[0:00] Now, we're going to read a couple of different sections from the New Testament. First of all, in the book of Philippians chapter 2. So, if you have your Bibles, you can turn there, otherwise the words are up on the screen. Philippians chapter 2, we're going to read the first 11 verses, and then we'll turn to 1 Corinthians 13 again. So, let's hear God's Word together. Therefore, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in Spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place, and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And then turning back to 1 Corinthians chapter 13, we're going to read there from verse 3 to verse 7.
[2:06] If I give all I possess to the poor, and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
[2:50] We're going to be back looking at that second part of verse 4 in just a moment, but let me again pray briefly. Lord, with the psalmist, we ask that you would open our eyes to see wonderful things in your word. That we would remember that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We pray that we would open our mouths, that you would fill us, that you would satisfy us, that you would bring us a good news of great joy as we spend time in your word. May we be conscious of your spirit opening the word to us. May he open our hearts to receive it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
[3:41] So love does not envy, it does not boast, and it is not proud. Love is the most excellent way Paul has been teaching the church, and we're going to continue to think about that, but we are going to begin, at least in our imagination, with a trip to the carnival or to a funfair. Now, I don't know how different people feel about them. Some love them, some not so much. Some are thrill seekers, some not so much. There are at least two queues at the funfair you would never find me in. The first would be the queue for the pirate ship, which looks to me like the greatest form of torture ever devised. You know, the way it swings all the way up, and then it swoops back down, it swings all the way up again.
[4:30] Paying to be seasick does not strike me as fun. So you wouldn't find me on the pirate ship. I don't like those highs and lows. You also would never find me in the hall or the house of mirrors. I get claustrophobic very easily, and the thought of being surrounded by reflections of oneself and feeling trapped. It seemed like a form of misery and torture again. Today, we are dealing with the topic of pride. Pride, Paul is going to say to us, is most definitely not the most excellent way because love is. Rather, pride, when it takes root in our lives, can be a lot like that pirate ship experience, or like being on a roller coaster, where we will find ourselves emotionally at least experiencing all kinds of highs and lows because how we feel about ourselves and how we feel our life is, is always related to other people. Do they speak well of us or not? Are they achieving more than us or not?
[5:38] Highs and lows that come with pride. Pride can also, can't it be a lot like a hall of mirrors? Where it feels like everything is about us. We manage to make everything reflect back to us, and when that happens, it's a struggle then to break out of that, to love others well, to think well of others. So today, our goal is to remind ourselves of the right center for our identity, that center that will give us stability and security to allow us to love others well. So we need to begin with what the Bible teaches about ourselves. The Bible teaches that as people, we are made in God's image, in God's likeness. As people, whoever we are, wherever we're from, we have value, we have dignity, we have worth.
[6:35] And more than just being made in God's image, we are made to know God and to enjoy God and to worship God. The right at the center of our identity should be knowing God as Father through Jesus as Savior.
[6:54] That's our source of identity, or it should be. The problem for pride then is that rather than looking up to God for a sense of our identity, we find ourselves looking around, having to compare ourselves to others for a sense of self-worth or dignity, what we can so easily do is we can put the self, ourselves, at the center of our existence where God belongs. The Bible uses the image of pride as a person who is puffed up. Perhaps we can think of a puffed up balloon. What do we know about that balloon? We know that it is fragile. There is always that strong possibility that it will be deflated, that someone will come along and burst that bubble of ours. We can also say of a balloon when it's blown up that there's a hollowness. We are meant to have a stable center who is God. God is big enough to fill all our hopes, our needs, our desires. If we put ourself where God's supposed to be, we will find that we are missing something. There will be that sense of hollowness.
[8:06] Augustine said our hearts are restless until they find their rest in our God. There is a God-shaped hole in all of us. The church in Corinth then, in a sense, stands as a case study of the danger of pride as it finds itself in an individual, or indeed as it finds itself playing out in a church.
[8:28] So again, you read the whole letter and you find a church where there is jealousy, a church where there is selfishness, where they are resenting the success of others or the gifts of others, where there are people fighting to be number one. And so Paul brings this answer to the church and he returns them to the reality of love that is the greatest, that is the most excellent way.
[8:55] That we need to find our identity in knowing the love of God through Jesus if we are to be secure as individuals so that we might then love others well, regardless of how their response is, regardless of how they are perceived by others, what their standing is, what their gifts are.
