I invite you to turn in your copy of God's Word to Matthew chapter 3. Matthew chapter 3 we'll be looking at verses 13 through chapter 4 verse 11. So the second half of chapter 3. And the first half of chapter 4. Now last week, Matthew presented us with John the Baptist. You remember that John the Baptist came with a very specific mission. And that is to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was to call people to repentance. Because the coming of Jesus would indeed bring the kingdom of God. And so his message was repent, for the kingdom of God is near. As Jesus comes and as He brings the kingdom, the kingdom brings judgment against our sin. And so He called the people to repent. And John was baptizing people in the river Jordan as a symbol of our repentance. In other words, the baptism itself didn't save, but it was a symbol of our need to have those sins washed away, and therefore the people were coming repenting. Now, that was last week. John was preparing us for the coming of Jesus. Today, in our passage, we finally get to meet the adult Jesus. This is the start of Jesus' public ministry. And we're going to look at two very important events in the life of Jesus. His baptism in the second half of chapter 3, and His temptation in the wilderness in the first half of chapter 4. So let's turn there, Matthew 3, starting in verse 13. Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, let it be so for now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him. And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. And behold, a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. But he answered, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, he will command his angels concerning you and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. Jesus said to him, again, it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, all these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. Then Jesus said to him, be gone Satan, for it is written you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve. Then the devil left him and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. With this far the reading of God's word, may he bless it to our hearing, especially as it's preached to us this morning. Well, people of God, let me ask you, what does it take to get a driver's license? Well, you have to be able to show some kind of proof of who you are, proof of your identity, and then you have to pass some sort of proficiency exam in driving, unless you live in Texas. What does it take to buy a house? Well, you have to be able to prove that you have some kind of level of regular income, that you have good credit, and in most cases, you have to make a sizable down payment. These are the things that it takes to get these very important things in life. But really, there is something much more important, a much more important question that we should be asking, and it's this. What does it take to be right with God? That really is the most important question. What does it take to be right with God? And you might say, why is it so important? Well, Proverbs chapter 20 verse 9 says this, who can say I have made my heart pure? I am clean from my sin. The problem is that none of us can say that. Paul makes clear in Romans 3.23 that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And the bad news for us is that God cannot tolerate sin. Habakkuk 1.13 says, Your eyes are too pure to look on evil. You cannot tolerate wrongdoing. So God's holiness, our sin, that puts us at odds with God. Isaiah 59 verse 2 says, Your iniquities have separated you from your God. Your sins have hidden His face from you so that He will not hear. So we are not right with God because of our sin. So the question then is, what does it take to be right with God? I'm going to give you the answer. It only takes two things. You might consider this, if you will, the first point. Even though it's really part of an introduction. But the two things that you need to be right with God are forgiveness and righteousness. Forgiveness and righteousness. Let's look at the first one, forgiveness. In Romans 14, verse 11, Paul says, as I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall confess to God. So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God. So we'll all stand before God and be judged and give an account of ourselves. And that account will be all-encompassing. Ecclesiastes 12.14 says, God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil. So God will come and examine. He knows everything about us. And so this is why we need forgiveness. We need forgiveness for all our moral failures. We need forgiveness for our sins, for our secret hatreds, for our secret desires. Without that forgiveness, then what we read in Romans 6.23 comes to pass. There Paul says that the wages of sin is death. Now what are wages? Wages are the things that you earn. So that which we have earned through our sin is nothing short of death. And the only way to avoid that is we need forgiveness of their sins. So you need forgiveness. What's the second thing that we need? We need righteousness. In Romans chapter 3 verse 10, Paul is quoting from different places in the Old Testament. It's known as the 14-point condemnation of the human race. And he says, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. So he tells us that none of us is righteous. