Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Well, good morning. Good morning. Christ Church, good morning.
[00:00:05] It's good to see you today, man. Isn't it? I love the festive feel. Anybody else?
[00:00:11] Snow coming down? Yeah. Christmas. We're in December. We're starting a new sermon series. We're talking all about the Christmas story as it's shown in the scriptures, in the book of Matthew and the book of Luke. So every week we're going to be talking about it, and I'm excited for that. And I hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
[00:00:32] We had a great one. I was feeling great until yesterday at noon.
[00:00:38] And all I can say is the Bible says Jesus wept, you know, and I think there are a lot of tears in heaven yesterday. But we'll be back, you know.
[00:00:55] Oh, we'll pray for you guys.
[00:01:00] Ushers, take care of that lady.
[00:01:03] All right, all right, all right.
[00:01:06] Too much? Yeah.
[00:01:09] But other than that, it was a great Thanksgiving. Amen. Well, let me say a prayer for us. Father, we thank you so much for your love and your kindness to us. We thank you for the meaning of this season, Lord, and help us to really see it. Help us to connect to it. Help us to be changed by it. Father, I pray you'd bless every person here. I pray you'd bless their family, their friends. I pray, Lord, that during these holidays we could draw nearer to each other, Lord, and you could bring healing and blessing in our relationships. But most importantly, I pray we would draw near to you. And, Father, I pray that you would bless this time together in the good name of Jesus. Amen.
[00:01:57] Well, if I were to ask you today if you were ready for Christmas, my guess is most of us would probably say not quite. Is that fair? I would say, you know, maybe we got. And when you think about getting ready for Christmas, you know, I want you to think about what. What that requires. What do you need done to be ready for Christmas? Like, in our life, it kind of first starts with, what are our Christmas Eve services? And, you know, and then we kind of make our plans around that. So I gotta figure out what are. And, you know, and I wish they would just keep Christmas Eve on a Sunday every year.
[00:02:38] It's so awesome when that happens. But so, you know, we gotta figure out our plans from there. And then there's shopping. Gotta buy gifts. I hate that part.
[00:02:50] I hate shopping. I get physically ill in stores. It's a real thing. And so you gotta do that part, you know, but that's a part of it. We got any bakers here? Any people that. Yeah, God bless you people.
[00:03:08] And I just want you to know that. That there are some angels of God in this church, that you bake for your family, you bake for your friends, and you bake for your pastor, too. And I love you, and I want you to know God loves you more than other people because.
[00:03:24] Just kidding. Kind of. But it's.
[00:03:29] You gotta do some baking. There's a lot of things. And probably, you know, we're working on what we need to figure out this year to be ready. But today I want to talk about what it means to be ready in our hearts, in our spirits, and in our lives. And I bet that whether you know it or not, you're actually probably really ready for what Christmas actually means and is about. Because we're going to look at the first Christmas, the original Christmas, and in it we see that it was a time where people were waiting for breakthrough. They were waiting for things to change. They were waiting for God to help them and God to break through in the challenges, in the circumstances in our life. They were exhausted, they were waiting for rest, they were waiting for strength, all those kinds of things. And I bet some of us here in this room today, we're like, you know, there's been a lot of things that happened this year, and not all of them have been great. And maybe some of us in this room, we're like, man, I'm waiting too.
[00:04:45] I could use some help, some guidance, some wisdom, some strength from God. And if you're in that place or if you can connect to that place, and whether you know it or not, you're actually ready for Christmas. Because Christmas is about God breaking through in this world and in our lives. And so we're gonna talk about that today. And we're gonna begin in the book of Matthew, where Matthew begins the story of Christmas. And today you're gonna be really excited. I'm gonna read the Genealogy of Jesus to you. Are you excited about that?
[00:05:23] When was the last time you read a great genealogy? Has it been a minute? Well, we're gonna read this. Cause this is where Matthew begins. And now this is kind of, if you are a daily Bible reader, I want you just have a moment of honesty right now. When you come to some of these genealogies, what do you do? You maybe skim it, maybe you pass by it, maybe you kind of look at a few names here and there. But today we're gonna read it because, believe it or not, this might not sound interesting, but I'm telling you, this genealogy is powerful and there is some incredible insight in it. Today that is going to help us and to really help us understand this message. So I'm gonna compress it a little bit. So we're gonna begin Matthew 1, and I'm just gonna.