[9:17] So to help us to think about this, four simple words beginning with the letter C. We're going to think about comparison, and we're going to think about contentment, and we're going to think about celebration, and then we're going to think about Christ as we think about this truth that love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. So let's begin with our first C, which is comparison.
[9:46] So there was a minister in Govan in Glasgow back in the 17th century by the name of Hugh Binning, and he wrote a little book on this chapter, and he has a wonderful little phrase in there where he says, pride is a self-admirer. Pride is a self-admirer. And he goes further and he says, that pride is fed by constant comparison. That was back in the 17th century, but I imagine that we can so easily relate to that reality today in the world in which we live. You may have seen in the news, or you may be a social media person, and you will know that Instagram have now made it possible that when you post a story, you can hide the likes that you get. It was regarded as being stressful, bad for people's mental health. So to give a less pressurized social media experience, you can now hide how people respond to your story. The power of comparison and competition, positively or negatively.
[10:51] When it comes to pride here, we can think about envy and boasting, as it were, of two sides of the same coin. And when we think about comparison, envy is drawing pain, because we think someone is higher and better and more than us. Whereas boasting is drawing pleasure from the fact that we think we're doing better and we're higher and we're more than another. Perceptions we have of ourselves.
[11:17] The categories that we compare one another with, I imagine we could draw almost an endless list. All of us will have our own weaknesses, temptations to compare and compete.
[11:29] We can think about success, power, reputation, looks, performance, temperament, personality, abilities, gifts, you name it, it's possible to compare and compete. And the challenge we face in the 21st century is this is being fed by advertising, which is saying you will be someone when you have this product.
[11:49] You are worth something when you wear this item of clothing. Couple that with the power of social media, where we can so easily, and Instagram have recognized it, find ourselves comparing and being compared with, and that could be profoundly stressful or lead to boasting.
[12:09] It's a day and age as well when you will find in any sort of field, there's so many success stories being paraded. We like to celebrate the great and the good, and that can be bad for our feeling of self-worth and self-image. It can be so easy to be sucked into the comparison game, the competition game. But the question is, why do we have that pressure of comparison?
[12:32] Well, the Bible would say it's because we're looking for our identity on the horizontal level, when we should be finding that secure identity from who we are in Christ. Rather than comparing and competing with one another, we should be content knowing that we have the approval of God, our Father. The answer, to use the title from Tim Keller's little book, is the freedom of self-forgetfulness, to think of self-less, and to think more of the Lord Jesus. What happens when we compare ourselves, not to one another, but we compare ourselves to Jesus? What happens as we read the Gospels?
[13:15] There we see the one truly perfect human being who is, of course, also fully God. We see His glory, we see His perfections, we see His perfect treatment of others, and when we are honest before God's Word, that creates a humility. So we look to Jesus to humble ourselves, but we also look to Christ to find our stable and secure identity, because the good news of the Bible is that when we are trusting in Jesus, God's verdict on us is already in. And that verdict is a positive one, and it's a positive one not because of who we are and what we have done and what we are achieving, but because of who Jesus is, and what Jesus has done in His dying on the cross and His resurrection to forgive our sin, to reconcile us and bring us peace with God.
[14:10] So before God, we have a welcome, we have approval, not based on me, but on Jesus. And that's where stability comes from. And when we know that, we live out of that, then we can love others well.
[14:23] So that's the first C, the C of comparison. Let's move from there to contentment. A couple of classic Bible examples of people who were not content. Our Sunday school, they're just finishing off the story of Joseph at the moment. And what we discover as soon as we meet Joseph and his brothers is that Joseph is hated because he's favored, but he has a dream, doesn't he? He has a dream that his mom and his dad and his brothers will all bow down to him. And when he has that dream, of that position that God would give to him, his brothers hated him all the more because they were jealous. Who is he to claim that kind of status? Another example in the book of Esther is Haman, one of the real villains of Old Testament history. Haman was the guy who, in one sense, seemed to have it all. He had power, he had respect. People from all over the kingdom were bowing down to him. He'd been invited to a feast from Queen Esther, but he couldn't be happy because one man, Mordecai, wouldn't bow down to him. In fact, he said to his friends, I won't be happy until Mordecai is dead. The point is that pride, when it takes root in our hearts, will suck away contentment from our lives. We will inevitably find ourselves on that roller coaster of emotional highs and lows, constantly comparing, constantly competing, never feeling content. We see one aspect of this in the church in Corinth. In 1 Corinthians chapter 3, you can turn there if you have your Bible, we find Paul saying to this church, in this one regard, you're not acting like Christians. You're acting in a very worldly way, and it was because they were arguing and fighting, there was jealousy and quarreling over who was the great spiritual leader that they should follow. Paul says, when one says,
[16:39] I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not mere human beings? What, after all, is Apollos, and what is Paul? Only servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord has assigned to each his task. Yeah, a wonderful example from Paul. He's not fighting to be regarded as number one.
