Let's come before our God in prayer. Our Father in heaven, you are the creator, the giver of every good thing. You are the one that we look to. For you are the overwhelming fountain of all good. All creation waits for you. When you open your hand, creation eats and drinks. And when you close your hand, they go hungry. And so we wait for you. When the night is dark, how we long for the daytime. Like the watchman on the tower, we wait for daybreak. We pray, Father, that you would pour out your spirit upon us. Comfort us in this trial that you have sent to us. Give us patience and give us boldness to come before the throne of grace. We pray, Father, that you would ease our restlessness and discontent and give to us patience and peace. Shine your face upon us that we might know your favor. You have given us every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. You have washed us, you have sanctified us, you have cleansed us as you have promised, but so quickly we forget. We forget the exceeding greatness of your power and so we begin to fret ourselves in times of trial. We see wickedness in the world and cry out, how long? We see pain and sickness and death and we worry. What if we aren't strong enough? What if we aren't wise enough? What if we aren't good enough? And so, Father, we pray that you would teach us through your word and spirit that we are complete in Christ, that in him we have all things, that we have the forgiveness of sins and fellowship with you, that you have restored your image in us, that you have begot us as a kind of first fruits of the new creation. And so hallow your name in our midst. We pray, Father, that you would put a guard over our tongues so that our words and our works might magnify you and that we might breathe out patience and peace and rest and calm. Open our eyes to see your glory. And we will shout forth your praises. Father, give us patience so that like Elisha, we might stand calmly in the face of even the Aramean army, knowing that there are always more with us than there are with them. Father, we pray for our leaders. We pray that you would give wisdom and justice. You are a God of justice. We pray that you would be with our governor, give him wisdom, be with the health officials that are making decisions, be with our president, all of those that are making different decisions. We pray, Father, that you would remove them from avarice and greed and power plays, and cause them all to rely on you and to do what is good and what is right for the people that you have placed under their authority. And we pray, Father, that you would bless our community. We see the new life and the blossoms on the trees. We see the fruit beginning, and we pray that you would bless that work, that you would bless the rice fields and the orchards and the fruit of the field, for it is all yours, and the blessing is yours alone to give. And we also pray that you would give the fruit of love and joy and peace. And in our community, we pray that there might be a spirit of reformation, that the self-made religion of self-righteousness might be cast off, that many might fall before you and say, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. May your gospel this morning be proclaimed everywhere. May it be preached to every creature. And with that gospel, we pray that you would pour out your spirit and soften the proud heart that it might be received with faith. And so, Father, let your kingdom come where every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. As we bow down, Father, give mercy. Lift up those who are crushed under heavy loads. Relieve the afflicted. Give peace to the restless. Restrain the criminal. Give food to the hungry. Shelter to the homeless. Deliver those who are in bondage to sin. We pray that you would give protection and safety and hope to those who are trapped in oppressive and abusive homes during this shutdown, and that you would bring justice. and show us the right path. Give us the grace, Father, to help those that are in need. Give us the opportunity to do good to all. Give us the health and the strength to respond to the needs of our community so that we might relieve burdens. Know the right words to say. Witness the peace and light of our Lord Jesus and do good to all that you bring into our path. We pray, Father, that you would give us health and peace, that you would deliver us from this virus and deliver us from the wickedness of rebellious and violent men and women, that we might live peaceable lives in all godliness. Fill us with the fruits of your spirit and teach us to love one another with an undivided heart. And may the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. For we stand in your presence and wait upon you. In Jesus name. Amen. This morning, I would invite your attention to the first chapter of the epistle of James. James 1, and my text this morning will be verses 17-20. Verse 17-20 of James 1, let's give attention to the reading of God's Word. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights. with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of men worketh not the righteousness of God. Satan's first temptation struck at the heart of God's goodness. That attack on God's character, the attack of God's goodness, is the heart of sin. It continues today. And this is the context of the Apostle's instructions to his brothers and sisters in exile. It's the cry of that restless heart. in the midst of trials that says God isn't good, he isn't trustworthy, he can't save me, he won't save me. James is speaking in the context of these trials and that how even in the middle of adversity God has a good purpose in all that he does. That testing causes faith to shine like gold and gives us a sure place to stand and teaches us patience. Only one who has been trained and tested in great adversity can stand like Elisha did before the Aramean army, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. For only one who was tested can see the armies of the living God surrounding him. The tested one learns, as Paul did, that the grace of God is truly sufficient. But we, being sinful, often cast stumbling blocks in front of God's Word. The lie that speaks in our heart that God is not good, that God is not able to save, and it continues to attack our heart even after we have been born again. James calls it in verse 21, the superfluity of naughtiness or the residue of wickedness that still remains in our heart. And yes, the blood of Christ covers even the remaining wickedness as we confess in our catechism. We are to put it off. And so James says, don't ever say that your sins are God's fault. For God isn't out to get you. He isn't out to trick you. And he goes on to teach us, as we saw last week, that the source of sin is in the human heart. He says, your lusts break forth into sin. Sin gives birth to death. And that's the state of the whole human race. This is what we inherited from Adam. This is what the patriarchal movement of today misses. There's that great romantic picture that is drawn of the valiant man, the submissive woman, the 19 starry-eyed children sitting around the table like olive branches. And you can even dig out a verse or two in the Bible that can be taken out of context and used to support that picture. But the reality is always far different. God gave Abraham the sign and seal of circumcision after Ishmael was born to teach him that that which is born of the flesh is flesh. You must be born again. Only when God circumcises the foreskin of the heart can you stand before him clean and pure in Christ. What man begets is always another sinner. or two sinners, or five sinners, or 19 sinners. Adam had a son after his likeness, after his image, and it continues throughout all of human history. Adam's race is fallen, hopeless. What the flesh bears is always the same thing. adultery, fornication, heresy, witchcraft, idolatry, rebellion, stubbornness. There is no sense in taking pride in the flesh, pride in flesh and blood, when what we need is a new race, a new father, a new Adam. To teach this reality before Christ, the heads of families were not allowed to act as priests for their families. Only those priests descended from Aaron could offer sacrifices in the temple. In order for fellowship with God to be restored, that taught us that there must be a new priesthood. There must be a new bloodline. There must be a new race, a new father, a second Adam. And this is so contrary to everything that Israel was taught. by the scribes and the Pharisees that Nicodemus was astounded in John chapter 3 when Jesus said to him, you must be born again. If this is the true reality of our condition, that every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed, and sin when lust hath conceived bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished bringeth forth death, if that is true If we are dead in trespasses and sins and only bring forth that which is filthy and unclean, then how on earth can we choose to be alive? Nicodemus understood the problem when he asked Jesus, can a man crawl into his mother's womb a second time and be born again? Did we choose to be born the first time? The fact is the things in your lives that affect you the most, you had nothing to do with. You didn't choose what era you were to be born in. You didn't choose your ethnicity. You didn't choose your skin color. You didn't choose your social status. You did not choose how much money or power you were born with or how much money or power your parents had. Whether you were born in the slums of New Delhi or to the new elite in Hollywood, You didn't have a choice in the matter. In fact, even looking at those things that we tend to take pride in, that we say we accomplished, fame and fortune, success and failure, riches and poverty, don't actually have so much to do with one's choices. The slogan, you can be anything that you want to be, gives you nice warm and fuzzies in a Hallmark movie, and I enjoy Hallmark movies like the next guy, but they have nothing to do with real life. as an example on a recent television contest where one contestant was sent home each week. One night a participant was cut because she wasn't good enough and she didn't make it through to the final. She failed a specific challenge and was sent home. And in her exit interview she said, it was really worth it. I'm glad I came. I showed my kids back home that you can do anything you want if you follow your dreams. My first thought was, but you didn't win. Was that your dream, not to win? It doesn't match reality. Solomon observed this thousands of years ago when he said, I returned and saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance. happeneth to them all. Battles are not won by willpower. Riches aren't made by willpower. Races aren't won by willpower. The fact is you were born under the curse of sin with lusts that you inherited from Adam, the lust to be his God, knowing good and evil. You were born under the curse of God and you had no say in the matter. The next obvious question that comes up is this one. Well, then it's God's fault. Paul mentions that in Romans 9. Why does God still find fault? Who can resist His will? That's what our text is answering. Those lusts that you were born with were not God's fault, for God created man good and after His own image. But man, through the instigation of the devil, deprived himself and all his posterity of those divine gifts, to quote the Heidelberg Catechism. The choice to act on those lusts is yours and yours alone. It's not God's fault. You know and I know that you commit adultery, you steal, you revile, you curse, you brawl because you choose to and because you want to. And it isn't God's fault. So James says, let no man say when he is tempted that I am tempted of God. To fully understand it and to stand in peace, we have to have a full and robust understanding of who God is, particularly the goodness of God, which brings us to our text. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above. God is the overflowing fountain of all good. God is eternal, immutable. His throne is fixed forever in heaven. And so, first of all, we know that God's gifts are good and God's gifts are perfect. God communicates only goodness to His creation. He is the only source the only source of everything good and everything perfect and everything complete and everything whole. When you hear a piece of music and say that's beautiful, when you see a painting and you say that's beautiful, when you see someone dressed beautifully and you say that's beautiful, when God said of Joseph that he had a great face and a beautiful body, all of that came from God. He has no admixture of ugliness, as I said last week. He is pure light. Darkness cannot dwell in Him. We receive this by faith. If we look with redeemed eyes, we can see His goodness and His beauty and His love all around us. But we are naturally untrusting and unloving. so that our tendency, until we put it off, our tendency is to see every providential act as proof that God is not loving and God is not good, especially when things are not going our way. In a rather famous poem from the 19th century by Ben King, he satires this view of the pessimist. nowhere to go but out, nowhere to come but back, nothing to see but sights, nothing to quench but thirst, nothing to have but what we've got, thus through life we are cursed." In other words, everything is wrong, everything is stupid, everything stinks. If all goes well, we take the credit. But when things go wrong or not exactly the way we think they ought to go, we blame God. And so if you begin by looking at creation hoping to come to the syllogism at the end that God is good, you will fail. You first must start with the premise that God is good. To understand God aright, to understand mercy and grace and understand who God is, we must first embrace His revelation that He is good and every good and every perfect gift is from above. The fault is not in God. The fault is in ourselves. We are restless, untrusting, hasty, discontented. When God has given us every good and every perfect gift, And yes, it is true that we are not yet home. It is true that we have not yet received the fullness of His promises. It is true that we do not yet see Him face to face, that we are not at the marriage supper of the Lamb. We are not in the best of all possible worlds. What does that have to do with it? The fact that our God is good and the overflowing fountain of all good should give us hope in our tears, purpose in our toil. The fact is in Christ we have a future, we have a name, we have a significance that goes above and beyond this world freely given to us of God. An acknowledgement of the goodness of God does not at all mean that we are blind to the pain and sorrow of this world or the loss and loneliness of our own heart or that we never weep. It means, as Paul says, that we don't grieve as those that have no hope. You see, if our sins are God's fault, there is no hope. For if our sins are God's fault, then He is vindictive and spiteful and untrustworthy. If God is not good, if He is the author of sin, then we have no reason to hope in anything. There's no reason for anything. If the devil is right and God cannot be trusted, then we have no reason to hope, no reason to dream, no reason to run the race, no reason to achieve. Then there is no purpose in art or music or beauty, no point in marriage, no point in love, no point in raising kids. And this is why the Apostle stresses God's goodness. There are more things that we must know about God in order to fully trust in that goodness. One, which the Apostle hints at, is the doctrine of simplicity. God's goodness is not something different from His essence. God is good. Good is not something added to God. It's not a quality put on top of God. For God is not made up of pieces and parts. He's not part good, part justice, part love, part mercy, and part wrath. He's not made up of parts. His attributes are identical with His essence and they are not divided. And so to put this practically, we say that God is eternal, everywhere present, unchanging, not dependent upon His creation. He is the one greater than whom cannot be conceived. He's perfect in power, in love, in purity, as the hymn says. And His goodness is not something added to that list, for God does not have a list of attributes, properly speaking. He is one, pure, simple essence. From our perspective, we have to divide it up so that we can conceive of it. But we also know that the Lord our God, the Lord, is one. So it is correct also to say that goodness is eternal, everywhere present, unchanging, not dependent, the one greater than whom cannot be conceived, perfect in power, in love, in purity, for God His essence and his attribute of goodness is one. A human being can be called good, but the goodness of a human being, as we all know, is a shifting shadow. He may be good one moment and horrible the next. He may be good one moment and feeling poorly the next. He may be beautiful one day and the next day be ravaged by