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, which we'll look at here soon enough, in chapter 5, verse 20, Jesus said, I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus was warning us that it's not enough to just have an outward righteousness. What we need is a transformative inside righteousness. What is that standard? Jesus spells it out just a few verses later in chapter 5 verse 48. He says, you must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. So look at it this way. Think of it in financial terms or in accounting terms. We need forgiveness. You owe a debt to God. So think of your baseline, your zero, right? We find ourselves in debt, in the red. We owe God for our sin. We owe him a debt. And you're in the red, and what you need is to have that sin forgiven. Just like when we talk about having a loan or a debt forgiven, you need to have that loan forgiven that you need to have in here, in this case, our sin forgiven. So you need forgiveness. But it's not enough just to get to the baseline of zero, just to be at zero. No, you need to be in the black in your account. And that's the righteousness that you need. You need to have a perfect righteousness, an infinite account in the black. That's what we're being called for. We're going to be right with God. Your sin has to be forgiven, which gets you to zero, and you have to have a perfect righteousness that gets you infinitely in the black. That's what it takes to be right with God. Your sin's forgiven and a perfect righteousness. And you might say, now, John, that's exceedingly important to know. How can we move forward in life without not knowing that? We need to know what it means to be right with God. But what does that have to do with the baptism of Jesus and his temptation that we just read? Well, this of course marks the start of Jesus' public ministry. But what's very interesting, the amazing thing is that both of these events, his baptism and his temptation, illustrate that it is Jesus who provides us with these two things that we most need. So we're going to first look at his baptism. And his baptism illustrates that Jesus gives us the forgiveness that we need. And then we'll look at his temptation in the wilderness. And we'll see that the temptation provides us with the righteousness that we need. In short, Jesus provides us with that forgiveness and that righteousness. So let's start with the first one. Let's look at the baptism of Jesus. And we're going to see how it illustrates how Jesus alone provides you with the forgiveness that you need. We see in verse 13 that John the Baptist, again continuing the story from last week, is baptizing there in the Jordan. And again, that baptism is symbolic of people's need of repentance, of leaving their sin behind. Now, let's remember some of the words from last week. The two verses immediately preceding our verse 13. Verses 11 and 12, John the Baptist was saying, I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. And you'll remember from last week that what John the Baptist was doing here is he was warning the people to be ready because when Jesus comes, judgment will come. And so imagine John here in the Jordan, and he's baptizing, and he looks in the distance, and who does he see? He sees Jesus approaching. And he starts thinking, ah, the time has come. The time has come, as he would say later, for me to decrease as Jesus increases. It's time for me to step aside. Jesus will now take center stage. And as he gets closer, you can imagine John thinking, I wonder, will he continue preaching repentance? Or is he going to bring that judgment right away? So you can imagine just how astonished John was when Jesus finally gets to him. And rather than doing any of that, he turns around and says, baptize me. And John's befuddled. What do you mean baptize you? He says in verse 14, John would have prevented him saying, I need to be baptized by you and do you come to me? We see here the humility of John the Baptist. He recognizes his own need for forgiveness. But not Jesus. Jesus needs no repentance. And that's because Jesus has no sin of his own. As Hebrews 7.26 says, he is holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens. And just in case we have any doubt, the Apostle John in 1 John 3.5 makes it plain, in him there is no sin. So then, if Jesus is the sinless one, why would he ask to be baptized? Again, to be baptized means that you admit that you have sin and you repent and you turn from your sin. The answer to that question comes in verse 15. But Jesus answered him and he said, Now what does that mean? That it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. Well, Jesus knows that God's justice requires that our sin be punished. As Exodus 34, 7 says, God will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. His holy character is that He can't look upon sin and He can't just wave it away. It must be punished. Jesus therefore knows that we need forgiveness for our sins and that we need a perfect righteousness in order to be right with God. He knows these things. So when he says, let's just go ahead and allow this. He's admitting, this is not something I need to do, but we need to do it to fulfill all righteousness. He's talking about our righteousness. What Jesus is doing here is something really rather amazing. He's identifying himself with people like us, with sinful people, with broken people, with rebellious people, people who deserve punishment for our sin. Jesus is not a sinner. He doesn't need to repent. And yet here he is identifying, saying, these people are my people. I will join them. I will be like them. I will come amongst them, these people who need to be cleansed. And isn't that what we want? Don't we want someone who can identify with us and with our plight? I remember some years ago when I was in a barbershop waiting, and there was a mechanic there from Delta Airlines, and he was talking about how he wished that the higher-ups in Delta would be able to relate to the mechanics. Don't we all want someone who can relate to us? And here's Jesus Christ, God come in the flesh, identifying with people like us. But it was more than just a symbolic representation or identification. It wasn't just him saying, I stand with you, like some kind of slogan that you put for a 30 second ad on the news or something. He was doing more than that. What Jesus was doing and what he's showing us here is that in his mission, he had come to actually be our substitute to take our place as a sinner. You might ask the question, why would the sinless one undergo baptism when he had no sin? You might say, Jesus did have sin. It was just simply ours. He took that sin that is ours and he placed it upon himself. Again, baptism is just a symbol. It represents our need to be washed, to be cleansed from our sin. But the only reason that that baptism or that washing actually works in real life, not in symbolic, is because of what Jesus did. Jesus took