Amen. Amen. Let's just show our appreciation for those fabulous children's ministry workers. All right. Well, if you have your Bible with you. By the way, thank you, worship team. That was wonderful, marvelous. I like that new song. I'm assuming that was, Rob, that was in Passed Around. That was a new song we did. Not the last one, but the one before that, right? I must have been in a coma or having a stroke or something. I missed that. I like that. That's really good. Not having a stroke. I like the song, just to be clear. Yeah, yeah. If you have your Bible with you, I'd love for you to open it to Matthew 6, verse 24. For several weeks now, we've been working our way through the Sermon on the Mount. Just a reminder, the Sermon on the Mount is not a sermon about how to get saved. It's a sermon about how saved people should live. And so, you know, I don't want you to hear anything we've been saying over the last several weeks and saying, well, if I just do that, then I'll be right with God. No, no, no. Jesus gathers together his disciples and says, as my disciples, as those who know me and will represent me in the world, as those who love me and follow me, I want you to live like this. Now, last week in Matthew 6, 19 to 24, we were looking at how Jesus was commending to his disciples a singular focus in terms of their ambitions and allegiances in life. He said, no one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he'll be devoted to the one and despise The other, you cannot serve God and money. So in that passage, Jesus identified money as a potential rival to God in terms of our driving ambitions and singular allegiance in life. But of course, that's not the only rival that Jesus identifies in the Gospels. Of course, he speaks about family. It's not hard to believe. He speaks about family as a potential rival to God. In Luke 14, Jesus said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And I mentioned last week that the word hate is often used in Semitic discourse to emphasize or underline an emphatic choice. Not this, but that. That's what Jesus was doing with money. He says if you try to serve two gods, God and money, eventually you're going to have to choose. And you're going to end up loving one and hating the other, meaning you're going to have to make a loyalty choice. That kind of descriptor is used in the Bible to emphasize the fact that some choices in life are binary. You can only have one best friend. You can only have one top priority. You can only have one supreme loyalty. And if you try to live a life with divided loyalties, Jesus is saying, you're gonna end up honoring one and disappointing the other. You're gonna end up loving the one and hating the other. That's just how life works. You cannot serve God and money, just like you cannot serve God and wife, just like you cannot serve God and children. Only one thing can be at the center of your solar system. That's how physics works, right? The thing with the most gravity makes its way to the center. and everything else has to organize itself around that. So be careful what you put in the center, Jesus says. Be careful what you enthrone as the most important thing in your life. That's what we were talking about last week. Money must be rejected as a potential rival to God. But of course, saying that leaves an awful lot unsaid about money. We have a lot of questions about money, don't we? And I'll tell you this, we have a lot of questions in North America because we have so much money, right? You know, I wonder, maybe, I don't know, I never asked my great-grandparents this question, right? Maybe you did, but I don't know whether our great-grandparents wrestled with this issue the same way that we do. because they didn't have a great deal of money, did they? Most of them came here from somewhere else with little more than a suitcase and the clothes on their back, and so did they wrestle with money as an idol? I don't imagine that they did to the same extent that we do. So it's a more common temptation today, but then also, I would argue, there's more confusion in the church around money than there was in our great-grandparents' day, wouldn't you think? Our great-grandparents didn't have the prosperity gospel confusing them the way that we do. And one of the things that I've noticed is, for Christians, it's very hard for us to think clearly about anything when there are gross distortions at hand. Because what happens is we either buy into the gross distortion, so the gross distortion of the prosperity gospel is that God wants you to be rich, and if you're not rich, you must be doing something wrong. So if you are living a life that is pleasing and honoring to God, you are going to be healthy and wealthy. That's the prosperity gospel, which of course creates a lot of heartache for people who aren't healthy and wealthy. They're always wondering, what did I do wrong? Why doesn't Jesus love me? Okay, that's nonsense. I hope there's nobody here that believes that, right? But so as I say, when there's a gross distortion out there, it's hard for us to think straight, because then what we typically do as evangelicals is if we reject what's wrong, we run right over the road and into the ditch on the other side. And so now a lot of us struggle with how to think about material. We think that money is evil. We think