[17:02] He considers himself a servant. God's working in him. God's working through him, and he is content with that. And he calls them to recognize that in a very real sense, verse 7, neither the one who plants, nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow. So they're discontented.
[17:25] They're arguing over who's the best, and what does Paul do? Paul says, look to God. God is everything. There's where we find our contentment. Now, three aspects of pride that we can think about, about envy and boasting, that can steal away contentment, and that can also lead to a lack of love and the loss of love within a church, which is obviously a really bad thing. Think about how it affects ourselves. If we envy, we will not be content. You know, Paul has said, 1 Corinthians 12, God calls people into his church. God assigns people by his Spirit particular gifts, particular ministries, particular roles. That's true of life in general. Envy rejects that because we want something more. Envy finds it really hard to be thankful because we're always thinking the grass is greener and someone else has got what I want. Whereas boasting also lacks contentment because, again, we're not happy that we have these gifts or these opportunities or these. We need others to see us, to value us. There's still that sense of wanting to be compared against others, and so there's a fragility that's connected to boasting. What about as envy and boasting relate to others?
[19:03] Well, we see in Joseph's brothers and Haman how quickly envy leads to bitterness and to anger, wanting to tear down someone else, where their happiness, their success, their personality, their gifts become a rock in our shoe that we just want to get rid of. But then on the other side, pride affects the way we look at others, so that we're inclined towards looking down on others, perhaps even stepping on others to make sure that our position and our sense of self-worth are maintained. And that, that's exhausting. If we're always competing, there's always others who we need to show ourselves to be better than, so we are losing that battle for contentment when we are boasting.
[19:57] And what about when it comes to God? Envy, as we've already said, is a way of saying, I am unhappy with God's providence. I'm unhappy with my circumstances. I'm unhappy with my personality, perhaps.
[20:15] I'm unhappy with my gifts and my opportunities. In pride, we say to God, maybe not, maybe we don't say it out loud, but in our hearts we're thinking, I deserve more than this. But what about boasting as it relates to God? Boasting takes credit to ourselves that rightly belongs to God. Where we're saying, I did that? That was on me, not every good gift comes from God. I'm just a servant.
[20:47] What are some of the danger signs of discontent in a person's life, in our lives? Perhaps we find ourselves daydreaming. If only, if only my life was different, if only I was different, if only I had those opportunities. Or it might look like constantly promoting oneself, turning every conversation to us, every social media post about me. Or perhaps it's giving too much weight to the words and the opinions of others. I can only be happy if all these people say good things of me. We'll be crushed if one person says something negative of us. What's the secret to contentment? Don't we want to find contentment? Don't we want to be happy in our own skin and able to love others well? Paul said he'd find the secret. He said, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Being united to the Lord
[21:56] Jesus, drawing life and strength from him, resting in knowing God's love and God's approval. That's where contentment is found. That's the only place where true and lasting contentment is found.
[22:13] I love the example of John the Baptist, beginning of John's gospel. John the Baptist is a wonderful example of pointing away from self and towards Jesus. Remember the bit where, so John had a great following as a prophet. But then Jesus comes and John straightaway says, look, here's the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And then there's one point where John's disciples say to him, look, your followers are starting to go and follow Jesus. And Jesus is starting to get a bigger crowd than you. And what did John say? John knew who Jesus was. He said, he must become greater. I must become less.
[22:48] That's where contentment is, where we recognize Jesus is the glorious one. We're not trying to claim glory for ourselves. That's contentment. Third C is that of celebration. Celebration.