that sin upon himself. That debt that we were infinitely in the red to bring it up to zero, that debt can only be forgiven because Jesus paid for it. That's what we see here. He takes upon himself the penalty that you and I so richly deserve and he's showing that now in symbolic terms by being baptized. Look at the way Paul puts it in Colossians chapter 2 verse 13. Paul says, you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him. Having forgiven us, there's that word, having forgiven us all our trespasses, how? By canceling the record of debt that stood against us with all its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. You see the language that he uses, you and I owe God a debt. And that debt has been forgiven. It's been set aside so that it no longer is what God sees when he sees us. But how did he set it aside? Remember, it must be punished. So he nails it to the cross and Jesus is the one who bears it. So people of God, when we ask the question, what does it take to be right with God? And we say, well, you need forgiveness. The thing is you can have it. But only if Jesus Christ bears your sin on that cross. And this, of course, was Jesus' mission from the very beginning. Adam read earlier from Isaiah 52 and Isaiah 53 that shows that 800 years before the coming of Christ, God was already announcing that this would be the mission of Jesus, to be the suffering servant, the one who identifies with broken and sinful people and takes our punishment on his own. And so even as he's baptized, God acknowledges that that's Jesus' purpose. We read in verse 16, And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him. And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. And behold, a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. So we hear that announcement from heaven as the Father speaks and says that He is pleased with His Son, even as the Spirit descends upon the Son to enable Jesus to carry out His ministry. We see the Trinity here. We never see the word Trinity used in Scripture, but there are many places where the Trinity is evident, and this is one of those clear times. And the beauty of this is that when you believe, when you trust that Jesus Christ did indeed die in your place to pay for your sins, then those sins truly are forgiven. Peter says in Acts 10.43, everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. All you have to do is believe that this is what he said and this is what he did. And when you do that, then the Father says of you the exact same thing that he said of Jesus. And He looks at you and says, this is my beloved son, this is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased. Don't you need to hear that? I do. And you need to hear that as well. And you can hear that. You can receive that approval of God. But only because Jesus Christ took your sins upon Himself, paid for them Himself, And in so doing then also gave you his righteousness, what the Puritans used to call the great exchange. We read that in 2 Corinthians 5 21. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And there you see those two different things that we need. Jesus takes our sins, granting us forgiveness, and he takes his righteousness and he gives that to us. And that's our second point. The second thing that you need is righteousness. And we're going to see that illustrated in the temptation of Jesus. If you look at chapter 4 now, verse 1, it says, then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And you may say, why would the Spirit of God lead Jesus to be tempted? Wouldn't we want to try to avoid anything that could put Jesus' mission into doubt or into jeopardy? So why would the Spirit do that? And the answer is really quite simple. If Jesus is going to be our substitute, then he must do what you and I are incapable of doing. That is, he has to perfectly resist temptation. He has to remain perfectly obedient. He has to remain perfectly sinless. Because if he doesn't, then his death isn't one that'll pay for our sins, it'll just simply pay for his own sin. If he's going to be our substitute, he must remain sinless, the spotless lamb, which is the imagery that we have all throughout the Old Testament to highlight that point. In other words, if Jesus is going to be our champion, then he must be able to face the powers of darkness that so consistently defeat us in our own lives, and he must defeat them. After all, is he in fact worthy to be called by God my beloved son with whom I am well pleased? He's got to prove it. As the early church father Origen put it, virtue is not virtue if it be untested and unexamined. It's so easy to say, well, he's sinless when he's never been tempted with the opportunity to sin. And so now, God puts him in a position where the worst temptation possible can come across Jesus. Will he be able to stand and be that champion whom we need? And so we see him in the wilderness, and verse 2 says that after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. So we find Jesus physically weak, tired, and hungry. And you all know that when you and I are hurting physically, it also is when we can become spiritually vulnerable. And so God is showing him at his weakest so that there's no excuse And say, this was the moment when the man stood against the toughest temptations. And sure enough, the devil brings it all. And what's interesting is that what the devil does, and we're looking at each temptation in turn, he attacks Jesus' trust in God, which is really behind every temptation. When you and I are tempted, when we fall into sin, the temptation is always, do we trust God even in the midst of our weakness? We see that happening here. Let's look at the first temptation. Verse 3, the tempter came and said to him, if you are the son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. Jesus had a mission. It was to come and be the substitute for his people. And now here he is, hungry, weak, tired, physically put out. And he attacks and Satan attacks the priorities of Jesus. He says, you're weak and you're hungry. What you really need is food. And Jesus knew that that was not His priority. It was not His own needs, but meeting this