through 36 and beloved this is God's Word Acts chapter 2 beginning in verse 14 but Peter standing with the 11 lifted up his voice and addressed them Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you. Give ears in my words, for these men are not drunk as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall all prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. And even on My male servants and female servants, in those days I will pour out My Spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs upon the earth below, blood and fire and vapor and smoke. And the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon to blood. For the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst. As you yourselves know, this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and for knowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. For David says concerning him, I saw the Lord always before me. For he is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken. Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced. My flesh shall also dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor your Holy One to see corruption. You have made known to me these paths of life. You will make me full of gladness in your presence. Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David, that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon the throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of Christ. that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing, for David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. Let all of the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him a both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we praise you as we come to the sermon that Peter has preached on this first Christian Pentecost. Father, as we reflect upon the sermon, knowing that there's no way that we would ever have time to root out the depth of the text. Father, I pray that you would indeed instruct us and guide us and use many of these ideas to cause us to want to dig deeper. and to understand more and more fully every day of our lives the greatness of your son and the glory that he shines into our lives. Father, I pray that your mercies would be upon us as we hear. May we hear And may we be convicted where we need to be convicted. May we be built up in our faiths. And if there are those here who do not know you, Father, I pray that you would call them to faith as well through, again, these words that you have given and recorded in the scriptures. We praise you, Father. And pray that you would do all of these either through me or in spite of me and through the power of your Holy Spirit. And these prayers I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. The Book of Acts contains a lot of things. And we often times when we talk about the Book of Acts, we talk about it as being the Acts of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit founding the Christian Church and building the earliest church. But one of the things we can also call the Book of Acts is a Book of Sermons. Because within the Book of Acts we find a number of sermons by a number of people that are recorded, and this very much is a book of preaching more than anything else, and if this kind of sets you thinking about that, it should be also a reminder of something we talked about last week in terms of what is the normative way the church works, and that is through the preaching of the gospel and the testimony of God's people as they share about the great things that God has done. So as we kind of look at this book of Acts and look at the first full sermon or at least portion of a sermon that's recorded for us by Luke from Peter, I thought it would be valuable for us to spend just a few minutes at the front of this talking about what sermon is we've all heard lots of sermons in our lives not just from this church but other churches that we may have have been in and every sermon is just a little bit different they're different based on the person that is preaching them they're different based on the audience that is hearing them and They're different based on the context that you happen to be in. Sermons preached in America are a little bit different than sermons that are preached in Africa or maybe in Ukraine, where I've been. And if I have one of the funny stories, I guess, just in terms of contrast, is one of the years where I was there, some of the students got curious and they were asking about how long do you preach and things like that. And I said, usually given give or take, it's right around 30 minutes or so. And they looked at me and said, so is that 30 minutes for the first sermon you preach or the second sermon you preach on Sunday? I kind of think if I got to know, typically in Ukrainian churches, two sermons were preached on Sunday mornings, a shorter one and a longer one. And a lot of times a shorter one would be preached by the elders as they read a passage of scripture. And I'm sure Tim and Tom are going, leave me in America, not Ukraine. But, you know, that's their culture. And so that's kind of, you know, going into it what's expected of you. And you know that that's kind of going to be part of what you do. And so they're different from the different contexts that you go in. And you see some of those differences even found in the Book of Acts, depending on, again, who it is that happens to be preaching, and the audience, and the context that they happen to be in. So