[23:04] We had our niece's first birthday last weekend, which was very exciting and a very fun weekend. And we were able to share it with one or two family members. So it was really a special time.
[23:20] But imagine if you're at this kid's birthday party or any child's birthday party, if you were there and it was past the parcel and the music stopped. And if every time the music stopped, I made that desperate grab for the parcel, wrestling it out of a one-year-old's hands even to make sure I got the prize.
[23:45] Or after a particularly energetic game of musical bumps, you found me crying and throwing a tantrum in the corner because I didn't win. You'd be more than entitled to pull me to one side and say, do you know what? It's not your party. And do you know we need to remember that about life? Pride says, this is my party. It puts me at the center. Says, I should be celebrated. I should be valued.
[24:22] Where the Bible encourages us always, as his people, to make sure that God and his glory and his love are at the center of our lives and that that love would flow out from us to others.
[24:37] What does envy do, though, when we think about celebration? Envy makes it incredibly difficult to truly celebrate the success of others, the happiness of others, the gifts of others, if we feel, that should be me. That should be my experience. We can either find ourselves in the cycle of despair. I'm a nobody and I'm a nothing because they're achieving all this and I'm doing nothing. Or a cycle of bitterness. I can't wait till they fail. But what about boasting?
[25:20] If in our mindset, everything must be about us, then we have no time or space. Perhaps we don't even notice the successes of others that ought to be celebrated. We certainly don't have time for their joy because we're too busy worrying about our own. And when we have that boasting, there's a failure in us to be humble. Remember Paul saying, remember, I'm just God's servant. There's a failure to see God's hand in any success that we have. And there's still the problem of competition so that we're not free to celebrate others. C.S. Lewis, on the subject of pride, said, pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. That kind of mindset doesn't have room to be grateful to God. Doesn't have room to be secure either because what if the next person after that gets more of something? It's a challenge for us. A chance for us to examine our hearts. How do we react to the success of a colleague in a project that they're involved in, a promotion that they receive that you don't? How do we react to the happy family that we see when perhaps we feel sad or lonely?
[26:51] How do we react to the thriving church? Down the road we hear wonderful stories of God's grace and God at work in them, and we feel that we are small. Are we able to celebrate God's kindness to others, the success of others? It can really expose our hearts and expose our pride.
[27:15] The answer, when it comes to celebration, is not to find our identity in comparing with others, not to find our contentment in relation to how we feel we stack up to others.
[27:26] Rather, it's to believe the gospel, to believe what God said through Zephaniah the prophet, that God, the holy, perfect, infinite, eternal God, rejoices over his church with singing, that God celebrates, saved by grace, sinners. It's to believe that Jesus, eternal Son of God, our perfect Savior, he had joy in going to the cross, knowing that he would achieve the Father's will, and knowing that he would save sinners and bring us home. This Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers, and that's something to celebrate. That's where we find our value, our sense of worth. And then, as we understand that, then we're free to rejoice with those who rejoice, and we're able to weep with those who weep.
[28:16] Then we are free to celebrate the success of others, to affirm the gifts of others, to enjoy saying, it's not my party, it's God's. When Jesus is at the center of our lives, there's stability, and there's security. That brings us to our fourth C, which is Christ. When we find ourselves on that emotional roller coaster of those highs when people value us and approve of us, and those lows where someone devalues or criticizes us, how do we get off? How can we know freedom to love others well, stripped of pride? How do we escape that hall of mirrors where we make so much of life all about us, where we feel exhausted and anxious and fragile? Where do we find strength and stability? Well, the answer is to look to the Lord Jesus. That's why we read from Philippians chapter 2. If you have your Bible, perhaps you can turn back to Philippians chapter 2, and here we discover the power of God's love to free us, and the pattern of Jesus' love that we are then encouraged to follow in our own lives. There are wonderful truths here in verse 1. It says that by faith we recognize that we are united to Christ.
[29:50] By faith we draw comfort from His perfect love. By faith we share in the spirit of love.
[30:03] Here's the antidote to selfish ambition and pride and envy and boasting. It's found in what we have in Christ, and it's what we see in Christ. Verse 5, in your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ. What do we see in Jesus? We see humble, self-giving love. Verse 6, Jesus, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.
