The Promise of Fruit

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St.

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John chapter 15 verses 1 through 8. I am the true vine and my father is the gardener.

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He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

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You are already clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Remain in me and I will remain in you.

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No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

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I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him he will bear much fruit.

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Apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers.

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Such branches are picked up and then thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given you.

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This is to my father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

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In the name of Jesus. Alright, texts like our gospel texts that we heard this morning are easily misunderstood.

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People wrongly think that this text says you had better get busy bearing fruit or God the

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Father is going to cut you off and throw you into hell. That is not what this text is saying.

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Jesus is not threatening his disciples. He's actually making a promise to them. Keep in mind Jesus said these words on Maundy Thursday, the night that he was to be betrayed.

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And so this is some of Jesus's last instruction to his disciples. He's not making a threat to him.

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So hear it again. He says you are already clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.

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Remain in me. Now a better translation would be abide. Abide in me and I will remain or abide in you.

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No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine.

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Neither can you bear fruit unless you abide in me. So notice the bearing fruit thing.

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That's actually a promise. Jesus is promising that if you abide in him you will bear fruit.

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He's not saying you had better bear fruit or else. The verb is abide.

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Abide in Jesus and you will bear fruit. I'm the vine, you are the branches.

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If a man abides in me and I in him he will bear much fruit.

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See it's promise. So this is a promise. It's not a threat. Abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit.

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Unplug yourself from Christ and you become a cut flower. Jesus said apart from me you can do nothing.

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If anyone does not remain or abide in me he's like a branch that is thrown away and withers.

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It reminds me of when I was a child. I know that we're in the Easter season right now but if you mind let me take you back to Christmas.

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When I was growing up my mom was all about the live Christmas tree.

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She loved the smell in the house of the pine tree, the fresh one. In fact we didn't just buy a live tree.

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We had a family tradition. There was Lion's Christmas tree farm that we went to in San Gabriel.

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We'd make the trip from Arcadia down to San Gabriel to Lion's Christmas tree farm and then what you do is you give them your keys and your driver's license and they'll give you a saw and then you wander into the

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Christmas tree farm and you find that perfect victim. I loved it when

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I got to the age where I can actually do the chopping. Can I cut it down mom? And then that tree it comes down and we'd carry it out to the place where we pay for it and they tie it to the top of your car and then we get that thing home and it would fill the whole house with the smell of pine tree.

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Now keep in mind my mom she'd say this is a live tree but thinking back on it

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I'd say no that's not a live tree. That's a dead tree.

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The thing that that tree needs to live is still back at Lion's Christmas tree farm. It's you know the roots right?

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So it was just a matter of time before well that live tree that smelled so wonderful became bone dry and the needles would start falling off that thing so that by the time my mom would take the

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Christmas tree down right before New Year's I mean it was a menace. You know what

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I'm talking about right? You know you just if a wind comes to the house 10 ,000 needles fall on the carpet right?

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You know what I'm talking about. So think of it that way is that you know this is a metaphor we all understand that tree is not alive that's not connected to the roots.

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In the same way we are not alive in unless we are connected to Christ. Christ is the vine.

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We're the branches. He's the root and if we're not connected to him then how can we bear good fruit?

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Now sticking with the Christmas tree metaphor here. Do Christmas trees bear fruit?

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No they don't but they sure do look pretty don't they? Now here's what I would point out. The person who is going with the

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Christmas tree approach to good works. Well they are disconnected from Christ and they are adorning themselves with wonderful looking fruity things.

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You know wonderful glittery balls and bulbs and lights and tinsel and they are making themselves look oh so holy so pious such a sight to behold.

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But they're not actually bearing fruit. They're just adorning themselves.

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And be warned my friends there are a lot of people out there who think that bearing good fruit is about adorning themselves and making them look holy and pious among their neighbors.

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And that's not bearing good fruit. That's just well mimicking something that looks like fruit.

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And keep in mind fruit is never for the tree. There's always for somebody else.

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I do not know a single apple tree that bears fruit in order for the apple tree to consume it. Good fruit is always for your neighbor.

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So think of it this way. Another way of looking at this. Years ago when my wife and I lived in California we would take trips from time to time up to Solvang, central coast of California.

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And oh wonderful place to be. I mean it looks like a Dutch village. If you ever want to go someplace like that you know just put that on your to -do list.

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It's a great place to visit. But outside of Solvang they have all of these vineyards and they also have fruit orchards.

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Whole orchards where you got fruit trees out there. And we were actually out on a walk and we were going by one of these fruit orchards and noted the fact that how they pruned trees that are supposed to bear fruit in commercial production.

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It doesn't look good. It looks awful. I mean you would never do this to a tree in your own front yard at least in California.

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If you have you know like an orange tree or something like that. You would not do these things to this tree because it just doesn't look right.

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I mean they top the trees. They prune back every little thing that you can possibly do. But see the thing is is that they're not pruning these trees to make them look good.

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They're pruning these trees so that they yield a lot of fruit. And so Jesus in this passage, notice he's the vine we're the branches.

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Branches do nothing except for get plugged into the vine. And God the Father, he's the gardener or the vine dresser and he comes along with his pruning shears and he starts snipping.

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And believe me it probably won't look good. Nope. The whole idea behind the pruning is to cut off the dead wood.

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And the dead wood in our lives, well these would be the sins of our flesh, our own idols and things like that.

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And oftentimes God the Father will allow suffering or calamity in your life as a means of pruning back and cutting off things in your life for the purpose of you bearing good fruit.

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It can be a painful process, but keep that in mind. It's not a pretty thing, but it's not about how pretty you look.

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It's about God bearing fruit through you. So unplug yourself from Jesus.

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You're a cut flower. You're just like a Christmas tree, a live Christmas tree. You're drying up.