some sermons are shorter, and some are longer, and some are more instructive, and some are more practical, and there's a lot of different variations between the sermons that you hear. So I thought, there's no way to explore what all of those might or might not look like, but there have to be some common denominators. Some things that basically all sermons, regardless of the style, if you will, of the sermon, that all sermons would share, regardless of the person, the context, or the audience, and things along those lines. And so, with common denominators in mind, I'd suggest three things that should be present in every sermon, in any context, in any location. The first of those is that they are to be biblical. And when I say biblical, what I mean by that is that the ideas that are shared, the principles that are communicated, the applications that are made, should come out of the scriptures that are preached. It doesn't mean that we just kind of say, this is what I want to talk about and let me look to find a scripture that will support this idea. But more or less saying, this is what I am preaching on and what are the ideas as I seek to mine the depths of the text, as I seek to exhaust what it is that the text teaches, what are those ideas that come out of it that the scriptures essentially teach us what to preach? Or we should say that the pulpit is submissive to the word of God and not the other way around. so that they should be biblical in that sense and we should submit to the word of God. That's the first thing that I thought that would be a common denominator can set before us of all sermons and I think you can clearly see this in the book of Acts when you look at the sermons that contain within. The second one is that the effectiveness of the sermon relies not on the eloquence of the person that is preaching. Paul the Apostle says later on in the epistles that he's not an eloquent speaker at all. Some of us have heard the stories of Jonathan Edwards and the revival that Jonathan Edwards was involved in and there's a mass revival during that time and Jonathan Edwards, from everything that I've been told and everything that I've read, spoke in a monotone voice as he read his manuscript word for word in front of them, never really looking up dramatically at the audience in any way, shape, or form. He just read in a monotone way. The explanation is because it had nothing to do with Edwards and everything to do with what the Holy Spirit was doing at that time. Funny thing I had to chuckle as I was looking at this sermon that Peter preaches is if Peter went to seminary where I went to seminary at RTS and preached this sermon at RTS for a kind of homiletics class when you got your practice sermons to preach and your professors are grading your sermons, he probably would not have passed that class. That's the Apostle Peter. You know, we were taught that the only sermons that we should be preaching, this is good Presbyterian polity there, are three-point sermons. And all of the points had to be rhyming or alliterated or something along those lines. And, you know, that way you can remember them more easily. And so you begin by telling people what you're going to say. You say it in three points. And then you tell them again at the end. You close by saying, well, this is what I've already said. Peter doesn't do any of that. He's got one point that he makes and there's no, you know, solid introduction and solid closing and certainly, I guess if it's one point you could say it rhymed with the self, but it's not rhyming and alliterated like we were all taught. Okay, so it's not based on the style of the sermon. It's not based on the person that is preaching the sermon. It's based upon the Holy Spirit in terms of its effectiveness. And that means two things for us. One, it means that as the person preparing the sermon, prayer is an essential and a critical part of sermon preparation. All through the week, as you're thinking about the sermon, in my case, planning the sermon months and months ahead of time, again through that process. But the prayer doesn't end on my side of the things. It also includes your side of the equation as well. As you pray leading into the sermon that God would open your heart to hear the hear what you need to hear from the sermon. To hear the message of the sermon. To be convicted where you need to be convicted. To be encouraged sometimes where you need to be encouraged. And so that it would land on the mark. And so it's kind of not like when we were in school. In education class, they talked about the difference between active listening and passive listening. Our tendency is to lean towards passive listening, just to kind of be there sometimes. Active listening is what all of our teachers wanted us to do in the classroom, whether that was through taking notes or engaged in the ideas with our mind. The sermon is meant to be actively listened to. And so we should be more like the disciples. Remember around the Last Supper when Jesus is saying, one of you is going to betray me. And the response of the disciples was not to say, yeah, that's nice. You say all kinds of different things. And you've talked about that before. And just to ignore it. Nor was it to go here, and it was to go over there. But every single one of them were humble enough to say, is it I, Lord? Is it I, Lord? And so when the word is preached and the applications are made, we should be saying to ourselves actively, is