[30:41] This is wonderful truth that Jesus did not grudge leaving the glory of heaven to come to this earth. Verse 7, rather, Jesus made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. Jesus did not begrudge becoming one of us. Jesus did not grudge taking the position of a servant, becoming the suffering servant to save us. Verse 8, Jesus being found in appearance as a man, humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Jesus in humility did not grudge becoming obedient to the point of death to be our Savior. And who did he do that for? For proud, envying, boastful people like us. But Jesus didn't claim his rights. Rather, he freely gave himself to die for us at the cross. And when we see that love, that humble, sacrificial love, when we receive that in our hearts, isn't that what strips away pride in our lives? Isn't that what turns us towards loving others? When we see that perfect example in Jesus. Jesus, our elder brother, who's not ashamed to call us brothers? I was talking to a few different people about big brothers this week. I don't know where everyone sits in their family tree, but if you have a big brother or a big sister, I imagine the chances are that you, at least at one point in your life, looked up to them. It's certainly true of me. I'm only one year younger than my big brother, but he is someone I always looked up to and still do.
[32:42] And that's often the case with big brothers, big sisters. We often look up to them. We admire them. We want to be like them. That's why we need to look to Jesus, remembering that in God's family, Jesus is all our elder brother. And when we admire Jesus and the way that he lived, we recognize Jesus didn't envy and Jesus didn't envy and Jesus didn't boast. So, I don't want to.
[33:15] Jesus loves others. Jesus celebrated the value of others. And I want to love like that.
[33:26] We need to look to Jesus. We'll shortly be coming to the Lord's table. And as Philippians 2, our reading continued, this same Jesus who humbled himself to die on the cross to forgive our sin and to bring us to God is now, verse 9, exalted to the highest place and given the name that is above every name. Jesus exalted above everyone and everything. And yet, Jesus will meet with us at his table. In his self-giving love, he will come to graciously serve us and strengthen our faith. This is our Savior, a humble Savior, full of love. And since this is true, what do we need? We need, first of all, to receive his love today, to receive this offered forgiveness, to receive this peace with God by putting our trust in him. And then we need to rest in this love, to let this love be what defines us and gives us our sense of self.
[34:42] And from that freedom of self-forgetfulness, we would then be enabled by God's grace to love one another. Let's pray together briefly.
[34:59] Lord, our God, we thank you so much for the humble, self-giving love of the Lord Jesus in leaving the glory of heaven for us, in becoming one of us, in becoming our servant and to die on the cross for us.
[35:20] Lord, we thank you now that he is exalted over everyone and everything. We thank you that he still continues to give us his love, still draws near to meet with us.
[35:34] Lord, we pray that you would cause us to know that love in our lives and that it would both humble us and give us that sense of stability, to recognize that our true identity as believers is who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ. Keep us from fighting and competing and comparing.
[36:02] Keep us from discontent. Help us to be able to celebrate others because we find the joy of a God who celebrates over us.
[36:17] We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, before we come as God's people to share the Lord's Supper, we will hear a very appropriate hymn when I survey the wondrous cross. And this will be a good time for us to open our bread and our wine if we are sharing them today.
[36:41] Amen. When I surveyed the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and poor contempt on all my pride.
[37:34] Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, save in the death of Christ my God.
[37:50] All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to His blood.
[38:11] See from His hand, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down.
[38:30] Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, For thorns compose so rich a crown?
[38:47] Were thou whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small, Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my own.
[39:27] Now as we come to this part of our service, we come to share the Lord's Supper, which is a visible reminder, A representation of the death of the Lord Jesus, stands at the centre of our faith, the centre of our hope, where we see God's love demonstrated.
[40:05] This meal which is for those who are members of God's church, those who've been baptised. Let me read a verse from Galatians 6 that our hymn writer drew on as he was writing that wonderful hymn.
[40:22] Galatians 6 verse 14, May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.
[40:36] May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. We sometimes sing, Hallelujah, all I have is Christ.
[40:48] Hallelujah, Jesus is my life. Boasting in what Jesus has done for us, who Jesus is to us. I am a new creation in Christ.
[41:02] That's our hope. That's our centre, not what we have done, but all that Jesus has done for us. So here at the Lord's table, we have an opportunity to look back and to remember his death for his people, for our sin on the cross.
[41:22] And as we look back, it creates a sense of humility in us when we recognise the sinless Son of God did that for us. It creates a sense of gratitude in us when we recognise our salvation secure at the cost of Jesus' body and blood.