disease. He may be strong one minute and weak the next. He can be trustworthy one moment and shifting the next. In adversity His goodness can be strained. We as human beings become irritable. We have mood swings. We change with the atmosphere and the circumstances. But the aseity or independence of God means that God's goodness being identical to his essence doesn't change with atmosphere and circumstances. As James puts it, there's no variableness or shadow of turning or shifting shadows. There's no shifting shadow with God. There's no up and down. There's no flicker or twinkle. There's no change in response to stimuli. There's no change in response to atmosphere or circumstances. And this is not just empty speculation, it's necessary knowledge that we must have in order to hold firm and see by faith the chariots of armies that surround us at all times. We must have a correct view of God's goodness to see him as he is, our refuge and our strength, a very present help in time of trouble. For if God is not good, how can we depend on him? If God's goodness changes with the circumstances, then perhaps we're out of favor one moment and back in favor the next. But God isn't like a shadow. He's like the light. In fact, he's the father of light. The apostle tells us. How do you describe the essence of eternal, infinite God? You can only do it by metaphor, by referring to things of this earth. James uses the example of shadows and lights. He's not like shadows that come and go, where there's flickers and changes and ups and downs. He's like light. not created light that flickers, but eternal light. In fact, the father of lights. He is the source of all light. The source of everything beautiful and good and holy and pure. So why doesn't everyone come to the light? When the light became flesh and walked this earth, why did they hate him and crucify him? Jesus said they hate the light because their deeds are evil. Mankind is born in trespasses and sins. It is the nature of mankind to flee from the light. We are born at war with God, fearing him, dreading him, fleeing from him, creatures of darkness that stay hidden in darkness and flee from the light. How does a dead man choose to do something that is absolutely contrary to his nature? The answer is in verse 18. He must be born again. And so we come full circle. In verse 18, James moves on from the doctrine of the goodness of God to the doctrine of election. It is the goodness of God that motivates God's election. God begot us. The first word of the sentence, the emphasis is on, of his own will. Literally, it's the determined one begat us. The willing one, the one who willed, the one who determined, he begat us. In other words, to put it in English, which is the translator's task, to take this concept in an ancient foreign language and put it into a modern word, from his own will. That's the source of our begetting or our being born again. The theological term is regeneration which means regeneration, born again. The unshifting light, the unchanging goodness of God didn't respond to outward stimulus to determine our salvation. Otherwise we would have no solid place to stand. What would we offer God to convince him to choose us? How do we even ask? How do you even raise your hand when you're dead? Did the bones in the valley request that Ezekiel come and preach to them? No. The only motivation for our salvation is the will of God. The determination of God himself. His goodness in the act of election and regeneration of His own will He begat us. James is using the same language as John does in John 3. You must be born again. But James is giving us the motivation for that rebirth. The motivation of that rebirth is of His own will. Arminian theology puts the motive of the new birth into man's will. It even became the slogan of revivalism. You must be born again. And they would ask, when were you born again? Meaning, when did you make a choice, walk down the aisle and choose Jesus? But if that were the case, then God's goodness would be a shifting shadow depending upon the fickle choice of man. It would depend upon the strength of the revivalist at the particular moment, whether you happen to be there, the whims of nature. What if the car broke down on your way into the meeting and you didn't make it? What if you got sick at the last minute and didn't make it to the revival? What if Jesus catches you when he comes back and you happen to be in an R-rated movie? What if the alarm didn't sound and you slept in that day? What if you missed the bus? What if the preacher left town? What if you're a tribesman in New Guinea and this college student doesn't obey the call to take up the mission arms and go preach to you? Think of the thousands and thousands and even millions of things that have to take place in order for you to be at a specific place at a specific time to hear the preaching of the gospel and to respond. And if God does not interfere with man's free will, then God is not good. Or God's goodness has variableness, shadow of turning, depends on the whims of nature, the flapping of the butterfly's wings. And it ends up with all of us being hopeless. For our salvation depends on whether or not the alarm clock works and gets us up in time for church. There's no comfort there. You cannot stand fearless in the face of the enemy if God's goodness is as fickle as the revivalist preachers would have us to believe. If there is no shadow of turning in the goodness of God, then it cannot be dependent on man's free will. There can only be one certain, steady, unchanging, unflickering, unshadowed source of our salvation, the will of God. And like I said, God is not made up of pieces and parts. So like God's