Hi, my name is George Sinclair. I'm the lead pastor of Church of the Messiah.
! It is wonderful that you would like to check out some of the sermons done by Church of the Messiah,
either by myself or some of the others. Listen, just a couple of things. First of all, would you pray for us
that we will open God's Word well to His glory and for the good of people like yourself?
The second thing is, if you aren't connected to a church and if you are a Christian,
we really, I would really like to encourage you to find a good local church where they believe the
Bible, they preach the gospel, and if you have some trouble finding that, send us an email. We will do
what we can to help connect you with a good local church wherever you are. And if you're a non-Christian,
checking us out, we're really, really, really glad you're doing that. Don't hesitate to send us
questions. It helps me actually to know, as I'm preaching, how to deal with the types of things
that you're really struggling with. So God bless.
Let's bow our heads in prayer. Father, we thank you for Jesus. We thank you that He
was our substitute, our representative, that He tasted all there is to taste to death for us after
He had suffered punishment for the sins that we deserved. We thank you that on the third day,
He rose triumphant over sin, over death, and over all hostile spiritual powers in His resurrection.
We give you thanks and praise that He is both in heaven with you as our advocate, and that He walks
beside each one of your children day by day, moment by moment, as our advocate. And we thank and praise
you that He will come again in glory. Father, pour out the Holy Spirit upon us. Grow within us deep
gratitude and wonder at what Christ has accomplished for us. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and
our Savior. Amen. Please be seated.
So I've been doing something unusual. If you're a guest here, you might not know this, but there's
an ancient part of the original sort of from the English Reformation in the mid-1500s.
There's a communion service, and towards the end of that communion service, it's actually
a great time. And we've had the Bible reading and the sermon, and we've had intercessions.
And then we confess our sins. And after we've confessed our sins, and the minister has pronounced
God's desire that all would turn to Christ, there is something in the original service called the
Comfortable Words. And you at this 10 o'clock service don't hear them very often. The 8 o'clock service,
they'd be there every Sunday. And I decided that I would spend three Sundays going over the three
comfortable, three of the four comfortable words. Every week I'd add in the first one, Matthew.
So these comfortable words, you can make a case, I think, they are four different ways,
three in particular, of one-verse summaries of the whole purpose of Jesus, the whole gospel. And if you
understand who Jesus is and his mission in the gospel, that's the key to understanding the whole
Bible. And these are very, very great short summaries of it. And so today I will be preaching
on this one verse. It's actually half of one verse and the first half of the next verse,
which is, but if anyone sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,
Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins. Now, if I wanted to,
I could hide something from you. And many churches and many ministers hide something from you when they
read a verse like that, if they read it at all. Letting you know, and those of you watching online,
often ministers will hide something. Quite a few years now, when Daniel Avitan and Jonathan Kamiri,
they had to go to a three-day assessment to assess whether they might be able to plant a church.
And part of that assessment is they each have to think, I can't remember if it's 10 or 12 or 15
minutes, but they have to give a sermon or brief sermon on an assigned text. And that they're assessed
by it. So I think there were five couples. So there's like, you know, 30 people in the room,
because you have a whole team of assessors. The assessors are there with pads and pens to make
comments on what's being said. You can imagine how stressful it is, by the way. Like most people
don't want to do public speaking, period. But public speaking, while there's people being critical of
you, that for most people's would be a description of something close to hell. And needless to say,
usually in those situations, because sometimes the assessors can be really harsh in public,
when they, because part of it, they give part of the assessment right to the person in front of
everybody. And probably they know that's going to happen. But by the time you get past the first speaker,
they know what's going to happen. It's needless to say, people don't do very well in those talks.
Anyway, afterwards, even though I'm not part of the assessment, but because I'm there to represent
an advocate, advocate for Daniel and Jonathan, I'm back there and I hear how they're going to assess
and how they're going to score their sermon as part of their assessment. And I wasn't going to,
you know, Jonathan, and if they were here, by the way, they'd say, yeah, I didn't do a good job.
Like, they knew they didn't do a good job, but very hard to do a good job in such a stressful situation.
You know, I have a bishop here, and he can tell you, speaking in front of clergy is not often the
best situation in the world. They can be very catty and highly critical, and it's often very stressful to do.
