Given Over to a Depraved Mind

Romans 1 and the Need to Acknowledge God

If you will turn in your Bibles, please, with me to the book of Romans, Paul's epistle to the Romans, chapter 1. Romans, chapter 1. Before we look to the Word of God together, let us ask the Lord to bless our time together.

Our great Heavenly Father, once again, we thank you for the privilege you have granted to us that we may possess your Word, that we may read it, that we may publicly proclaim it. We recognize that this is a privilege, it is a freedom to which we have become far too accustomed, that many of our brothers and sisters do not have.

And Lord, we don't know how long we will have it either. So we would ask that we would take it seriously, that we would truly rejoice in this freedom you give to us, that you would meet with us, and by your Spirit you would help us to understand your truth.

We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. For those of you who are regulars here, my name is James White. I'm the one that doesn't seem to be the regular here. It's been a little while since I was able to be with you.

I assure you I have not been vacationing anywhere. I will say Zurich is a very nice place, if you can afford to live there. The franc and the dollar are pretty much one-to-one, but everything in Zurich is minimally, minimally twice the cost that is here, frequently three times.

So it's, like I said, a nice place to visit. I'm not sure I could afford to live there by any stretch of the imagination. And then, of course, it's just the exact opposite of that in Kiev, where everything is much, much, much cheaper, but just a very, very different...

Well, let's just say the Soviets didn't build things the way that we did. Let's just leave it at that. But it's been great to have that opportunity to meet with the saints over there. The Lord is doing great things around the world.

I can report to you that that's the case. And certainly I hope you are praying for the fact that a week from Tuesday I leave in the evening for a flight to London and from London to Johannesburg, South Africa.

And the very next night I will be engaging in what I consider to be one of the toughest debates I've ever done with a man by the name of Graham Conderly. He is a professional public speaker, and he is one defending the concept of the complete redefinition of marriage being an appropriate Christian stance.

And South Africa has had the profaning of marriage for a number of years, and there are many people who are looking forward to this debate. I certainly hope that it will be very useful when it becomes available, but I'm also hoping that I will be conscious for the entirety of the debate, given that it will be less than 24 hours after flying from here to London and from London all the way across the continent of Africa.

So your prayer is to be appreciated for my survival of that particular experience. And then the debates, especially later on in Durban, where right now we're scheduled to do two debates, two nights in a row, in the Juma Masjid in Durban where we were last year.

So it could be a very, hopefully very fruitful, but very challenging, fairly brief time, about a week, a little about nine days or so in South Africa. But with that said, I looked at where we need to be in our study of the Holiness Code, and the next section would require us to be spending some time dealing with food and dietary laws.

Twitter, Abortion, and Romans 1:28-32

Well, that's a great topic to try to make work on a Sunday morning. I will confess I do not possess the necessary skills to make that work real well. Maybe I'll just leave that to Pastor Fry. Maybe he's not aware that I would do that.

But no, seriously, this evening we will probably be addressing those issues together. But for this morning, certainly another first. We've done a few firsts in this series on the Holiness Code. I think for the first time in any Reformed Baptist church at all, we played a clip from the West Wing over the speaker system.

Now that was, we were breaking new ground when we did that. There's no two ways about it. I really can't imagine any other Reformed Baptist church where that has ever happened. So now this morning, possibly more new ground, and that is a sermon inspired by Twitter.

Yes, yes. Now, someone needs to revive Pastor Fry. He just saw the pew back there. But he, the guy goes overseas, catches something on the plane coming back, who knows what's going to happen. Seriously, my thoughts this morning were influenced by, at the very least, an experience that I had on Twitter only a couple of days ago.

And I'll tell you more about that, but let's read the section we're going to be looking at, and then you'll start to be able to put things together for yourself. At the end of the chapter, verses 28 -32.

Romans 1, verses 28 -32. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice.

They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful. And although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Now, we know that this final section comes after a lengthy discussion of the nature of sin, the twisting of the creator-creation relationship. And we know that immediately preceding this are the today rather infamous verses, verses 26 and 27, where Paul utilizes as an example of how the entirety of man's being has been influenced by, corrupted by, twisted by this rebellion against God, the one bearing the image of God seeking to twist and damage that image in regards to the subject of homosexuality.

But here you have what is called one of the vice lists. There are a number of them. There's one in 1 Corinthians 6, and there's really going to be another similar in chapter 3 of Romans. And we find them elsewhere in the New Testament.