mission. And so He countered with Scripture in verse 4. But Jesus answered, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Here quoting from Deuteronomy chapter 8 verse 3. And what Jesus is telling the devil is, look, obeying God is much more important than meeting my own needs and desires. That obedience, that's true bread. And the lesson for all of us is that we ought to pursue God's priorities first and trust that God will meet other needs as well, rather than pursuing our own priorities and leaving God for the margin, as we often do. Jesus himself told us that in chapter 6 verse 33, he'll say, as we'll see when we come to the Sermon on the Mount, he said, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. All these things was he was talking about our needs in life. So that's the first temptation. In the second temptation in verse five we read, then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down for it is written he will command his angels concerning you. And on their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone. Here, what Satan is doing is he's attacking Jesus' trust in God's care. He's saying, okay, okay, so you're saying that you need to pursue the priorities of God first and that he'll provide for your needs? Well, if he really provides for those needs, make him show it. Throw yourself down. Have him prove that he really is gonna provide for your needs. Something that happens to us all the time. God, if you really love me, If you really are going to take care of me in the midst of this trial, then show me that you love me and give me this, that, or the other that I think that I need. Now, as an aside, can I say here, Jesus had quoted scripture to Satan, and so Satan turns around and says, ah, but it is also written. And he quotes from Psalm 91. And you know what? He quotes it accurately. But he does misapply it. And he does skip some things that are in Psalm 91. And it's a simple reminder for us that it's easy to be fooled by those who claim to know the scriptures and hit us with the scriptures if we ourselves don't know it. You've got to know the scriptures to know when you're being bamboozled by someone. Thankfully Jesus does know his Bible and he knows it better than the devil. And so in verse 7 it said, Jesus said to him, again it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Here he was quoting from Deuteronomy 6.16, and this was a time when Israel was in the wilderness. You remember that? The 40 years of wandering in the wilderness? And there, in the wilderness, Israel as a nation, God's people had failed to trust in God's provision. They had failed to trust that God really cared for them. And again and again, as you know if you read through the book of Numbers and so on, they tested God. Hey God, show us that you really care. Provide us with meat. God, provide us with water. We can't trust you. And now we see Jesus in that same wilderness. But he does what you and I could not do. He does trust in God's provision. And he's able to resist the devil. The lesson from this temptation is simple. Tough times will come into your life. Oh, absolutely. But that's not the time to test God and to say, God, if you really do love me, then heal me or fix this problem in my marriage. God, if you really love me, that's how you will prove it. We're not to test God, but to trust that he will protect us, he will care for us, and he's always doing what is best. And that doing what is best leads us to the third temptation. In verse eight, it says, again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, all these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me. Now, the obvious thing here is that Satan is attacking Jesus' allegiance to God, but the more subtle part of that temptation is that he's tempting Jesus' trust that God's ways are always best, that God knows what's best for us. Even when he puts us through tough times, those two things go hand in hand. And so he tells him, look, I get it. You came to fix a broken world. And so I'm gonna give you all the kingdoms of the world and you can bring now, I'm gonna give you all this earthly power and you can now bring peace to the world. How many of us have sat there and said, if I were governor, or if I were president, or if I were emperor, or if I were king of the world, because we all know those politicians don't know what they're doing. You all know exactly how to fix the problems in Ukraine. You know what has to happen. You know how to fix our economy. Imagine if you were given all that power, you can finally fix things, and the devil is offering that to him. and saying, you can have all this. You can accomplish your mission right now. You don't have to go to the cross. You don't have to go through all that. All you have to do is just one time, just bow down to me. And for the third time, Jesus counters with Scripture. By now, you will have picked up on this lesson. that the best way that you counter the devil is to know your Bible. That way you know when you're being fooled by someone who tells you that something is biblical when it's not, but also you know how to counter with the very words of God. And Jesus does that in verse 10. He says, then Jesus said to him, be gone, Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve. Quoting Deuteronomy 6.13. Jesus says, I don't need this. He recognizes that he could have bought, as it were, could have achieved some kind of external peace among the nations. Had he done what Satan suggested? Yeah. But he knew that that would not have been real peace. In other words, it would not have dealt with the fundamental problem, which is that we're not right with God. And the reason we're not right with God is because of our sin, and this solution does not deal with that fundamental problem of sin. Jesus recognizes that the only solution, as painful as it would be to Him, was to be our substitute and to go to the cross. So He says, I'm going to trust, as hard as that is, that that is a better way than this simple shortcut. So often, we don't know that lesson, the fact that God knows what's best. Whenever we think we know better, just like Adam did in the garden. Remember