So anyway, but in the back room, we're talking about it. And one of the people they were going to give
the highest marks to, and another one they were going to give very high marks to it. I'm listening
to Puzzle Mitt. One of them, I don't think it was this text, but it's the next text in John that uses
the word propitiation. And I said to the assessors after I listened to it, I said, listen, I would have
failed that guy, both of those guys, right on the spot. Boom. I would have failed them. And they pushed
back. I said, why? They didn't tell you what propitiation meant. They hid the meaning. How can you trust
them to be a pastor if they hide the meaning of propitiation? Well, they pushed back. You know,
I pushed back. At the end of the day, we agreed to disagree. They made their assessment, and I just
said I would tell the bishop my view in our case. Neither of our guys had to talk about it. So what
am I talking about? What did they hide? I mean, in fact, I think even one of the guys actually said
that Jesus takes a time out for you. Like the most innocuous, sorry, minimal type of punishment for a
kid. And rather than you taking it, you know, the kid taking the time out, Jesus takes the time. Okay,
here's the problem with the word. The word propitiation means that Jesus's death upon the cross
satisfies God's anger, God's wrath at sin. That's what it means. That when Jesus died on the cross,
his death turned away or satisfied God's wrath at your sin. Now, you can go online. You can google
propitiation. You'll say you can find articles and YouTube videos that try to explain that that's not
what the word means. And all they are is very clever gas lighters. That's what it means. Everybody knows
that's what it means. That's what it means in ancient Greek literature. That's in fact part of the problem.
But that's what it means. Now, we can all understand why people want to avoid saying that. And you might be
wondering why on earth I would even say something like this on Easter Sunday.
In fact, I think the average Canadian, if I was to say, like in a coffee shop, what the word
propitiation means, I think people would be a bit shocked. And I think if you could, if you asked them
and they felt comfortable, I think most Canadians would say this, I could never believe in a God that gets angry.
I could never believe in a God that gets angry.
Now,
we have to understand, I don't know, maybe some of you are feeling the same way. Maybe some of you have
never heard that that's what the word means. And by the way, if you go back and you look at the original
prayer book service, and go back and look at the language of oblation and satisfaction, that the
the word, it's right in the very center of the heart of the English Reformation.
And it's a it's a very important idea in the Bible. But we can understand why people have problems with it.
We all know people who are anger driven.
Yesterday, when I was working in the coffee shop, a woman shocked me by she looked at what I was
writing and she shocked me by saying, I have very neat writing. Sorry. I chuckled and said to her,
I think you're the first person who's ever said that to me. And I said, sometimes I can't read my
own writing. But she she said, No, no, like, it's very fine. And it's small. And it's very precise.
And I said, Okay, well, whatever. And we got talking about what I was doing. And I talked a
little bit about, you know, how what I was going to be talking about today. And she's just waiting
for a coffee. And, you know, I, she said, Boy, you must, you have lots to say, don't you probably,
because, because I told her I was going to be talking a little bit about anger, and, and how it
related to goodness. And she said, because, you know, people aren't angry enough at Trump in Canada,
United States. Now, I'm not going to get into a political debate with her. But I said,
I don't know if I quite see it that way. I think, don't you think that maybe in social media and media,
there's like, maybe too much anger that maybe we got to, like, don't you think it might be better if
more people just said, I'm just going to think about this for a week or a month or something
without just shooting my mouth off, we had a bit of a disagreement about it. But, but here's the point.
Right. We all know people who are anger driven. Every single one of us knows somebody,
or have been in some situation where we know that we can't say something to them,
because we don't want to deal with the explosion of anger that will come back at us.
That is a situation in families and sports teams. It's in business places and government offices,
we are hesitant to say something to certain people, because we don't want to deal with their anger.
I've never actually preached a sermon on child rearing. But over the years, people will sometimes
come and have a private conversation with me asking me some questions. And often, they'll ask me about
slapping a child if it's ever appropriate. And I start to say a couple of things about it. And I remember this
one, one, one, a woman, because I, one of the things, one of the things that she said after I,
she'd listened to me a bit was that she could never slap a child once.