[00:06:12] I took a couple verses out just to kind of highlight some of the main areas. So here we go. This is where it begins. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac. Isaac the father of Jacob. And Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Now, if you have a Bible circle, Tamar, that's a female here. And one of the interesting things that we're gonna see is there's five ladies in the genealogy, which would have been unheard of at the time. She's the first one, Tamar. And Perez the father of Hezron. Hezron the father of Ram. How about that name, man? Ram Beetler.
[00:07:02] Too bad we're done having kids. If we weren't, I might consider it. And Ram the father. That's a cool name. And Ram the father of Amminadab. And Amminadab the father of Nahshon. Nahshon the father of Salmon.
[00:07:17] Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab. It's another lady. Again, very unusual. Boaz the father of Obed, by Ruth, another one.
[00:07:28] And Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse the father of David, the king. There's a king. That's pretty cool. Don't you always wish there's someone really awesome in your genealogy? Like a president, or am I the only one? I haven't found one yet, but still hoping. David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.
[00:07:56] This is getting a little sketchy here. You got any shady people in your family?
[00:08:02] David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. Now, her name is Bathsheba, but the author is making a point. They're saying that David had a kid with someone else's wife. That is. This is not a good story. And they're pointing that out to us. And it goes on. Josiah, the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon. Now this is going to be a big part of this genealogy. This is an event that happened, and it was when the people of Israel were exiled. And I'll talk more about that in a minute, but just note it in your mind. And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel. Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel.
[00:08:49] Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.
[00:08:58] So all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations. From David to the deportation or the exile to Babylon, 14 generations. And from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, 14 generations. And we'll talk about why that is emphasized in a minute. But here's what I want you to see today, that this is a messy family, this is a messy history.
[00:09:32] And they're not hiding it.
[00:09:35] Matthew is putting it right out there for us. These are messy people with messy events, with messy lives. And there's all this thing that. But yet from all of this mess comes the perfect plan of God in Jesus Christ.
[00:09:56] And I believe that this genealogy is meant to give people like you and me hope. If you're someone who maybe life gets messy at times, you don't always do the right thing. You hurt people, people hurt you. You have baggage and a history. Your family has baggage and a history. If that's anyone in this room, then this genealogy is for you. And what it's meant to do is to give us hope and faith in the grace and purpose of God in our own mess. And I want to explain that to you today. So we're going to look first at the big events that come in this genealogy, the depth of it, because what Matthew is showing us, he's saying, hey, if you wanna understand the message of Christmas, this is a long and complex and big story. You ever been talking to someone and they're like, well, I'll tell you the story, but it's a long one. And you're like, well, I don't know if I have that much time. Tell me later. Matthew's kinda said, all right, I'm gonna tell you the story, but it's a long one. To understand the story of Christmas, we have to understand the bigger story of God in the Old Testament. And that's why he begins here and he opens this genealogy and he begins it and he says, jesus is the son of David and the son of Abraham. Now, these names are completely out of order, but he starts right there with him. And the reason is, is because God made a promise to Abraham and a promise to David. And these promises become some of the most major themes in all the Bible and especially the Old Testament. And these promises kind of are these huge headings through which so many of the other events and promises in the Old Testament could be understood and fall under. And I'm just going to give them to you very, very simply. His promise to Abraham was Abraham. And this is just to give you a little timeline here. This is 2000 years before Matthew wrote that genealogy. This promise to Abraham was given. 2,000 years. That's a long time to wait. Amen.
[00:12:23] And the promise was that, Abraham, I'm going to build a family. You're going to be a great nation, and through you, I will bless the world. That there will be this global blessing through you, through your family. That's very simply the promise to Abraham, the promise to David, which then came a thousand years after the promise to Abraham. And so a thousand years from the time that this genealogy is being written. You with me on that? All right. And the promise to David was that, David, you will always have a king, a leader that sits on the throne of my people. My people will always be led by someone from your family. Now, these two promises were huge. And these two promises created all kinds of anticipation and hope and longing for the people of God. But 2000 years is a long time to wait.
[00:13:26] 20 minutes can be a long time to wait. And so in the waiting, it looked like the promises were getting farther and farther away.