it me? Is it me? Is there, in the way that I'm living, Holy Spirit, am I not living this out? Am I not being faithful to this the way I should be faithful? Is my life not glorifying God in the way that it ought? Is this something about God's character that I hadn't really thought closely enough about and doesn't shape the way that I live my life as application go? It requires the work of both sides of the pulpit, if you will. All of us, as we gather together to engage, as we engage in worship and we engage in the sermon. So first, it's got to be biblical. Second, that its effectiveness is based upon the work of the Holy Spirit. And third, it needs to include both a rebuke and an exhortation. Exhortation is a fancy word saying that we ought to live a little bit differently than we do. And the reason for that is twofold. One, that's exactly how Paul the Apostle describes preaching when he speaks to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4.2. He says to Timothy, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, and hear what it says next. Reprove rebuke and exhort with full patience and teaching. Those are the elements that should be part of a sermon. So it's got to be the reproving or the rebuking for sin. But it also includes the exhortation that says we need to live A little bit differently maybe based on what it is that is there. The second part of that equation is the fact that none of us are perfect. None of us have been fully sanctified yet. That won't happen until we're on the other side of the veil. That won't happen until we pass away in this life and go into the presence of Christ and are in the next life. That won't happen... to us physically in this world unless Christ comes again during our natural lifetimes and then we'll be glorified in full physically and spiritually all at once. So we're not there yet. Not one of us is there yet. And so every single one of us, as we listen to the scriptures, as we hear the word explained to us, should be actively thinking to ourselves, I know I don't got it right. I'm coming here to learn how I should have it. And now knowing how I should have it as the scriptures teach it and explain it, how now can I apply this in ways so that I do get it, or at least get it better than I'm getting it now? Because again, we're all, every single one of us, I don't care how young or old or how mature in the faith or immature in the faith that you are, we are all works in progress, works of the Holy Spirit in progress. And so it is something in which we engage with the Holy Spirit and work towards and build ourselves up towards. So again, the sermons, and again there's lots of other aspects of the sermons, and there's lots of variations in terms of style of preaching, should have those three things. They should be biblical. They should be resting upon the Holy Spirit for power. And thirdly, and I guess I just preached at least part of my first application as a three-point sermon, my professors would be so proud of me. And thirdly, it needs to contain rebuke and exhortation in terms of our lives, recognizing again that we don't have it all together. So we come to this text that is before us that I would argue has all three of these things. So who is preaching? Peter. Who is his audience? And I think that's important for us to ask so we understand why this language is so directly harsh. Peter, at least most directly, is addressing the unbelieving Jews who in the previous verse are saying, yeah, these guys, I see them coming out and they're speaking in tongues and all this stuff is going on. I just think they're drunk on new wine. Peter begins by addressing them. That's, if you will, his opening. And so at least his primary audience are those unbelieving Jews that are mocking, the naysayers essentially, that are basically saying, You know, this is just a bunch of bunk. Okay, so he's directly addressing them. Now that doesn't mean that the other people aren't listening too. But he's directly addressing these guys. Because he begins by saying, look guys, these guys are not drunk as you say. And that's in verse 14 there. continues on with that. And so he explains to them what it is that is happening. And he can kind of break his sermon up into two, from this point on, into two parts. What is it that you're seeing? And then the why is it that you're seeing it? Kind of good posing questions. The what and the why is happening here. He's saying, what you're seeing is Joel, and it's being fulfilled in your midst, in your presence. Now, Joel is a kind of neat little book. It's a short one, one of the minor prophets there. It happens early on. Joel is writing somewhere in between Isaiah and Malachi, so it kind of maybe helps put some dates on there. He begins by language of judgment and kind of moves from that judgment into a promise as the people repent of their sins. There's a promise in Joel that God would pour out his spirit and bring renewal to the people. The judgment is captured by a locust plague. Now, there's a lot of debate. The locust plague could be a very literal locust plague. It probably was certainly a literal locust plague there. That area is commonly plagued by locusts. And one of the things the scriptures oftentimes points out that when you are falling into sin and when you are under God's judgment, one of the effects, one of the ways that God brings judgment upon the nation is by sending a whole patch of locusts to go and tear up all your crops, to