And I pause, she paused, and she said, because if I slapped the child once, I'd slap and slap and slap
and slap and slap and slap. And I'd have a hard time stopping. No, I was actually very, I knew the
woman a bit, and I was actually happy she said it, because I thought that's actually probably what you
would do. But we know people who are like that. We've all been in situations where maybe in a
workplace, or in a family, you can see that somebody's anger is building and building and
building, and you walk around on tiptoes, because, or maybe even try to find an excuse to get out of the
room, because you don't want to be there for when it blows. And we all know how people who are angry
almost always justify their anger. In fact, we all know that often people paint their anger as a sign
of their virtue, rather than a fault. We all know that people's anger tends to be highly self-centered.
We know people who nurture their anger. And most importantly, we all know people, and including
ourselves, that when we get angry, we go over the top. We just, our anger explodes.
So I can well understand why it is that for many Canadians, maybe most Canadians, they would say
this idea of propitiation, I mean, this idea, it sounds nice, George, but if anyone does sin,
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sin.
The first part sounds all very nice, but this propitiation, I could never believe in a God that gets angry.
And I have to confess, I probably was like that in the early years of my Christian life.
But I want to bear witness to you today, I could not believe in a God that doesn't get angry.
I could not believe or worship a God that never got angry.
There's a movie from 2003. Some of you have seen it. It's not a spoiler alert. It's called Tears of the Sun.
It's a movie starring Bruce Willis. I confess I like war movies. Not everybody's cup of tea.
I'm not necessarily recommending you watch it, by the way. But the heart of the movie is a group of,
I can't remember if they're Marines, I mean a Delta Force or Marine Recon or Navy SEALs. I can't
remember what it is. One of those special forces groups. There's an African country and a coup arises.
And part of the coup is Frank genocide. Those rebels trying to take over the country begin to slaughter
innocents. And the United States government doesn't want to interfere with it, but they do send in seams of
seals, we'll call them, to rescue people from mainly Americans, but also people from other first world nations.
And so Bruce Willis heads up a SEAL team that goes to get this doctor. And the whole drama of it is,
is that he tries to trick her to just take her away and rescue her. And she would have to leave behind
all of the people that she was treating and she refuses. And there ends up then being this early
part of the movie where they just, the SEALs, they just keep saying, we're not involved in the nation.
We're not to interfere. We don't really care about all of that. All we're here to do is to rescue you.
And it's a big part of the thing and her moral outrage at that. But a point, a turning point comes in the
movie when they come to the outskirts of a village and the soldiers witness genocide.
This is not a part of the movie for the faint-hearted. They see the senseless murder. They see the hacking off
of limbs and body parts. They see the rape. They see the unleashed cruelty against innocence.
And the soldiers realize they cannot be neutral.
They cannot be neutral.
They need to interfere and deal with it. They need to be angry and deal with it.
You see, one of the things that many people will say if they say, the average Canadian, if you get
talking to them about, they say that they could never believe in a God that gets angry. They tend to
talk if you push them. And not push them, just have some conversation with them. They tend to fall back
in a Buddhist type of idea. That, you know, really God should be above such things, you know, as anger and
hatred and love, you know, love and hatred and anger and vengeance and even good and evil. That God should
transcend all of those types of things. And that God should be a type of place of tranquility above these
types of messy moral situations. And that just seems wise to them. But if you think about it,
that's exactly how the coup leaders would like you to respond to their evil.
Moral, it is not a sign of moral superiority to think you are above such categories as good and evil
and dealing with evil. It is a sign of moral indifference, moral apathy.
It is a sign that you are walking away from morality. It is not a sign of moving to a higher plane.
But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,
and he is the propitiation for our sins. What is God's anger? Why is it different than the anger that
we are afraid of? Well, the anger that we are afraid of is obviously often connected to injustice. It's
often connected to just plain evil. It often blinds us of moral right and wrong. But what God's anger is,
is his unfailing, it's in a sense, love's unfailing opposition to hatred. It is goodness's,
goodness's unfailing opposition to evil. It is justice's unfailing opposition to injustice.