[00:13:41] God had said, I'm going to do something unique and beautiful through my people, ancient Israel. But as years and decades and centuries went on, it actually looked worse, not better.
[00:13:57] And isn't the purpose of God in our life confusing like that sometimes?
[00:14:01] Isn't the purpose of God so hard to grasp at times in our life because we're looking at the short game and God is looking at this grand scheme, and we can't see what he sees, and we don't know what he knows. And this is where these people were at. And then it got really bad. And that's when Matthew references the exile. And the exile means that this promise of being this people and this nation through whom the whole world will be blessed, and having a king from the line of David. When the exile happened, it was as if those promises evaporated.
[00:14:38] Because what happened was the people of God were taken over by foreign nations. They were taken from their homes, their businesses, their lives. They were forced to become part of another culture. It was a loss of identity. It was a loss of freedom. It was a loss of all these types of things. And so these great promises seemed so incredibly far away, and they just had to wait. Now, I've often wondered, why does God make waiting a part of his purpose in our plans? Cause these people, I believe that they're kind of like us. God desires. And God creates moments in our life where we have to wait, too. And they weren't great at waiting. I'm just gonna tell you, when you read these stories, they were not great at it. But is it fair to say we're not great at waiting either? Is that a fair assessment? The other day, I looked at my car, and I realized my tire was flat. And so I put air in it. I'm like, hopefully it's just, like, the cold and everything's fine. And it went flat again. So I took it to a tire place, and I was like, hey, man, tire's flat. Can you take a look at it? Took a look at it. And he's like, oh, there's a nail in it right here. Found it. And he's like, but I think I can fix it. I'm like, great.
[00:16:07] And I'm like, how much does it cost to get fixed? He's like, oh, just fixing it is free.
[00:16:12] I'm like, you're speaking my love language right now, brother.
[00:16:16] And he's like, but I'm pretty busy right now.
[00:16:21] But you could wait here for, like, two hours, maybe more, and if I can kind of have a little minute in between appointments, I'll fix it. And I was like, how long did you say?
[00:16:34] And I was like, can I just come back tomorrow and make an appointment?
[00:16:39] Cause I can't wait that long. And he's like, yeah, no problem. So I scheduled appointment. He said, but before you leave, just pull up to the shop entrance, and I'll have someone fill up that tire so you can get home safe. I'm like, dude, this guy's awesome, man. It was just incredible customer service and generosity. And I was like, sure, I'll pull up there. So I pulled up, and no one kind of came out, you know? So I was just, like, looking, and I see people. And then I kind of got out of my car, and I just kind of stood there awkwardly. I'm pretty good at that. And just trying to say, like, hey, look, you know, help me, innocent bystander here.
[00:17:20] You don't want me to start messing with these tools and stuff in here. And kind of one of the workers there noticed. I said, hey, man. The guy in the shop said, you guys would just fill up the tire.
[00:17:34] And I could just pull up here real quick. And he's like, okay, okay, we'll get someone to do it. And I was like, well, why don't you just do it? You know? But he had other stuff to do, and so he went back in. So I just kind of wait. And then it was getting cold, and then I went back in my car and I waited some more and then I left and I didn't get air in my tire because I have a hard time waiting anybody else. I'm not good at it and I don't like it. But I thought, why is waiting something that God makes part of our lives and his purpose?
[00:18:11] And here's what I came to is, I think when you're waiting, the real struggle is you have to submit your agenda to someone else.
[00:18:23] See, if I just wait at the shop, I'm no longer in control of my own day.
[00:18:29] I'm no longer in control of what I do. I'm at the mercy of their day and their agenda. And I don't like that. I want to control my day. I want to control what I do. And church, isn't it true we want to control our lives?
[00:18:46] And is it fair to say that we actually even want to kind of boss God around a little bit at times? Like, lord, no, I need this done in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:18:57] But do you know what waiting does? Waiting is. It is a submission to the purpose of God. I think that's why it's so important.
[00:19:07] See, God is not trying to take something away from our life in times of waiting. He was not taking something away from the people of Israel. He was preparing them for the fullness of what he wanted to give them. And if you are in a season of waiting today, you need to know God is not trying to inflict pain on you. He's not trying to make it harder than it has to be. He's trying to prepare your heart for the fullness of what he wants to do in your life.