in the garden? Hey God, I hear what you're saying. You've given us a perfect life, and you're telling us this is the way for us to continue that perfect life. But you know what? I think I know better. I'm gonna go on my own path. That's what you and I do every time we sin. We're saying thanks God for the advice on how to live a good life. But I think I know better how to live a good life. And I choose to do this, that, or the other against your word. And whenever we think that we know better, We're always shifting our allegiance away from God, aren't we? We are, in fact, worshiping the devil. We are, in fact, saying, thanks God, I don't need you. I belong to the world now. Now, the good news is when we look at all these temptations, we're reminded of Adam, that first Adam in the garden. And he was put on trial. He was put on probation. He was tempted. And he utterly failed that temptation. But Jesus, who Paul in Romans chapter 5 calls the second Adam, faced those same temptations. And he sent the tempter packing. In verse 11, then the devil left him and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. You see, people of God, that's the good news. That's our hope. There were we fail, Jesus succeeded. And he did so in our place. Acts chapter 3 14 calls Jesus the holy and righteous one. And he remained righteous because he has sustained those temptations. He had shown that he can face the most severe temptations and still remain sinless and resist the tempter. And it's that righteousness that He has that we so desperately need and He gives to us. And may I just say as an aside, we read this earlier during our confession of sin. Because Jesus has faced the toughest temptations known to man, He knows what you're going through when you're tempted. And He's able to come along and help. I hope you didn't miss that passage we read earlier from Hebrews 4.15. We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. And it's that part, yet without sin, that is our hope. So we go back to that question, what do we need to be right with God? You need the forgiveness of your sins and perfect righteousness. And we can produce neither of those on our own. But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus can. And He provides us with both of those things. And He does so by becoming our substitute, by taking our place. He loves us so much that He identifies with broken and sinful people like you and like me. And not just some identification like when you see these Hollywood celebrities come alongside a homeless person and say, oh, I'm with them. And then they go back to their mansions and they go on with their lives after the photo op. No, He stepped into the mire and the muck of our world. And not just to go around sightseeing, but to actually experience everything that we've experienced and take on those same temptations. But to be our champion and to succeed where we failed in standing up against the evil one. And had He just done that, it would have shown that He Himself was the righteous one. But instead, He goes to the cross and He takes upon Himself the penalty that you and I, oh God, for our sin and our failures. His baptism shows that he's gonna stand in our place. He didn't need to have his sin washed away, because he had none, but he stood in our place, and he took upon himself our sin. It's interesting that John the Baptist was expecting Jesus to bring judgment. And the thing is, Jesus did. But he put that judgment on himself, rather than on us. And it's because he took that penalty that we are forgiven. And his temptation proved that he was the righteous one, the one who was perfectly obedient. And the good news is that then he gives us that record of his obedience. The Bible calls this exchange justification. It literally means to be made right with God. Our sin given to Jesus, his righteousness given to us. The Puritans used to call it the great exchange. Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 3 verse 21. He says, now the righteousness of God, that's what you and I need, now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. In other words, you can't achieve it by obeying the law. And he says, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified, put right with God, and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith. Propitiation just simply means the setting aside of wrath. God's judgment was coming on us, and it was set aside. And you need to only receive this by faith. That's the good news. God grants us forgiveness in Jesus Christ. And he accepts us as righteous, not because of our own merit, for we have none, but because of the merit and the righteousness of Jesus. And Paul tells us in Romans 3 that it's all because of grace. What's grace? Unmerited favor. Romans 5, 8 says, God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It wasn't because we were worthy. It's while we were yet enemies of the cross that He was willing to do this. His love is that driving factor. 1 John 4, 10, and this is love. Not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. I want a God like that. I need a God like that. Don't you? Let's pray. Father in heaven, how thankful we are that you are a God of grace, a God who is driven by love and you have pursued us with a ferocious love in Jesus Christ, a love that will never let us go. And in Jesus, you have provided us those two things that we cannot produce on our own. forgiveness of our sins, having paid the debt that we owe you by His substitutionary death on the cross. and a perfect righteousness that we can never accomplish in our own efforts, but which He did again and again. Father, how thankful we are for the life of Christ. And we pray that each and every one of us here would put our faith and our trust in Him for that forgiveness and that righteousness. And if there are any here today, Father, who have not done that in the past, we pray that even now that you would show them their need and show them that the answer is found only in Jesus Christ. Father, this is the question of the age, the most important question. What does it take to be right with you? And the answer is found in Him, in Jesus Christ.