That's what it is. And we know from God that God can never, ever, ever, ever be anger-driven. When we
say, Christians say that God has no passions, it doesn't mean that there isn't something like an
emotion in God, and that's a complicated topic. But what it means is that while our emotions just come
and go, one day we're loving, the next day we don't feel love, and our emotions can take us over and can
rule us, this never happens to God. God cannot have anything overwhelm him being good. God cannot have
anything overwhelm him being true. God can have nothing overwhelm him being just and being love.
Nothing can overwhelm that. And God is never anger or evil-driven. He is love-driven, justice-driven,
goodness-driven, beauty-driven, and yes, in this phrase of propitiation, mercy-driven.
The word propitiation is this idea that God's opposition, it is what happens when love meets
hatred and love will not back down, when goodness meets evil and goodness will not back down or allow the
evil to continue. And it has to be dealt with. There has to be an aspect of punishment.
That's part of a propitiation. And there has to be an aspect of satisfaction, making things right.
Now we can see that there's some problems with that idea right off the bat. But if anyone does sin,
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins.
And some people will say, well, George, why does God have to punish? Like, why does that have to be
part of that? Why can't he just say, you're forgiven? Well, we all know that we say that of God,
but we don't actually believe it. And it's very simply put. I believe it's the case that Joe Biden
set the record for the most presidential pardons. I'm not making a political comment because it wouldn't
surprise me if Trump decides to beat his record. I'm talking about political matters here now.
I'm not making any type of political judgment between parties. But do we feel satisfied? Maybe
we do when it's our guys that hand out the pardons, but when the other guy hands out the pardons, do we
feel satisfied? Do we think it's right that a president with just by a stroke of a pen can say
that all of the legal penalties and punishments that are due to another person are just gone?
It didn't cost him anything. It's only to bolster and pay off his friends and his cronies. And once
again, I am making no political comment about that. I'm not saying Democrats will do it more than
Republicans or vice versa. And we all know that if that happened in Canada with liberals and maybe someday
a conservative government, that it would once again be almost definitely connected inextricably
with just who you happen to like. Is that just? Really? Nobody thinks it does.
We think justice means that there should be some type of punishment, that there really should.
Some people say, well, you know, maybe wasn't there something like just like God making some type of
like counseling type of program that would just end up, you know, having them, you know, be rehabilitated.
But really, is that is that that really, really, really what we want? Like, if you read the papers,
I mean, most of the time the papers push stuff like that, but occasionally they will talk to a victim
who hears that somebody who's done some horrific act of violence to them, some woman who has been
horrifically attacked and abused by a man and find out that he has only spent a mere months or a year or
two in prison and has supposedly been rehabilitated and let out. And does she think justice has been done?
Never. And even if God was to force some type of treatment upon you that would bring you out at the
other side rehabilitated, is that really what we want? We know that we don't want that. That's why they have
movies like The Manchurian Candidate, where some type of psychological process and maybe physical means
are used against a person to, against their will, have them be something different. Those are dystopian
movies, not utopian movies. Dystopian, horrible things of the state forcing you to be a way that you do not
want to be. Is that what we want God? Is that actually what anybody thinks is better? And if anyone does sin,
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins.
You see, it's not just that there is punishment, but there's also this thing of making right. But we
understand that both of these things have to happen. Imagine for a moment that you were doing a kitchen
reno, a renovation of your kitchen. And then one day you come and you find out that there's been a fire.
And the fire is in your kitchen. And you discover that part of the reason that there's a fire is
because the, you know, the worker, the workers decided after work one day to all smoke some joints
and drink some booze and have a bit of a party. And, and they started a fire and it burned a big part of
your kitchen. And then you discovered that they had lied to you and they don't have insurance.
And your insurance won't cover it. And in fact, even if it, if there was insurance, they probably
wouldn't cover it because the bloody fire came about as a result of these guys staying illegally in your
house, smoking joints, doing drugs and drinking and causing the fire. And you would want justice.
And you would want satisfaction by which you would mean if they came to you and said, well, listen,
we can't afford to fix it. You'd say, well, you're going to take out a loan and fix it.
Well, we won't make any money that way. We'll lose money. It's going to be hard to, well, that's your
problem. Now we can see how something like that might be able to work in something like a home
renovation. But now we get to another crux of the whole problem. And it's when we get this other
aspect of the problem that we begin to understand the beauty and why the beauty and the wonder of the
gospel and why I say I would never believe not only in a God that doesn't get angry,
but then a God who takes it upon himself to see that propitiation is done.