tear up all your food sources, and to fill the area. To basically say, repent and turn back to me for your provision. But there's also some scholars that say, you know, anticipating the Chaldeans are going to come in and do a lot what the Locusts do. They're going to wipe out everybody and everything in the land. And the Locusts are oftentimes considered to be symbolic of these Chaldeans coming through and taking over the nation as part of God's judgment. And so there's some of that there that anticipates this judgment that's coming. This wrath is coming, and then a promise to be restored in the Day of the Lord, where the people are then restored to the promise, and the Spirit is poured out. Peter says, guess what, guys? With the resurrection of Christ, this is what you see. The Spirit is being poured out. The restoration that Joel promised is happening to us now. And if you're going, I'm still not 100% seeing that yet. In verse 33, if you kind of jump ahead in the text a little bit, that's exactly what Peter says, very explicitly. He says, look, Jesus received the promise of the Holy Spirit from God the Father, and this Spirit now has been poured out upon you. And this is what you're seeing. He's saying this is what you're hearing. It's the result, all of this is the result of that outpouring. It's happening in your time, in your place, in your midst. And so, the prophecy of Joel that speaks about sons and daughters, even of the nations, of the Gentiles prophesying. Young men seeing visions and old men dreaming dreams. And even the male and the female servants of God will receive spirits and will prophesy. There will be wonders in the heavens and signs upon the earth as the blood and the fire and the vapor and the smoke, the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood before the day of the Lord arrives. Let me explain a little bit about the ancient culture, too. In the ancient Middle Eastern world, and this is not an idea that is unique to Jewish tradition, this is something that you find in the broader traditions as well, there was an idea that surrounded this idea of the Day of the Lord, or an understanding of what that referred to. They believed that there would become a time when a king would rise up And he would be such a powerful king that he would defeat all of his enemies in one fell swoop, in one day, literal day period of time, and bring them under his judgments and wrath. This idea you find throughout, especially the Old Testament Minor Prophets. You find it in other places in the Old Testament, but especially you see it riddled throughout the prophetic works, including the Book of Joel, as he's talking about this idea. Ultimately, this points to Christ. But it points to Christ's work, we oftentimes say, well, that's happening in the Second Coming. Well, it'll be completed, the culminated in the second coming. But where is it that Jesus defeated all of his foes in one literal day? It happened on the cross. That's what the day of the Lord is speaking of. Jesus is that great and powerful King who would defeat his enemy's death and sin and all of the powers of darkness are defeated by Christ upon that cross. And so, as a result, everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. That promise is a promise that is tied here in Joel's language, as Peter is quoting it here, is tied to this day of the Lord events. Not to a future thing. I mean, if it were tied to a future thing, evangelism wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. The preaching wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Paul, when he says that the salvation comes, faith comes by hearing, wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if it didn't happen in Peter's day. At this point, no matter what nation or race or tribe you come from, If you call upon the name of the Lord, you will be saved. He's calling upon Him in faith and in power. That's what He's talking about. Let me make a couple just brief observations about this. First of all, notice that the pouring out of the spirits. is what God is giving. It's a fulfillment of Joel's prophecy, but he's also doing it to restore the church. There's a purpose there behind it. The church thus relies upon that spirit. The church had grown weak and the church had grown corrupt up to the time of Christ. Its witness had not been faithful within Judaism. Christ comes to restore that. And the church grows out of that. And you see the gospel going out in the book of Acts. And almost immediately, of course, thousands begin coming to faith in Jesus Christ. By the work of the Holy Spirit. But that means, if we want the church to be restored in our day, it comes to the work of the Holy Spirit as well. Remember we talked so much about dedicating ourselves to prayer? It comes to the work of the Holy Spirit. So you want revival in our land, you want revival in our congregation, our community, in our realized individual, it begins through the process of committing ourselves to prayer. and putting ourselves to the work that God has set before us to build His kingdom and to tear down the strongholds of hell. That is an active activity that we are called to engage in, whether it's at work or in our lives, in our communities, with our friends, even at church. There are times where we are doing things, saying things, or living things out that are not helpful in terms of building Christ's kingdom. Second observation kind of ties in with that. Because the way