that God wants us all to be sick and poor. But that's not true either. And so there's just a lot of confusion out there around money. A lot of guilt, a lot of hurt, a lot of idolatry, a lot, a lot, a lot of everything around money. And so I just thought last week, because the passage that we were looking at last week really only dealt with one thing, it was just saying you have to reject money as a potential rival to God. That's true, that's amazing, that's wonderful, please write that down, but that's not everything we wanna know. And so I thought maybe this week we could just pause and we could drill down and we could ask some other questions of the Bible in terms of how to think in our minds and in our hearts about money. So we're gonna play a little sword drill today. This is kind of an excursus sermon. I was saying to the preaching workshop this past week, I said, one of the things I've learned as I've got older is that if you try to say everything you think needs to be said in a single sermon, your sermons are gonna be an hour and a half long and your people are gonna be exhausted. So every once in a while, I'll just say what the passage says and then say, you know what, we'll get to all the questions we have in our hearts next week. So that's what this is. As I was writing last week's sermon, I thought I could make this an hour and 20 minutes, or we could just hit it again next week. So that's what we're doing. This week, it's all the follow-up questions you had that we didn't talk about last week. We're gonna play sword drill, we're gonna jump all over the Bible, and we're gonna hit on what various passages contribute to this question. What else, what else, does the Bible say about money? All right, so we'll put our first one down. If you're a note taker, we'll put our first one down from last week. This was last week's sermon. Money must be rejected as a potential rival to God. You can write that down. Leave a marker there, if you like, in Matthew 6, 24. You should have that verse highlighted in your Bible. And now we're gonna flip over to 1 Timothy 6, 9 to 10, where we're going to see that money isn't evil. in and of itself. That's the next thing that we can say from the Bible. 1 Timothy 6, 9-10 reads as follows. It says, but those who desire to be rich fall into temptation. Let's stop there. How many of us think, you don't have to put up your hand, but how many of us think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil? You hear that. People will say that in television shows. They'll say, well, don't you know, money is the root of all evil. We hear that, I think many of us instinctively think that, but again, that's not what the Bible says, so let's pay attention. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction, for, here it is, the love of money is our root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. If you think about it, that's not terribly different than what Jesus said in Matthew chapter six, is it? Money can't be your love. Money can't be your desire. It is very dangerous for you to crave it. Money can't be your life ambition and goal. Because if it is, then your life will be filled with darkness and shadow. That's a divided loyalty, right? I was at my middle daughter's high school graduation. I think it was two weeks ago now, 10 days ago or so. It was very interesting. An incredibly, a disturbingly high percentage of the graduates You know how they say, well, Joe is graduating from grade 12 today. And he's he's going to go to York University and study whatever. And his life ambition is to that's usually how they do it. And then he walks across the stage gets this thing and takes a picture. A disturbingly high percentage of students said that their life ambition was to make a lot of money. Now I would have I've been going to graduation for a long time. I got a lot of kids. And I would tell you that there's always one or two kids who make that joke, and we kind of giggle and we laugh, and it's fun to see kids finding their sense of humor, and that's good. But this was student after student after student after student, so much so that the MC finally remarked upon it. It was weird. Heaven help us if we have a generation of young people who have no other ambition in life than to make a lot of money. Because I'll tell you something, it's hard to make a lot of money without stepping on an awful lot of necks. And so what kind of world are we heading towards? That's what the Apostle Paul is saying here. It's the love of money. It's the desire for money. It's the craving for money that plunges people into ruin and destruction. That's what we have to watch out for. Money is a cruel master, but it can be a good and useful friend. and it's treated in the Bible as a blessing, not a curse. At the end of the Job narrative, you remember the story of the Book of Job? Book of Job in the Bible is presented as a true story in two different ways. I mean, it's a true story in that it actually happened to a guy, but it's true in the sense that it serves as a kind of parable of how life can work. And so Job was a really rich guy, and then God took away everything, took away his money, took away his health, took away his family, all the potential idols. And then Job is left with nothing. He's sitting naked on a dung heap, scraping his boils with a piece of pottery, and he prays that great prayer, right? Naked I came into this world, naked shall I leave it. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. It's a fascinating story, right? What's interesting, though, if you've ever noticed, is that at the end of the story, Job has his fortune restored and even doubled by the blessing of God. So Job 42 verse 10, and the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. You know, interestingly, a lot of modern Bible commentators don't like the end of that book. They want the end of the story to be Job died a poor and sick man, but he learned to be content with the Lord alone. But that's not how the Holy Spirit wrote the story. He said, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. Why? Because money is not a curse, it is a blessing. That's really what the Bible says about money. The Bible is not anti-material, for crying out loud, right? How could it be? The Bible begins with the words, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. So God is not anti-material. God is the source of all material. The problem with money, according to the Bible, is actually a problem with us. We are inclined to worship creation instead of the creator. We are inclined to worship the gifts instead of the giver. As crazy as that sounds, that's what human beings are inclined to do, and that is the textbook definition of idolatry. Idolatry, according to the Bible, is when we treat a good thing as if it were a God thing, when we worship it. But here's the thing. That doesn't make the good thing a bad thing. Money isn't evil any more than family is evil. The problem isn't having money, just like the problem isn't having a wife or a husband or a child. The problem is when we worship those things as if they were God. That's the problem. So money is treated in the Bible as a good thing that sinful people tend to value inappropriately and pursue indiscriminately. That's the issue. But money itself is good. God created it, and I don't know if you know this, but people will still have it even in eternity. Did you know that? In Revelation 21, 24, when the Bible is describing the new heavens and the new earth the restored universe. There's a little picture of the New Jerusalem, which is the capital city of the restored universe. And the Bible says this, the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. That's a direct allusion, direct citation from Isaiah 60. And if you ever go and read Isaiah 60, you'll see that it says there that the kings of the nations will bring their wealth as an offering to God in Jerusalem at some point in the future. That's a prophecy. Leading Bible scholars like G.K. Bill to declare in his commentary on Revelation 21-24, this apparently is intended to be understood as literal wealth coming from the nations. How about that? I always think Revelation 24 or 21-24 is gonna be a surprise to a lot of people for two reasons. Number one, most of us think there's gonna be no money in heaven and most of us think there are gonna be no leaders in heaven. So here we got kings bringing money to Jerusalem. What are we gonna do with that? There's gonna be money and wealth in eternity. We're gonna be digging stuff up out of the ground. We're gonna be making stuff. We're gonna be accumulating stuff. But the good news is we aren't going to be worshiping those things like sinners tend to do. Rather, we're gonna be worshiping with those things as human beings were originally created and intended to do. And that makes all the difference in the world. All right, third thing the Bible says about money is that it's good to have a little and really dangerous to have a lot. There's a fantastic prayer in Proverbs chapter 30. It goes like this. Isn't that good? And by the way, doesn't that run very parallel with the fourth petition in the Lord's Prayer? Give us this day our daily bread. So according to the Bible, it's good, it's good to pray for enough. God wants you to have enough. Sometimes you have not because he has not. We should pray that we would have enough. It's a good thing to pray that we would have money to buy groceries. Money to put gas in the car. Money to buy the necessities of life. Boy, if you can do all of that and still have a few dollars in your pocket before the next paycheck comes, according to the Bible, that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with having enough money to meet your daily needs. You should be praying for that and you should be working for that. The Bible says that God gives us money by giving us the power, the ability to make money. You hear that? God gives us money by giving us the ability to make money. Deuteronomy 8, 18, you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth. By the way, I love how that is framed. The Bible is so mindful of our tendency to worship the gifts instead of the giver. So it says, now listen, now listen, remember to worship the Lord, right? the Lord who gives you the power to get wealth. So there's the sort of encouragement, the directive with the warning in place. God's gonna give you the power to get wealth, and because you're a knucklehead, you're gonna wanna worship the wealth that you make, which is crazy. Rather, you should worship the God who gives you the power to get wealth. It's wonderful. Remember, according to the Bible, we were created originally