It's a very common thing in certain types of movies where somebody has gotten murdered and maybe
their husband or their wife or their son or their uncle or their grandfather or some other person decides
to pursue the wrongdoer because they've escaped or they've done some type of trick so that they walk
away free. And as this desire to make the person pay goes on, there will be people who will interrupt
that man or that woman and say, well, even if you make them pay, you cannot bring your loved one back.
In other words, you can only get part. You can get maybe the payment, but you can't get the satisfaction.
You can't get making things right again. And that's maybe a bit abstract, but at a very personal level,
many of us in this room, maybe all of us in this room, have been part of a damaged relationship where
somebody has done something to us, where we have done something to another person. And even though
we can say we're sorry, and even when we can accept punishment, and even when we can make a partial
amendment of life, we cannot make full satisfaction. And we know that that relationship is broken and
damaged until the day we die. And here the Bible says, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sin. It's not just that love
meets hatred, goodness meets evil, justice meets injustice, truth meets lie, and deals and punishes the wrong.
But also that there is a making right, a satisfaction that takes place at the same time.
Today's Easter Sunday. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. And I'm not going to spend any
time trying to argue these types of things today, but if you're here and you don't know this,
for Christians, it's not just a good story. It's not a moving story. It's nothing like that. I mean,
it is a good story. It's the best story of all. But we Christians believe that the resurrection of
Jesus is just as true as you have a body is true, just as true as your bank balance is true,
just as true as saying that Ottawa is the capital of Canada. It's just as true as that. It is literally
that Christians believe that if God, if scientists were able to create a time machine and you were able
to dial it back to that time in early 33, and you were there on Easter Sunday afternoon, and you were
able to track down and advance the disciples, you would see the resurrected Jesus. In fact, even more dramatic
that if you could be on a time machine and go back in time, you would on Good Friday see Jesus hanging
on a cross, stripped naked. You would see him say his final last words. You would see him breathe his last
breath. You would see him say, it is finished. You would see the spear pierce his side. You would see
him taken down and wrapped in grave clothes and packed with spices. You would see him put in a tomb. You
would see the stone rolled across it. You would see the stone that it's sealed and people guarding it.
You wouldn't see the resurrection. But what you would see on Easter Sunday morning is you would see the
stone rolled away. Whether you saw the angel doing it or not, that's a separate whole question. But you would see the
stone moving away apparently on its own if you don't see the angel. You would see the soldiers running away in terror.
And if you waited for Mary Magdalene to discover that the grave is empty and other women, and you would see Peter and John.
And if you hung around because you know the story, you could be with Mary Magdalene, the first person to see
the resurrected Jesus. That's what would happen if you could go back in a time machine. It really happened.
And this is part of the profound good news. You see, on Good Friday, you have God punishing
you, paying the penalty that you deserve to have paid for the wrong that you have done, the evil you have
done, the injustice you have done, the lies you have told. For those times when you could have been generous
and you held back, when you could have stepped into the breach for somebody else and you refused to do it.
For all that, the cumulative weight of all those things that you have done will at some point in time
come into a collision with a God, the true God who really exists, who is unstoppably good, unstoppably true,
unstoppable love, unstoppable justice. And you will collide with that God.
And what we Christians understand is that on Good Friday, the punishment that I deserved
laid on him. You see, you have this wonderful story. It's as if the weight, you just could imagine,
you know, all these things, the punishments and the satisfactions and all of those things that I just,
the punishments I deserved, the satisfactions I just can't make. And they, in a sense, they could just
pile on me and pile on me and pile on me and pile on me and pile on me and pile on me and pile on me
because I don't always face the consequences of these when it happens. But they're still there.
They're just piling up and piling up and piling up. And if you were to see that, if God was allowing
you to see that in my life from a distance, you would know that when George dies and meets God,
that will crush George. It will completely unmake him. And the wonder of the gospel is
that Jesus, that Jesus taps George on the shoulder. He taps you on the shoulder. And he says,
Father,
George is made in my image. George did what George did, but he is made in my image. I am that image in
which he is made. George, if you let me, if you let me put my hand on you, I will take your place
underneath that load and you can walk away. And the punishment that should crush you
will crush me in your place. That's Good Friday.