goodness and His infinity and every one of His other attributes, we're not talking about separate things. His will, His decree, His words, His power, His action are all one. As is His goodness and His wisdom. And this is the solid ground for our feet. Elisha, when he stood there in the face of the Aramean army, knew that the armies of God surrounded him. They protected him. And he knew that because he knew God is the Father of lights with whom there is no variation nor shifting shadow. He doesn't forget to show up. But it also follows that our new birth is grounded in that changeless, unshifting will of God. And if God's will is unshifting, God's purpose is also unshifting and unchanging. And we read in verse 18 what the purpose of our new birth is. It's that we might be a kind of first fruits of the new creation. God's ultimate purpose is the recreation of the heavens and the earth. that all things are going to be made new. I spoke of that last week and here he tells us that that regeneration of the heavens and the earth begins with the church, with the regeneration and rejuvenation of his church, the recreation of the church, the beginning again of each individual in his church calling them to himself. When Jesus ascended into heaven he gave his Holy Spirit to the church on the day of Pentecost. Echoing the filling of the tabernacle with the glory of God, which you read about at the end of the book of Exodus. After all the sacrifices and purity rituals were gone through by the priests, the glory of God filled the tabernacle. And in Christ the reality came. He was the sacrifice. He took the impurities upon himself and took them outside of the camp. Outside of the camp he was the circumcision of the world, cut off and cast away. And then he was raised from the dead for our justification. He who is perfectly pure and perfectly holy, he's our hope and our future. And when he ascended up into heaven on the day of Pentecost, he poured out his Holy Spirit on the church, no longer on a building. He poured it on his church. The Holy Spirit was received by faith where the word was preached and believed. There was the Holy Spirit and there was new birth. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth. That was the significance of Pentecost. And you remember when Peter went out and preached the word, 3,000 of them believed and were baptized, receiving the promise of the Holy Spirit. And how did God, how does God bring that about today? And this is crucial to the main point of the book of James. He brings it about today the same way, through the word of truth preached. God brought about our new birth in his infinite unchanging goodness by the gospel which was preached. That word of truth, just as Ezekiel preached to dry bones in the wilderness, so the preacher of the gospel today preaches and the dead become alive. The message of the gospel, the Lord has visited his people. Our sins are covered by the blood of the lamb. We are washed clean in the blood of the lamb. We are now righteous before God because Jesus was crucified on a cross and rose again the third day. And now we are righteous before God and heirs of eternal life. The blood and water that flowed from his side. wash away our sins in the sight of God, taking our sin and our shame and our guilt and our fear away. So with uplifted head, we can behold Him standing at the right hand of God. And when that word is preached, the Holy Spirit works in the heart, opening the understanding, making us alive, making us alive to hear and to believe and to obey. Why? Because of the will of God, which flows from His infinite goodness. That's the power of the gospel. That's the power of the Spirit. That's the power of Christ. And it all flows from the overflowing goodness of God. The Son of God today, by His Word and His Spirit, gathers, defends, and preserves for Himself a chosen communion in the unity of true faith. This makes people nervous. If election is true, if our new birth has nothing to do with us but only comes from the good will of God, why should we do good works? Doesn't this doctrine make us careless and profane? It can't possibly be true. Pelagius, way back in the 5th century, taught that because throughout Scripture God commands us to keep the law, Therefore we cannot be dead and incapable of keeping it. For it wouldn't make sense for God to command us to keep the law. It wouldn't make sense for God to command us to obey if we couldn't choose to do so. If what James is saying in verse 17 and 18 is true, then why do we need to make any choices to do anything at all? And James answers that whole argument in verse 19 with one word. Wherefore, what follows from the free election of God is this. Be quick to hear. That command, if you look at it from the right perspective, only makes sense in light of verse 18. But the fact of the matter is, we are dead. If God doesn't make us alive, then a command to hear is the ravings of a madman. How can a dead man hear? Only an insane person stands in a cemetery and shouts orders. Only a madman would walk to a tomb and say, Lazarus, come forth. Only a crazy person preaches to a valley of dry bones. If God doesn't make men and women alive through the preaching of the gospel, there isn't any point. But the fact is, throughout Scripture, we have the testimony that death is not the end. God does make men and women alive. Those that hear the voice of the Son of Man shall live, Jesus said. We say in our Apostles Creed, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Spirit. Do we believe in the Holy Spirit? This is what the Apostle reminds us of and he brings it back to the subject at hand. In the battle against sin and misery, don't forget