[00:19:44] And in times of waiting, you have to guard some things in your life. Number one, you gotta guard your hope.
[00:19:54] When you can't understand what God is doing in life because your perspective is just too limited. You have to guard your sense of hope. And you have to trust that God's good purpose will be accomplished in your life. You may not know it, you may not have all the details of it, but God is trustworthy in the midst of it.
[00:20:18] I don't need to know everything. I don't need to have it all figured out. All I need to do is trust the character of God. And you need to guard your hope. You also need to guard your heart. You know what happens in times of waiting, in times of confusion and times of frustration, is if we aren't guarding our heart, we get bitter.
[00:20:41] We get bitter towards God. God, why there's these thousands of years of waiting, Lord, where your Promises are not being fulfilled. It's easy to allow our hearts to get to a place of bitterness. Not just with God, with other people.
[00:21:01] Some of us are nasty to other people because we are upset with God and we can't process it. And we need to guard our hearts and guard from bitterness, and we need to guard our habits. Have you ever noticed that when life gets hard and you're in the season of waiting, you're in a season of exile, that all the things you want to do are not healthy for you? You ever notice that, like all the good people in your life, you're like, yeah, I'm not talking to any of them.
[00:21:34] Nope, I'm in too bad of a spot. Well, that's exactly why you need to talk to them. Amen.
[00:21:41] When I don't want to pray, that is an indicator that I need most to pray in that moment. You with me?
[00:21:50] When life gets hard, we tend to go to habits that don't help us. They just make it harder. And you have to guard your habits.
[00:22:00] You gotta keep coming to church, you gotta keep praying. You gotta get into God's word. You've gotta talk with good people. That's what will help you. That's how you find the hope and strength of God in the midst of the waiting.
[00:22:19] But Matthew has good news. He says, but all of this is now coming to fulfillment in Jesus Christ. He says, the waiting is over.
[00:22:31] Christ has come. Now, let's talk about the people in this genealogy for a moment. Now, this is kind of my favorite part of these verses. In the ancient world, your genealogy was like your resume.
[00:22:46] So your genealogy, it was a completely communal, family centric world. So who you were was about who your ancestors were. And so there was many different types of genealogies that we see in antiquity. And people would edit them. They'd be like, crazy Uncle Larry. No one needs to know he's related to us. And so they would edit him out.
[00:23:15] And today, you know, we make resumes, right? And those are very individualistic. Those are about what we've done. And we kind of do the same thing, don't we? Sometimes you're like, well, I went to college there for a semester. But no one really needs to know that because it didn't work out. And I went here, anybody, this job, I'm going to kind of leave this one off here. You know, we sort of edit that because we want to present a better image or a better resume. And genealogies worked like that. And so we would see them like that. And interestingly, Enough. This one is not edited very well and it has a lot of people and names and stories on it that do not show a good picture, but show a broken picture.
[00:24:07] And here's just some of the things is, number one, there's five women in this genealogy. Again, in the ancient world, this was unheard of in the ancient world, which was male dominated, which was very marginalized the role of women in many ways, women just, they weren't on genealogies, but here are five of them in the story of Jesus, in the ancestors of Jesus. But not only that, some of these women, the stories around them are really, really messy. Now, messy is a very nice way to say it. Like that's me saying it in the nicest way.
[00:24:51] They're not messy, they're absolutely broken. Some of these stories are appalling.
[00:24:56] Let me just kind of give you a couple examples of it. We have Tamar, and her story is in the book of Genesis. And in it Tamar actually dupes her father in law into being with her. And they have kids together.
[00:25:15] And so she actually fakes being a prostitute to do Pim. It's a messed up story. You think you got some crazy stories. There's some crazy ones in here. And so we have the story of Tamar. Then we have people like Ruth, who is not from the nation of Israel, she's a Moabite.
[00:25:39] And we have Rahab, who's a Canaanite, and we have Bathsheba, who's a Hittite. So this genealogy, it's shocking all the normal ways of presenting yourself. It breaks all the normal value systems. It turns upside down and it shows these messy people and these messy events. And even David, who it's like, oh, it's a king. Great, we got a king in our genealogy. See, we're not that bad.