But how does all that satisfaction work? Well, we don't know the full thing of it. It's a mystery,
but that's another part of the reason why Easter Sunday is so important. Remember, if anyone does
sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins.
I know this is a bit of a spoiler if you've never read the books or you've seen the movie, but that's just,
you know, you probably know enough about the end of the Lord of the Rings. It's not really possible,
if you haven't read it, to have a spoiler about it. But there's a scene towards the end, and of course,
the books were written by a Christian, where I think it's Sam, he wakes up after the ring has been
destroyed in a beautiful room, and the people that he thought had died are alive. And he asks if he's in
heaven, and they say, no, you're not in heaven yet. Just those people you thought were dead are alive.
And then Sam asks Gandalf. Gandalf says something else about there will be a heaven. And then Sam says,
does that mean that everything sad will become untrue?
Does that mean everything sad will become untrue?
See, that's the beauty of the resurrection.
In Christ, everything sad will become untrue. The making right is a key part of the resurrection
and the new earth. It's why that hymn that says, there is no sorrow that heaven can't heal,
is a true understanding of the nature of the resurrection.
We don't understand how it all will be. Maybe that's one of the delights of the first days,
the first months, the first years of decades of being in heaven, as we see not only the meaning of
our life from the perspective of what Christ has done for us on the cross, or how God and his providence
has worked different things in our lives, but also how Jesus not only paid for our sin, but in fact,
in light of eternity made satisfaction. And that's why, you see, the comfortable words begin with the
words of Jesus in the book of Matthew. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.
I am a herald. You are too. Jesus wants us to tell people, come on to me.
That's not, not come on to me. I want to be, Jesus says, come on to him. That's what he says to you.
I will give you rest. There is no rest in anger. There is no rest in injustice. There is no rest in
hatred. There is no rest in lies. And there is no rest if at some point in time the full consequences
of your actions fall upon you. There is no rest in sin. There is no rest in sin.
If the things that you have done wrong, every single one from conception to death have been dealt with,
and satisfaction has been made. If in fact, but if anyone does sin, Jesus, we have an advocate with
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins. Advocate means this.
Brother, I don't know if we're going to sing it. If we don't sing it this week, let's sing it next week.
That, how does it go again, brother? You know, when Satan tempts me to despair.
You know, when Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within.
We have this advocate that, what it means is this, that Jesus walks with you if you are in him.
The one who really knows literally the most that you have done that's wrong, and all of the,
the reparation and satisfaction that was needed that you could not make and dealt with it himself,
he is the one who walks beside you because he is for you. Not to gaslight God or the angels,
but to bear witness of what he has done for us, and his great love, and the Father's great love for us,
and he not only walks with you, he stands in heaven above,
representing you. He is for you.
He is for you.
And it's as this truth grips us
that we have a safe place intellectually,
theologically, spiritually, and emotionally
to look at things in our lives that are wrong.
We look at them with our advocate, who is the propitiator.
And it gives us a secure place to never believe the lie of tyrants,
that moral indifference is a sign of moral superiority,
but to stand against evil.
It provides that place.
And the devil is called an accuser.
And some of us labor under voices in our head of constant accusation.
And I want you today to memorize, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sin.
Let's stand.
Father, we thank you for Jesus.
We thank you for what he did for us on the cross.
We thank you that there is not any accusation that could be ever made against us of wrongdoing
that he does not know the truth about.
And when those accusations are true, he paid the price,
he paid the penalty that I deserved all out of love.
And we give you thanks and praise that not only in that,
but in his tasting of all there is to taste of death and in his resurrection,
he has made a full satisfaction, full propitiation,
a full making right for the wrong that we have done.
And he has done this all out of his love for us and mercy for us.
We thank and praise you that he walks with us, that he's with us,
that when we put our faith and trust in him, he is for us,
that he argues for that which is our best at all times, that he does not accuse us to despair,
but urges us for that which is our best on this side of the grave and on into eternity.
Father, we give you thanks and praise for these profound truths,
and we ask that you bring them home deeply into our hearts.
And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your son and our savior, and all God's people said,
Amen.