[41:42] It strips away false pride from us. We bring nothing except our sin. Salvation belongs to the Lord.
[41:52] But then as we come to the table, we find ourselves looking around at one another. And as we look around, we remember in the gospel, we are all one in the Lord Jesus Christ.
[42:08] We're all loved by our Father in heaven. Jesus loved us and gave himself for us. There's no place for envy and boasting in God's family, in God's church.
[42:20] Rather, we are to live lives marked by love. And then as we come to the Lord's table, as we hear Jesus say, do this until I return in remembrance of me, we look ahead, don't we?
[42:34] We anticipate. We anticipate the wedding supper of the Lamb, that wonderful picture of eternity in the presence of Jesus, in a world made perfect, when we're free of sin.
[42:47] And on that day, there'll be no envy in our hearts. There'll be no pride in our hearts. There'll be no boasting except in the Lord Jesus.
[42:59] So we can use this supper to remind us and to return us again to our faith in the Lord Jesus. Let's read. Let me read from 1 Corinthians 11, these words of institution.
[43:14] For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread.
[43:24] And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.
[43:36] So let's pray and then we can take the bread. Lord God, we thank you for this chance to stop and to reflect and to remember.
[43:49] To remember your great love in sending your son, Jesus, to be that ransom, to set us free from our slavery to sin, so that by trusting in Jesus, we might be forgiven and we might be brought home to yourself.
[44:11] Lord, as we consider the great cost of our salvation, may it lead us to humility and gratitude and increased worship.
[44:25] Lord, may our hearts and our lives be centred around your great love for us. and may you use these elements of bread and wine to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus, to be restored and renewed as we consider your great love for us.
[44:49] We ask that by your Spirit you would meet with us to strengthen us in our faith, to enable us to persevere with joy. We pray in Jesus' name.
[45:01] Amen. So let's take the bread and let's eat that together. Continuing our reading at verse 25 in the same way after supper he took the cup saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.
[45:28] Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
[45:41] So let's take the cup and drink. and let's pray together.
[46:01] Lord, as we have shared this very simple meal we thank you for its amazing significance, its saving significance for the lives of your people.
[46:14] May you strengthen us to proclaim the Lord's death until he comes, to with our words and in our actions to demonstrate the transforming power of the love of God in our lives as individuals, as families, and as your church.
[46:35] Lord, may we go from this place strengthened so as to serve you, knowing that you have so graciously and wonderfully in the Lord Jesus served us.
[46:51] Amen. Now, as we close, Kellen will sing for us a modern rendering of the hymn Man of Sorrows.
[47:03] Man of Sorrows, Lamb of God, by his own betrayed, sin of man and wrath of God has been on Jesus' lane.
[47:42] Silent as he stood accused, beaten, mocked, and scorned, bowing to the Father's will, he took a crown of love.
[48:04] Oh, that rugged cross of salvation, where your love poured out over me, now my soul cries out, hallelujah, praise and honor unto me.
[48:29] God's God's Son of heaven, God's own Son, to purchase and redeem.
[48:48] Reconciled the very ones who nailed him to that tree. thee, oh, that broken cross, my salvation, where your love poured out over me.
[49:11] Now my soul cries out, hallelujah, praise and honor unto me.
[49:21] God's son of a son of a bill. Now my debt is paid, it is paid in full by the precious blood that my Jesus spilled.
[49:42] Now the curse of sin has no hold on me. Oh, the sun sets free, oh, it's free indeed.
[49:54] Oh, that rugged cross, my salvation, where your love poured out over me.
[50:07] Now my soul cries out, hallelujah, praise and honor unto me.
[50:18] Oh, the sun sets free, oh, it's free indeed. See the stone is rolled away, behold the empty tomb.
[50:36] Hallelujah, God be praised, he's risen from the grave.
[50:48] Oh, that rugged cross, my salvation, where your love poured out over me.
[51:00] Now my soul cries out, hallelujah, praise and honor unto thee.
[51:12] Praise and honor unto thee. Praise and honor unto thee.
[51:26] We stand for the benediction. From the end of Hebrews chapter 13.
[51:40] Amen. Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will.
[51:54] And may he work in us what is pleasing to him through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Amen.