[00:26:12] But then the genealogy says, yes, but by the wife of Uriah, he had Solomon. And what is he doing? He's intentionally pointing us to this story. Now this is a story of betrayal. This is a story of adultery. This is a story of conspiracy. This is a story of murder. And Matthew is just, he's not hiding it. He's not editing it. He's actually drawing our attention to it.
[00:26:41] And so what does this all mean? Here's what it means.
[00:26:45] No one is in the family of God except by pure grace, by no one deserves to be in the family of God, ourselves included.
[00:26:57] And no matter how messy our lives are, God can still accomplish his perfect purpose, no matter how much brokenness and pain when Christ becomes part of Our story, what was meant for evil, God uses for good.
[00:27:23] See this genealogy? It's truly an honor to be in it.
[00:27:29] Even though these are messy people, messy lives, messy events, it's an honor to be in the story and the lineage of Jesus. And now we look at Tamar, and we don't think of her primarily about the ugly events in her life, but we think that she is an ancestor. Jesus, the savior of the world.
[00:27:53] And here's what Christmas shows us today. Church. When Jesus Christ is part of your story, it changes everything in your life, good and bad.
[00:28:03] All your mistakes, God in His grace, forgives.
[00:28:11] These are forgiven people.
[00:28:14] All your mistakes, all your failures, all your grievous sins, even those God will use for good. In his genius, in his plan, in his purpose, all the things that people have done that have hurt you, that have wronged you, God, through His eternal purpose, will turn those around for good.
[00:28:42] Church. When Christ is at the center of our story, our story changes significantly. You with me on this.
[00:28:52] And we see it here. And then here's the last thing. Although this is mess, there is a certain perfection in this. And I just have to point this out because this is really, really cool. So if you remember, when we read through this genealogy, it talked about 14 generations, 14 generations and 14 generations. Remember that? Three iterations of 14 generations. And people you know who study this are like, okay, what is going on here? Because Matthew edited this genealogy so it would be those 14 generations. He left people out.
[00:29:24] And he didn't leave people out because he wasn't good at Genealogies or his Ancestry.com membership ran out. And, you know, he didn't. He didn't do that. He's making a very, very powerful point. He's doing it on purpose. And these 14 and 14 and 14, they're very, very significant. And the way to think about them, and stay with me on this, the way to think about them is as groups of sevens. Because in the Bible, seven is the number of completeness. It's six days. God creates a world. On the seventh, he rests. It's complete, it's done, it is good. There is the year of jubilee, which is a year on the 70th year where there is forgiveness for all debt. All debt is relieved, all slaves are set free. It's this complete reset, this year of rest and renewal and self. So seventh is always symbolic of completion, of forgiveness, of freedom, all these kind of things. So in these generations, there are seven and seven, seven and seven, seven and seven. There are six sevens. You with me? On this. You don't have to be a math person.
[00:30:46] Here's the point. The birth of Jesus represents the seventh seven, the full and final rest, the year of freedom, the year of relief, the year of celebration. That's what the genealogy says. All of history has finally come to that point. We all long for. We all long for this world to be right. We long for it to be better. We all long for a rest in our souls that is deeper than a day off of work or a good night's sleep. We. We all long for these things. We long for completeness. We long for sorrow and sin and death to be part and gone out of our world.
[00:31:34] Here's what Matthew is showing. It only comes through Jesus Christ.
[00:31:38] He is the completion of history, of your life. Here's what it means for us today. None of us can be complete and whole without Jesus Christ. You need him today. Church he's the fullness that you're looking for. He's the completion. He's the relief. He's the forgiveness. He's the redemption. He's the hope. He's the strength. He's the one. Whether, you know, you're like, I don't know what I'm waiting for. Matthew's telling us. I'm telling you what you've been waiting for. It's Christ, and he's here and he's come to you. This is what's so amazing about Christianity.
[00:32:20] We don't go to God.
[00:32:22] We can't get there. We won't get there. We're too dumb and stubborn. Church. I'll be. We're just too. He comes to us.
[00:32:31] He breaks through into our world, and he meets us.
[00:32:39] And every Christmas is this incredible reminder of that today.