that it is the power of the word and spirit that made you alive. That's the gospel. In our trials and our struggles, don't forget that. When our sins become overwhelming, don't forget that. For God doesn't forget. His goodness doesn't flicker. It doesn't come and go. So how are sins overcome? You and me have both been discouraged by sins that don't seem to let go. They're done away with the same way that we were born again to begin with. Through the Word of Truth. Lay aside your sins, your doubts, your fears. Lay aside your anger and your malice. Love one another. Rest in hope. Lift up your eyes and behold the Son of God sitting at the right hand of God. Put aside malice and restlessness. Be patient in adversity. And with those words, the Holy Spirit again moves in the hearts of His people, draws us again to the foot of the cross, draws us again to confess our sins. to say, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner, and cast them at the foot of the cross. And the Holy Spirit again points us to Christ. We gaze upon him and are transformed a little at a time into his image. And so the application of that is very simple. Be quick to hear. Quit resisting the spirit. lay aside your anger and your distrust the fact is if the gospel is true and if scripture is true and if man is corrupt as scripture says then the gospel will change you your habits will change you will change your opinions will change that's because there's a difference between being alive and being dead if you're made alive You need to learn how to do the things that living people do. Jesus asked the layman by the pool, do you want to walk? If he wants to walk, if Jesus heals him, he's going to have to learn how to do the things that walking people do. Get a job. And he says, yes, Lord. If we have been made alive and brought into a new family under a new father, the second Adam, he is the father of light, not the father of darkness. So we have to learn how to walk in the light, and that's hard. To put off the residue of our wickedness, to put off our distrust and our fear, because those are lifelong habits. We will find ourselves changing, and as we change, we learn to rejoice. as we no longer love the things that we used to love, and we no longer believe the things that we used to believe, and we no longer serve the things that we used to serve. It's called growth, it's called sanctification, and at times it's painful. It's so painful we resist it because it hits our pride. It's hard to admit that we were wrong about something our whole lives. It's hard to admit that it's the meek who inherit. When we've always believed that it's the strong who win, it's hard to admit that it is the poor who see God. When we've always considered making money the mark of success and a mark of God's favor, it's hard to admit that mourning is actually a sign of blessedness. when we've always despised the losers. And it's really hard to admit that Jesus didn't come for the righteous because we naturally think of ourselves as the good guys. But Jesus didn't come for the good guys. He came for sinners. He came for the people that we have naturally despised our whole lives. The broken, the foolish, the shameful, the oppressed, the downcast, the sinners. And that's you and that's me. And to identify with that, we need to be born again. And that's exactly what the gospel teaches us and will continue to teach us our whole lives. And we, because we have that superfluity of naughtiness, we still have that residue of wickedness, fight against it every step of the way. And James says, now put it off. Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. When you finally come out of hiding and stand naked before God, that's when you begin to learn and begin to grow. That's when you learn what those garments are that He's clothed you with. but we're like the two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum, and mom is standing there just waiting and saying, come out of hiding, child. Quit throwing your tantrums. Quit talking about all your rights and all the things that you think you deserve. Quit talking about how hard you've slaved for God and everyone else around you. Just stop. Quit complaining about what a raw deal you got. for God is overwhelmingly good to you. So just stop, breathe, look up, see your father. He's the father of lights. Stop throwing that tantrum and just rest. Rest, trust, listen. Do you hear the armies of the living God surrounding you? Do you see the son of God standing at his right hand with all authority in heaven and in earth? If you look closely, you can see by faith from afar the country that you are heading to. It isn't here. Do you see the heavenly city that's waiting for you? Wipe those tears away. Don't grieve like someone without hope. Don't pick up guns and storm the capital like your helpless neighbors, for we have hope, and there's always more with us than there are with them. But in order to see the armies of God, you've got to quit throwing your temper tantrums. So stop it. The wrath of men doesn't work the righteousness of God. Look up. Now, Lord, open our eyes to see. Let us pray. Almighty God and Heavenly Father, teach us to lift up our eyes where you are. Teach us to lift up our eyes in hope, for we have a glorious future that awaits and your goodness is overwhelming with no shadow of turning, no variation. Teach us to trust in that. to rest in you and in your promises, and in resting, teach us that we can do good to our neighbors, that we can be a people of hope, of joy, of contentment. In all things, we look for the blessed second coming of our Lord Jesus. Come quickly, dear Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.