A vice list, a list of man's sins drawn primarily, I think, hopefully we now recognize, from the Old Testament law, from the Old Testament revelation. And in this section, we clearly see that Paul is saying, see, since they do not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, this is going to be the result.

What does it mean when God gives someone over to a ad hocimos mind, an ad hocimos mind, a depraved, rejected, twisted mind? What does it mean to be given over to that? And that's what the rest of the vice list refers to.

So how is this relevant to Twitter? Well, earlier in the week, I did a dividing line program in which I discussed a number of things. But one of the things I discussed was an article that Dr. Albert Moeller had brought to our attention in his broadcast called The Briefing.

And it was an article from London where the woman who had started what's called a hashtag in Twitter was allowed to explain why she had begun this particular movement, this particular hashtag. Now, for those of you who have flip phones, I'll explain briefly how this is relevant.

And that is, in Twitter, you can put a hashtag in your message and then people will search on these hashtags and you can follow this really worldwide conversation. So if there's something going on, I've gone to a number of conferences.

Well, for example, last January, I was speaking at the G3 conference in Georgia. I'll be speaking there again this year. And so there is a specific hashtag for people who are tweeting about what is going on there.

And so you can follow that. If you search for that, you can follow what everybody is saying. Even if you don't happen to follow them, don't even know them, you can see what everybody is saying about what's going on at the G3 conference as long as you know what the hashtag is.

Well, sometimes they're very humorous. In this instance, they were anything but humorous. When I first saw this movement, I saw it sometime last week, maybe the week before. I don't remember exactly when it was.

But a movement began in Twitter and the hashtag was shout your abortion. Shout your abortion was the hashtag. And it was a movement to seek to remove shame and stigma from those who had experienced an abortion.

And the article that Dr. Moeller had referred us to and that I looked up and read myself was an interview, well not really an interview, but was written by the woman who began the shout your abortion hashtag on Twitter.

And it was an amazing example, well pretty much, of Romans 1, 28 -32, if you really want to know. I mean, it would be very difficult to not think of, especially verse 32, but really other sections as well, especially when we talk about such things as being insolent and that kind of inventors of evil.

Also very descriptive of these people who, especially in a day like today, where we have, in light of the videos that have been released over the past number of months, such a heightened awareness of the absolute evil and ghoulishness of what is taking place in Western culture today in regards to the murder of unborn children and the selling of their parts and just the absolute inhumanity that would in some cases make a Joseph Mengele blush.

And yet this is happening in our own land. To have people in that context going, I'm proud of what I did. I'm not ashamed of what I did. I'm happy about it. It was good. It is truly Isaiah 5 come to life right in front of our eyes, calling that which is evil good and good evil.

So I read parts of the article on my program. And I especially focused in on what it tells us. For example, the woman at one point talked about girls and women and anyone anywhere on the gender spectrum who can become pregnant.

Let me repeat that for some of you older folks because you don't think you heard what I just said. She spoke of girls and women and anyone anywhere on the gender spectrum who can become pregnant. This is where we are in our society today.

Now you and I sitting here hear those words and the first thought across our minds, it's insanity. It's moral, ethical, scientific insanity. And yet this is the perspective of the societal elite. This is the perspective of those who unfortunately represent the generation that will be making all of the policy and law decisions in a very short number of years.

And so I had discussed the fact that worldview, worldview is absolutely central. Let's admit it. For many of us, we've lived our lives and while we may have taken note of worldview issues, it just wasn't something that was front and center every single day.

Well, those days are past for us. We are now seeing that worldview is central, that worldview has to do, worldview is spiritual. And what I was doing in my review of the article was to argue this is a spiritual issue.

See how these individuals have been, as verse 28 says, given over. That's the only way to explain this. They have been given over. There is such a complete obliteration of what those of us who are a little over half a century old used to call common sense.

What seems to be obvious, that women love their children. And women derive tremendous joy and fulfillment from the nurturing of their children. And mothers invest themselves in their children. And when we were children, when we were sick, who did we want to see?

We wanted our mother. We wanted her loving touch. We wanted her hug. We wanted to be with her while we were hurting. Oh, sure, we'd like to see dad, but let's be honest. Let's be honest. It's good to have mom around.

That's the first person that we want to have around when we're that young child and we're experiencing difficulties and trials. That fundamental human conduct, totally rejected. I read some of the comments that people were posting in this hashtag thread.