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So our good fruits, they're not born apart from Christ. They are born by abiding in Christ.

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Let me read a little bit again from our epistle text. In this is love. God was manifest among us.

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God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved

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God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

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So here's the idea. Abiding in Christ cannot be done apart from the gospel. It is done totally in the gospel, in light of the gospel.

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So the idea is that abiding is believing. Abiding is believing and trusting that Christ has truly bled and died for all of your sins.

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And you see God as a loving God, one who would go to such great lengths to save somebody as sinful as you, as sinful as me.

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And then that love of God that comes into our life through Christ now then flows from us to other people.

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If you don't love, how can you say that you're truly of God? Because God is love, is

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John's argument. And so to abide in Christ is to avail yourself over and over again of God's life -giving,

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Spirit -filled words from Scripture. You here this morning are abiding, hearing the words of Christ, feasting on them.

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And through the words that you're hearing from God's Word this morning, the Spirit is flowing like sap from Christ into your branch that God the

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Father has pruned in order to produce and bear good fruit in your life. And the good fruit, by the way, if you're not familiar with this passage,

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Galatians 5 makes it clear what this good fruit is. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self -control.

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And against such things there is no law. And love here is not a feeling.

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Where the fruit of the Spirit is love, it's not a feeling. It's not God is giving you fond feelings towards other people. I really feel good about that person.

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No. Jesus says to love your neighbor. He doesn't say to like him. Okay? You have to think about that, okay?

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You don't have to like your neighbor to love your neighbor. And the love here is not about a feeling. The love is about action.

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Knowing that your neighbor needs help, you go and love and serve your neighbor.

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That is good fruit that Christ is bearing in you for the sake of your neighbor, not your sake.

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In fact, a really good healthy grape vine out at some of California's wonderful vineyards, right?

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When they're full of the fruit and they got all these clusters of grapes on them, you can't even see the vine.

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You can't even see the branch. All you see is the fruit. And all of these give glory to God, Jesus says.

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And they give glory to God the Father, not us, because he's the one producing them in us for his glory, for his kingdom.

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So we as Christians ought to pray. Lord God, we pray that the

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Father would come and prune out the deadwood in our lives. Doesn't matter to us how we look to others.

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Instead, come and prune us as ridiculous as that might look or as difficult as that might be so that you may be glorified in the good fruits that you would bear in our lives.

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This is a good prayer. The result of it may be painful, but the result of it in the long term is the glory of God in and through you and the good works that God produces in you all through the gospel.

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And so a good way to think about this, if you would, Christ is the vine, we're the branches, and if you look at the front of your bulletin, we see the cross turned into a grapevine, right?

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I think that's a good way of putting it. We're all the branches connected now to the cross.

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The cross then becomes that vine by which we draw our sustenance.

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And so you are here abiding today. Today, you've heard the words of the absolution. Today, you are hearing the words of the gospel and God's spirit -filled words speaking right now through Mark as well as myself.

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And in just a few minutes, you're going to also receive Christ's body and blood for the forgiveness of your sins in the

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Lord's Supper. These are the ways in which he sustains us and by which we abide. We're not here for a flu shot.

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We're here to get that wonderful spirit -filled power of God's word and the life -giving sustenance given to us in the body and blood of Christ because this is how

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God then produces these fruits through our branches, right? And sustaining us.

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And to close with this kind of meditation today, I would like to read to you something that's really old.

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And I know I'm kind of a nerd that way. But in the writings of the church fathers, there is an old poem talking about the vine of the cross.

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And we don't know who wrote it. Some think it was Cyprian of Carthage. Others think it was

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Tertullian. But the reality is we don't know. So technically, this is an anonymous poem. And I won't read the whole thing.

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But with that picture of the cross being the vine, here's what one of the church fathers wrote long ago.

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He says, there's a place, we believe, at the center of the world, and it's called Golgotha by the

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Jews in their native tongue. Here was planted a tree cut from a barren stump.

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This tree, I remember hearing, produced wholesome fruits. But it did not bear these fruits for those who had settled there.

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It was foreigners who picked these lovely fruits. This is what the tree looked like. It rose from a single stem and then extended its arms into two branches, just like the heavy yard arms on which billowing sails are stretched, or like the yoke beneath which two oxen are put to the plow.

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The shoot that sprung from the first ripe seed germinated in the earth, and then miraculously, on the third day, it produced a branch once more, terrifying to the earth and those above, but rich in life -giving fruit.

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But over the next 40 days, it increased in strength, growing into a huge tree which touched the heavens, with its topmost branches, and then hid its sacred head on high.

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In the meantime, it produced 12 branches of enormous weight and stretched forth, spreading them over the whole world.

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They were to bring nourishment and eternal life to all the nations and teach them that death can die.

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And then, after a further 50 days had passed from its very top, the tree caused a draft of divine nectar to flow into its branches, a breeze of heavenly spirit.

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All over the tree, the leaves were dripping with sweet dew, and look beneath the branches' shady cover.

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There was a spring with waters bright and clear, for there was nothing there to disturb the calm.

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And all around this tree, countless races and peoples gathered of different stock, sex, age, and rank, married and unmarried, widows and young married women, babies, children, and men, both young.

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And so today, we gather underneath that tree, the tree of the cross, the true vine that we have been grafted into, the life -sustaining body and blood of Christ feeding us and bearing fruit in our lives.

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And because Christ has so loved us now, we truly can love our neighbors. So go this morning, after you leave church, and find that person who needs your help.

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Find that person. It could be your own spouse, or your children, or a neighbor, or somebody you don't even know, or a perfect stranger.

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Find the person who needs your help, and love and serve them for their sake, and for the sake of Christ.

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Because in this, God is glorified. In the name of Jesus, amen.

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If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. And again, that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. We thank you for your support.

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