the church thinks is different than the way that things operate in the community. You know, businesses or organizations are distinct and different from the way the church operates because the church operates with Christ as a King. Not with a board of directors, but with Christ as a King. So there's kind of more of a military model and our job is to go out and we're going to go out even, you know, California or bust. You know, to go and build Christ's kingdom. And that's our job. Whatever the sacrifice, whatever the cost may be, that is our job. And that's the measure of the success or the failure of a church. Are we faithful to doing what we have been commissioned to do? Make disciples of all the nations. Tear down the powers and the strongholds of hell in our midst. We're not doing that. We're not being and doing the church. We're not being indwelt by the work of the Holy Spirit. That's an observation that we need to take very, very clearly and very, very carefully. Because it's the Holy Spirit that not only restores and builds up the church, but it is the Holy Spirit that sometimes tears it down to its roots or foundations or even destroys it. Why? Not for our glory, but for God's glory. Because if the church won't do what the church has been called to do, as he says to the church in Ephesus, the lampstand will be removed. We're preserved and not because we're smart and good businessmen. Not that it doesn't mean that we shouldn't make wise decisions. We should make wise decisions. And we need business wisdom in the process of all of those decisions. But finally, the end decision has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with being submissive to Christ's call as our King. And if you know anything about the medieval times, the ancient times, when a king says, thus says the king, you did what the king said or you typically lost your head. That's how we are to act when we are to do, when we're called to do and to be Christ's church. That's what we pray when we say in the Lord's Prayer, may thy will be done. on earth as it is in heaven, in my life as it is by the angels, that kind of thing. Let me make one more observation here. There's a lot of times we still want to put all of this forward to the Second Coming. There is a judgment that God established upon ancient Israel. It took place around 70 A.D. when the Romans came in and destroyed the temple. If you read the descriptions, people like Josephus who were there and witnessed the events, they will sound an awful lot like this language of signs. And I don't have time to go into all of those things this morning. That in itself is a series of really lessons that are better taught in a classroom where we can interact and ask questions and read portions that are outside of scripture. But he talks about the blood and the gore. He's talking about over a million people dying in the siege of Jerusalem and their bodies being laid beside the road in stacks. When the Romans came in and defeated them, they lit the city on fire, everything that was in it. And the descriptions were that the smoke was so thick and black that it blackened the sky and made the evening moon turn red with the ash and the dust that was in it. Sounds an awful lot like what we have here. I'm not saying there can't be some greater fulfillment that ties in with the Second Coming down the road. I'm not saying the Second Coming isn't happening. It is. And it is promised. And it didn't happen in 70 A.D. Jesus hasn't come back yet. But I am saying that I think we need to be careful about pushing it all forward. Because there's an awful lot of it that we miss. If we forget that the language of the effects in the skies, the earthquakes and the moon being turned to black, is languages commonly used throughout the Old Testament to speak about God's judgment upon the people of the land for their sin. to keep that in mind. By the way, as a side note, the word that he uses here that most of our Bibles would translate as last days, the Greek word there is eschaton. It's a word that we probably have heard plenty of times. It's the same word that the author of Hebrews uses in Hebrews 1, verse 2, when he speaks about in these last days, in this eschaton that we're in, in this church age that we happen to be dwelling in, God no longer speaks in the many as in various ways, but through Christ Himself. It's something that has been inaugurated at the cross, fulfilled here at Pentecost, and the signs that they're seeing are essentially signs that go along and prove and assure us of that inauguration. and the visions and the dreams and the prophecy tie in with that, as well as the wonders in the sky. Metaphoric language for the work of God in judgment and pouring out His Spirit to build His church. That's what's going on. The why is because of Christ. And we could preach four different sermons on the four different points that Peter highlights here, but I'm not going to do that because those points come back to us as we go through the book of Acts. I wanted this sermon to speak as a whole to you, rather than to completely dissect it into parts. Because again, those ideas will come back to us. But let me highlight a few things about The why. The why is because Jesus of Nazareth, who was attested to by mighty works and wonders and signs, sounds familiar, was put to death. Why was he put to death? God's definite plan. And how was he put to death? Through the agency of wicked men. He had to die. He had to