicted as the divine warrior. We have to take these passages and receive them as bearing God's full and good authority. And we have to work them into our understanding somehow of how God in Christ rules and governs and moves and upholds everything in our world. And the key to understanding this passage And others like them is to remember that our king, who is Jesus, is not an earthly king. Now he did declare to us before he ascended all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to him, but he is seated at the father's right hand on a throne in the heavenly places and not on an earthly throne. So let's reread the verses 8 through 12 with that understanding. It helps bring the meaning into greater focus. So rereading verses 8 through 12. Christ's hand will find out all his enemies. Christ's right hand will find out those who hate him. Christ will make them as a blazing oven when he appears. The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath and fire will consume them. Christ will destroy their descendants from the earth and their offspring from the among the children of man. Though they plan evil against Christ, though they devise mischief, they will not succeed for Christ will put them to flight. He will aim at their faces with his bows. Interestingly, the word bows there is the same word in Genesis after the flood. where God promises Noah, I will put my bow in the clouds. It's a war bow. And that bow in the clouds is a promise to covenant keepers, a promise to God's people who love him and serve him. However imperfectly, however mixed motives we happen to struggle with from day to day, but it's a word of promise to his people, to covenant keepers, but it's a threat. to covenant breakers. Because at the end of history, in Revelation chapter one shows this, as God gets ready to pour out his judgment, he looks through the rainbow that surrounds his throne as he pours out his judgment. So we reread this passage in this light. And brothers and sisters, we're not the ones taking vengeance into our hands. We leave the vengeance business in this world up to Christ the King. And he will bring his justice in his time. But I want us just to look at one of these verses, verse 10, and consider one way of how that justice comes. Verse 10 says, you will destroy their descendants from the earth and their offspring from among the children of man. That sounds really harsh. And what is the best way to destroy? destroy an enemy's descendants? Is it best that you got to go kill him and his wife and his children? You know, you got to find his extended family because they're going to hold a grudge. So you got to kill his extended family and their children. And then maybe you got to, he's got some close friends and so you got to go kill them and their families as well, you know, just for good measure. Or is it better to turn an enemy into a friend? Is that not what God did for us? Are we not, as it says in Ephesians 2, children of wrath by nature? Are we not all, in our very nature, enemies of Christ, but God, as it says in Ephesians 2, being rich in mercy? Because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our sins, did he not make us alive with Christ, raising us up with him, bringing us into his family, making us his sons and daughters? Did Christ the King not cut off the descendants of his enemies by making us his beloved children? Because now how do we raise our children? We don't raise our children to be the enemies of God. We raise them to love Jesus. We raise our children to serve Jesus and to share what Jesus has done for them with others. Brothers and sisters, Christ the King is a divine warrior and he will bring an end to his and our enemies in one way or another. But we leave those ways up to him. And after all, we are the spoils of that warfare that he's been waging for thousands of years. I am a son who was once an enemy. You were children of wrath who are now children of promise. And that's worth shouting about. Or as it says in verse 13 in our text, it's worth exalting in the Lord's strength. It's worth singing and praising the power of our King. And that's what we've been doing since our call to worship this morning. And celebrating is what we're getting ready to do here. As we gather around the table of the King, we call it celebrating the Lord's Supper. Because when the King dies, the death that you deserve and that I deserve, When He takes your place and my place and then He's raised from the dead and we are declared holy and blameless, we are declared clean and set free and righteous alongside Him, well, that's worth a celebration. But the outward glory of this meal is pretty meager, isn't it? You get a tiny little piece of bread and a little Presbyterian shot glass I mean, I imagine a lot of your 4th of July celebrations are going to have a lot more flash, a lot more sumptuous food at the table. They're going to be a lot noisier and so on and so forth. But those celebrations are happening because our nation is celebrating that we have no king. And in those celebrations, we get to live by sight because it is true. There's no earthly king ruling over the United States, but we're Christians. We don't get to live by sight, we live by faith. If we had to celebrate this meal by sight, then history would end. If we celebrated the Lord's Supper by sight, then what we would hear and feel as we begin celebrating this, we'd hear a deafening thunder, we'd hear this terrible ripping sound as the roof is torn off and the skies are split open and the church would be torn from its foundations as we all ascend into heaven and King Jesus himself would join us and he would arrange us at his table and what we would eat, we would never hunger again. And what we would drink, we would never thirst for anything else ever again. As the song said that we sang right before the sermon, hunger and thirst will die. And we would be with Christ the King in the new heavens and the new earth forever. But we don't eat and drink by faith, we eat and drink, and we don't eat and drink by sight, we eat and drink by faith. So we eat this bread each time because we hunger and because we need to be made strong. We drink this little tiny cup of juice because life rings us out and wears us down and we need to be refreshed and we're strengthened and we're refreshed. Not because of our faith, not because our faith is strong, but because our King is strong. It's not our faith that gives us hope. It's Christ's faithfulness that does so. And Christ's faithfulness is directed toward his people who have been marked by baptism and made members of his body, which is the church. But what this also means, the flip side of that, is that if you're here this morning and you don't consider yourself a Christian, if you've never been baptized or joined a particular church, then this meal is not for you. And if that's you this morning, just allow the elements to pass by you here in just a minute. But if God's word has moved you in some way, don't let today pass by you. Don't let the opportunity to talk to a Christian about who this King Jesus is. But if you are a Christian, If you've been marked by Christ through baptism and been joined to his church, then this meal is for you. You're not welcome at this table because you've had all your doubts answered. You're not welcome at this table because you feel particularly in touch with the spirit this morning. You're not welcome at the table because your faith is strong or because you feel sufficiently bad about the sins you committed this week. No, if you're a Christian, We are welcome in this table because of Christ's death and resurrection plus nothing. As a matter of fact, if you're a Christian and you're wrestling with doubts. Then this table. is the right place to be. If you're wrestling with weak faith, this table is for you. If you're fighting a hard battle against sin in your life, then this table is for you. If you're worn down or worn out from life's just everyday burdens, then this meal is for you.