to be cultivators. We were created by God, and then we were given a wonderful world filled with rich resources and tremendous opportunities, and God said, go till the earth. Work the raw material. Use your intelligence and ability and make wealth. We see the same basic worldview, the same basic approach in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul says, if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. Now, key word there in that verse, obviously, is willing. If someone is disabled and they're not able to work, don't use this verse on them, okay? That's not what the Apostle Paul is doing here. He is just teaching very much in line with Deuteronomy 8, that God isn't the handout department. He is the resource and training department. He wants you to make wealth with the gifts and abilities and resources that he makes available to you. And then he wants you to use that wealth to take care of yourself, and to take care of your family. In fact, the Bible says if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Did you know that verse was in the Bible? So the faith of the Bible assumes that you're gonna work, that you're gonna accumulate some wealth, and that you're gonna use that wealth to look after yourself and your family. None of that is bad. All of that is good and all of that is from the Lord. Thanks be to God. So it's good to have a little bit of money, but it's really dangerous to have more than you need. And we see that also in Proverbs 30. He asks for enough money, but not too much, lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord? Being rich is dangerous because rich people are tempted to think that they don't need God. It's dangerous to be rich because rich people are tempted to think that they're better than other people. It's dangerous to be rich because rich people are tempted to trust in themselves rather than in the grace and mercy of God. That's why Jesus said, truly I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. Again, I tell you, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. You know, last week, I mentioned that it's kind of a funny thing that we do here in North America. And I get it, I'm getting to that age where you dream, you know, there's a certain point in your life where you start thinking about leaving things to your kids and your grandkids, right? It's not inappropriate. We just saw like, anyone who doesn't take care of his relatives, and especially his family is worse than an unbeliever and has denied the faith. Well, I don't want to, that's not good. I don't want to be worse than an unbeliever. I don't want to deny the faith. So I mean, there's something good about that. But, you know, we start dreaming about what we'd like to leave our children and grandchildren. We start dreaming about giving our kids things we never had when we were kids, right? Oh, man, it'd be so good to supply my kids and my grandkids a place where we could all meet, you know, like a beautiful lakeside cottage with one of those nice Muskoka boats and, you know, a jet ski, probably three or four jet skis because we've got a lot of grandkids, right? And, oh, man. Wouldn't it be great to be able to give each of my kids and grandkids a new car when they turn 16? And then help them out to buy a McMansion down in Forest Hill? Wouldn't it be great if we could give them that? Like I said, there's something good in there. But we almost never account for Matthew 19, 23 to 24. Because according to Jesus, making your children and your grandchildren rich, providing them with a lavish lifestyle, might actually be the greatest unkindness that you could ever do. Might make them happier for 20 or 30 or 40 years, but it may also cause them to be miserable and in agony in the dark away from God for all eternity. Why in the world would you want to do that? Instead, we ought to be praying the prayer of Proverbs 30 over our children and grandchildren. Give my loved ones neither poverty nor riches. Give them that which is needful. May they always have enough, but do not give them so much that they forget you, nor so little that they be tempted to steal or defraud and so dishonor you and bring shame upon themselves, I ask in Jesus' name, amen. That's a good prayer. Because according to the Bible, it's good to have a little bit of money and very dangerous to have a lot. The fourth thing the Bible says about money is that it can be used to open doors in eternity. I mentioned last week that Jesus gives a very similar teaching in Luke 16 to the one that he gives in Matthew 6. It's slightly different, different audience, different emphasis, and some different illustrations. But it's useful to see the point that he's making there. If you have a Bible with you, flip over to Luke 16. If you look at Luke 16, verse 13, you'll see a verse that's familiar to you. Luke 16, verse 13, Jesus says, no servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. All right, well, you've seen that before, right? That's the same thing Jesus said in Matthew 6, 24. But here, though, he's making a slightly different point, and he's supporting it with slightly different illustrations. He supports the point here with a story that he made up, a little parable, about an incompetent money manager. Talks about a guy who squandered his master's wealth, his master's property, through