die to make acceptable sacrifice for our sins. It had to be God that died, because we're not able to make that sacrifice. For those of you who have gone through catechism class with Heidelberg Catechism, if you think back, huge amount of real estate in Heidelberg deals with this question about why God had to take on flesh and what Jesus was doing when he died on the cross. It's questions 12 through 18 and again 29 through 52. That makes up a massive amount of real estate in the Heidelberg Catechism. You spend months wrestling with all of the depth and the details therein. But he had to die. That's the first part of this that he talks about. The why is also because God raised Him from the dead. It wasn't just that He died, that God is doing and pouring out His Spirit. He did die, He had to die to make sacrifice, to pay the penalty for sin. but he rose from the dead. Here's the thing, folks. There have been a lot of people who have died in the history of the planets. A lot of big religious leaders have died. Muhammad lived on this earth and he died, and he's still there in the grave. Buddha lived on this earth and he died, and he's still there somewhere, rotting in the grave. And all of the great leaders, there was a guy by the name of Confucius who died, and he stayed dead. Jesus is the example of one who did die, but he didn't stay dead. That's important, folks, because that is a unique thing in the history of mankind and is a testimony to the reality that Jesus is who He said He was. He rose again from the dead and was witness to. It's one of the most historically verifiable events of all of ancient history. that He rose again from the dead. That's the why. Because that means He defeated the power of sin and death. And thus those who are trusting in Him as their Lord and Savior, sin and death no longer has power over them. He says, as I rose, I will raise up. my brothers and sisters in faith. The third is that of the prophecy. The prophets pointed to this work of Christ. In particular, David pointed to him. This is Psalm 16 verses 8 through 11 that is quoted in his sermon. The prophets needed to be fulfilled as a testimony. David was writing a thousand years plus. before the coming of Christ, prefiguring what it is that Jesus would do, and foretold the fact that He would rise from the dead, in fulfillment of God's promise to Him, in 2 Samuel 7, verse 14. And fourthly, we move from the death to the resurrection and the prophecy to the fact that Jesus is the greater David. He is the greater king. So it's the kingship, the kingdom that has been established. Jesus didn't die simply so that people could live eternally in the clouds and be happy. Jesus died and rose to establish a kingdom in the context of the church that will one day be fulfilled in the new heavens and the new earth, but is in part at work in each of our churches, in each of the communities across the globe. And thus, as citizens of that kingdom, if you were a believer this morning, we have an obligation to follow our king. And this is really the big heart of the thrust, the application that Peter is making in his sermon. He's basically saying to the Jewish audience, you have had a paradigm that is wrong. You have thought about the Messiah in the context of an earthly king, and you've been wrong. I am showing you the correct paradigm. Repent of your old, change your mind on the old one, and turn to the new one. And folks, if any of you have ever gone through that point in your life where you've had a real paradigm shift, you know it's not an easy thing to wrestle with. And you know it's not an easy change and transformation to make in our lives. And the Jews struggled with it. In fact, in this case, everyone struggled with it except for those of the Holy Spirit gave faith to repent and believe. But I want you to kind of wrap your head around that and ask yourself too in terms of application and exhortation. As you look at your life, what are the paradigm shifts even as a believer that need to be changed with you? Because all of us have things in our lives that we've embraced, adopted, accepted, that aren't biblical. So what are those paradigms that need change in your life? I encourage you to repent. I encourage you to examine yourself. I encourage you to ask the Holy Spirit to bring those things to mind. so that you are ready to repent of those and to live for Christ and not self, not for your paradigms, not for anything other than to live for the glory of Christ. What are those paradigms that, like the Jews, you also need to change? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, there's an awful lot here. There's an awful lot that we really didn't have the opportunity to explore in depth. And Father, I pray that you would press those things upon the hearts and the minds of your people. May they hear what they need to hear and may you build them up in their faith. And as we get ready to go and change gears to the congregational meeting, I pray that you bless that. I pray that you would bless everything in terms of the setup for VBS. But send us off. And when we get to that quiet place where we sit and pray, I pray that you would bring those things to mind. And give us the will, especially where we sometimes don't have the will. to indeed ask the question and seek to apply it. How do I live for Jesus? What do I need to put to death in my life right now? May You bless that in the life of this church. In this I pray in Jesus' name, Amen.