[00:32:47] Christ is coming and he's saying, the wait is over. I'm here. I'm with you. Follow me. Trust me, I am very interested in chess. I don't really play that much, but I think it's cool. And there's a great chess match. In 1972, it was Bobby Fischer who was this young prodigy, this great chess player. And he was facing a Soviet chess player, Boris Spassky. And they were the greatest chess players in the world. It was for the 1972 World Championship Chess match, whatever you call it. And.
[00:33:30] And it was a huge thing because the Cold War was happening. It was like, who's smarter, the west or the Soviets? There's all this political baggage around it. And Bobby Fischer ended up winning. There was a lot of drama around it, but he ended up winning. And he was A brilliant, brilliant mind in chess. You know, how have you heard people say, oh, that person is playing chess, not checkers. You ever hear that? It's kind of a fun phrase. He's playing chess, not checkers. And the point is that that person is thinking about things. That person is anticipating things. That person is looking at life at a higher level. They're just not reacting, they're anticipating. They're thinking 10 and 20 and 30 moves ahead. And that's a cool thing. And that's the cool thing about chess, is you to be good at it. You have to think about all these variables. Seems like, well, how many can there be? Well, there's an innumerable amount of variables within any chess game. And the great chess players see them earlier and they see them farther. But here's something interesting about it. That way of thinking can also drive you crazy.
[00:34:48] Have you noticed that in life you're trying to anticipate everything that can go wrong, and it keeps you up at night and you're like, I'm filled with anxiety. What? It's that type of thinking. And Bobby Fischer went crazy.
[00:35:04] And yes, he had a brilliant mind, but unfortunately, it got untethered and what was a gift became a curse. I think there's a lesson in that.
[00:35:18] And here's the lesson.
[00:35:19] God is the great chess player. You are not.
[00:35:25] God is the grand master. You are not. And I am not.
[00:35:32] The story of Matthew, the story of Jesus, no one could have figured that out.
[00:35:39] No one could have planned those events. No one could have aligned them exactly as they needed to be and used the mistakes and the failures and the sins and then turn it all into the greatest gift this universe has ever been given. No one could have done it except the Almighty God. And here's what it means for us today is don't try to play chess with your life.
[00:36:07] Don't try to figure everything out and control everything and try to plan your move and their move and anticipate. Don't. Yes, think ahead. Yes. Make some plans. But also realize my main role is to follow God today.
[00:36:26] I don't know what he'll do tomorrow. And I don't have to know.
[00:36:31] I don't know how this event will turn out. What I need to do is say, today, Lord, what do you want from me today in this moment? And I need to do that. And I need to trust the bigger game, the bigger scheme to the one who is actually trustworthy in it. So here's what I want you to do. This Christmas season, I want you to Pray.
[00:36:56] Just a very simple prayer. I want you to pray and say, lord, I trust you.
[00:37:02] I want you to acknowledge that every day this Christmas season, Lord, I'm not the grandmaster. I go crazy trying to be them.
[00:37:12] I trust you and Lord, help me to do your will today.
[00:37:19] Today. That's all that matters is today, this moment. Help me to do your will today, Lord, what do you want me to do today?
[00:37:27] And one step at a time. I will trust that your plan is gonna unfold better than I could think or imagine or create, Lord, because you are trustworthy. Let's pray.
[00:37:46] Father, we do acknowledge that you are the God of history.
[00:37:52] Your plan unfolds over generations.
[00:37:58] We think about our lives in minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years. But you think about it from eternity.
[00:38:12] And Lord, oh, how our perspective is so short sighted and so limited.
[00:38:22] And Lord, there's such a temptation to get lost because we look and all we see is a mess.
[00:38:29] But yet, Lord, your purpose is on target.
[00:38:34] Your purpose is happening even through the ugliness of Tamar and David and all the others, and in the ugliness and the struggles of our life. Lord, your good purpose is happening today. It's happening. I pray we would trust you, not our ability to understand you, but we would trust you.
[00:39:01] And I pray, Lord, our response to the events of life, especially the hard ones, the confusing ones, the weighty ones, would be. Lord, speak, for your servant is listening. What do you want from me? Today, today and each and every day, Lord, we would make the commitment to follow you, to follow you, Lord, with trusting hearts. Help us in this, bless us in this, ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