poor management and was about to be fired. And so just before he was given his walking papers, he uses his master's resources to curry favor with some of his wealthy clients, thinking that they will then be kind to him and look after him when he is unemployed. And Jesus commends him for it, which is absolutely unbelievable. Listen to the application that Jesus makes here. He says, for the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourself so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. Have you ever read a weirder teaching from Jesus than that? That's an incredible, incredible story. Absolutely paradigm busting. Jesus doesn't say in this, he doesn't commend the dishonest manager for stealing his master's wealth and say, well, you know what? That guy should never have had that much money in the first place. I think that's how a lot of maybe left-leaning evangelicals would co-opt this story. That's not what Jesus does. He could have said that, but he didn't. Instead, he makes one simple and astonishing point. He says, use whatever money you have at your disposal to open up doors for yourself in eternity. You hearing that? Use money now to open doors for yourself in eternity. See, Jesus' understanding of how time was gonna process, his understanding of how history was gonna unfold, included this moment called the final judgment. Have you forgotten about that? And Jesus said at the final judgment, there's gonna be a great reordering of human society. Many who are last are gonna be what? And many who are first are gonna be last. The whole world's gonna be turned upside down. So there are gonna be an awful lot of people who are poor now, living the vita loca in eternity. That's what Jesus says in the New English Translation. They're gonna be managing five cities and overseeing thousands of properties and estates, and you may need a job. That's literally the punchline of the parable of the incompetent manager, the deceitful manager. The poor old lady, living on the garbage dump outside of Cairo, who sells and collects plastic bottles to help take care of the single mom living in the tent next door. She's gonna be absolutely loaded in eternity. So maybe it would be wise for you to do something nice for her. That's what Jesus is saying. Money given to the Lord's little ones now will result in blessing and increase in eternity. That's the Bible saying it. Now you say, well, wait a second, Pastor. I don't know if I like that. I mean, you sound a little crass right now. I can't believe that the kingdom of God works like that. That sounds a little tit for tat. Well, again, you're welcome to think whatever you like, but as for me, I'm going with what is in the Bible. And Old Testament and New, this is what is in the Bible. Proverbs 19.17 says, whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord and he will repay him for his deed. That sounds pretty straightforward to me, right? Give to the poor and that somehow gets deposited into some bank up in eternity where it gathers interest and then can be used by you in the future. Pretty straightforward. Jesus says something very similar in the New Testament. He says, whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward. Old Testament and new, anything given to the Lord's little ones now will result in blessing and increase in eternity. I didn't write the Bible, but I can read the Bible, and that is what the Bible clearly says. You can use worldly wealth to open doors in eternity. And then the last thing we should probably say is that money can also be used to do good things in the here and now. I think I left you in Luke, so go right probably 30 pages and you'll find Acts 4, 34 to 35. Let's have a look at that. There's a little snapshot of the church in its early and ideal state. So the text says this. This sounds good. That's amazing, that's incredible. Particularly incredible if you understand what was going on at the time, if you sort of widen out your lens and look at the wider story. What was happening is that believers from all over the Mediterranean world were relocating to Jerusalem. You remember the story of the Day of Pentecost? Peter preaches an incredible sermon. Anybody remember how many people got saved and baptized that day? Yeah, 3,000. 3,000. And many of these people stayed in Jerusalem. They didn't go back to Rome or Athens or Corinth because, of course, there was no church for them to attend at that point in the story, right? There would be 10, 20, 30, 40 years later, but there wasn't then. So initially, pretty much everyone who got saved was moving to Jerusalem so that they could be a part of the church. And of course, many of these people, they would not have had jobs in Jerusalem. And if you read Acts 5, it says that many of them didn't even speak the local language. So for the short term anyway, these people were completely dependent upon the church. And so what are you going to do? How is that going to be managed? That's why people are stepping up and selling their properties, so that the church could support this influx of new believers. So we get a particular example of that at the end of Acts 4, the story of Barnabas. So look down at verses 36 to 37. Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet. So this would be like, imagine if a revival broke out in Aurelia and a thousand people got saved in a single weekend. Maybe imagine that all of us are praying for VBS, and as a result, every kid gets saved, and all their parents get saved, all their grandparents get saved, and all their neighbors get saved. And there's just an explosion, there's a revival. Well, of course, we would have to respond to that as a church, right? Right away, we would have to hire like five staff deacons to take care of all these folks. We'd probably have to hire two pastors, two more pastors. We probably have to run the kitchen now seven days a week. We need to do all that immediately. We wouldn't be able to wait for the Christmas offering or we wouldn't be able to have a campaign to raise funds. And so someone here would have to step up. They'd have to make the decision to sell their cottage up in Muskoka and to lay the proceeds at the feet of the elected elders, right? Here's $2 million, brothers. Use it to take care of these new converts. That's exactly what was going on here. That's why they gave Barnabas the name Son of Encouragement. Encouragement is expensive. That's what was going on. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean that all the early Christians sold their properties. The Christians weren't communists. We know that because all throughout the New Testament there are references to churches meeting in people's homes. At the end of Paul's letters, for example, sometimes he'll greet the person that the church is meeting in their house. So Colossians 4.15 says, give my greetings to the brothers at Laodicea and to Nympha and the church in her house. Notice that he doesn't say, and don't forget to rebuke Nympha for owning a house. No, he says, no, greet her, honor her. Show honor to her because she has made her house available to the people of God. Again, we see that again and again in the New Testament. We see it in archeology. Almost all the churches we know about in the first couple of generations met in the homes, larger homes, of people who had been converted. So, to state the obvious, owning a large home is not a sin. In fact, it can be very helpful. Have you got a large house? Hold on to that. We might need that in the not-too-distant future. at all inconceivable to me that at some point in the future, the government of Canada might declare Sunday a carbon zero day with absolutely no travel for any reason whatsoever. Well, that'd be a bit of a problem for us, wouldn't it? Quick show of hands, how many of you traveled more than three kilometers to get to church today? It might be easier to do it the other way. How many of you traveled less than three kilometers to get to church today? It'd be me and you if this ever happened, right? I mean, we would immediately have to transition. Instead of being 450 people under one roof, we'd need to be 10 gatherings of 45 people or 20 gatherings of 20 to 25 people. That's an awful lot of large houses. So again, if you have one, please register that with the main office before you leave. Because just like the little donkey in the Palm Sunday story, expect at some point in the future for one of the disciples of the Lord to knock on your door and say, hey, the Lord has need of this. Be prepared for that. Money can be used to advance the Lord's work, and it can be used to bless the Lord's people in the here and now. The bottom line, my friends, is this. Money is a good tool and a bad God. But you know who's a good God? God. So what you need to do is come into right relationship with him through the person and work of Jesus Christ, and then organize everything else in your life around that. Put money in its proper place. Use it to take care of yourself. Use it to take care of your family. Use it to open up doors in eternity, and use it to do good to everyone, and especially to the household of faith. Thanks be to God. Let's pray together. Oh, our Heavenly Father, we need your help. We need your help to hear this right. We need your heart to have this settle right in our hearts. Lord, we need your help to do the inventory to discover whether or not money has become an idol in our lives. And then, Lord, if it has, we need your help to push it back into the orbit that it should properly have. Lord, there may be people here who don't even know what it means to put God at the center of their life, to come into right relationship with God through the person and work of Jesus Christ. I pray that the Holy Spirit would convict those people right now so that they wouldn't leave here without getting that sorted out. But Lord, for the rest of us who have Christ in the center, but who struggle still with roving planets and satellites in our solar system, I pray that by your spirit, we would learn to put things in their proper orbit. Help us to look at money the right way. Help us to be thankful for it, not to worship it, and help us to be willing to work for it as you created and intended us to do. And then help us to let go of it when we need to. It's not a sin for us to have these things that you've given us. It's just a sin for us not to let them go when you call upon them. So help us not to close our ears to the spirits prompting. Help us to allow these things to pass through our fingers as you intend them to. And may we make all that we are and all that we have available to your gracious gospel purposes. We ask in Jesus' name, amen.