And so many rejoicing. I will never have children. And if anything ever happens to where it looks like I'm going to, I'll do it again. They were proud of it. Hatred of, well, the continuation of the human species.

Totally self-centered. Totally focused upon self, me, me, me. There is no future. Yeah, Japan will collapse in just a few decades. It's going to. We all know it. They know it, too. That's why they're investing in robot technology to take care of themselves when they're old.

Their reproduction rate is so low, so small, that they'll be one of the first modern nations to simply cease to exist. To be honest with you, even if they start paying people to have babies right now, they're past the point of no return.

We're actually seeing a society imploding because people are so focused upon self, so autonomous, you don't even think about the future. You don't even think about those coming after you. You don't care about anything else but those who came before you, and you certainly don't care about those coming after you.

It's all about me, me, me, me, me. And that's what this entire hashtag was all about. Me, me, me, I am willing to murder. Because let's be honest, we live in a day where we have more information than we've ever had in the past of the humanity of the pre-born child.

So call it what it is. I'm willing to murder a child so that I can have the things I want to have. It is human autonomy taken to the nth degree. To the point of the destruction, if it were even possible to fully destroy it, of the very image of God.

And so I talked about the spiritual nature of what motivates this kind of behavior, and what motivates this kind of incredible twisting of the world view to where you can talk about girls and women and anyone on the gender spectrum who can get pregnant.

It's a level of moral anarchy that cannot sustain culture, that cannot sustain civilization. And it is the result of being given over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, which are not according to the way that God made us.

The Public Rejection of God and the Meaning of a Depraved Mind

And so, some of you know, that we post those programs online. They're live. You can watch them online on YouTube. You can listen. And then we post it afterwards. And so people download them. And it's amazing to me.

I don't know how long we're going to have this privilege, but as long as we have it, we'll keep doing it everywhere I go. South Africa, Ukraine, any of the people I was talking about. I listened to you while I was on the treadmill this morning or whatever else it might be.

It's just amazing the reach that program has. But I didn't realize it had quite as big a reach as it did. Because I think it was just a matter of hours later, all of a sudden I saw a tweet directed to me from the woman who started that hashtag.

The very woman. Somebody, don't ask me how, had seen my program. And you know the amazing thing is, the first thing she did was she tweeted the video of it to all of her followers. Now, that's a good thing and that's a bad thing.

That's a good thing because I'm glad that this woman's followers had the opportunity of maybe clicking onto that program. Now, the funny thing was, the first part of the program was about the Pope, so that may have caused some real confusion to a lot of folks as to what's that guy talking about?

I have no earthly idea. But it's a good thing that they may have had the opportunity maybe of hearing something they had never heard before. But on the other hand, for some reason, this woman's followers, let's just say that they use language, some of it I wasn't even sure what it meant, but some of the rest of it, the last time I heard it was in the locker room in high school and when people are going, well, I hear some of it when those guys go by with the music blaring so hard that the windows are rattling out of their car and there's all sorts of four-letter words bouncing around in there too.

And all I know is I've never hit the block button more often in Twitter than I did the evening that that woman posted my video online. So there was the good and there was the not-so-good. Now, some of you might have followed the attempt that I made at having a conversation with this particular woman.

I can only call it an attempt. You cannot force human beings to reason with you. If they are beyond reason, you cannot change that. You can try every approach possible. You can try different ways of reasoning.

If they will not reason, nothing will happen. And this woman is not capable of reasoning. It was a very frustrating experience for even though I was focused primarily upon her, there were all these other people jumping in and some, you know, block, block, block, block, block and just cleaning up the feed as I go along.

But trying to get her to actually engage in a discussion of worldview and things like utterly impossible. Utterly impossible. And in the few exchanges I had with some of her followers, I was once again reminded that when someone has been given over to a depraved mind, they will very clearly give expression to that depravity.

I'm not sure whose car that is. You're all now completely going, is that mine? I don't know. Is that my horn? I don't know, honey. Is that your horn? I don't know. I know that it's not my wife's horn because she has the wimpiest horn on any car I've ever heard.

So, at least we know it's not that one. When people are given over to a depraved mind, their reasoning, their logic, the infantile level of reasoning and thought expressed by this woman and her followers was frightening to me.

Adults should not behave in this fashion. And yet, this is what is becoming not a vocal minority in our land, but probably, very soon, the majority in our land. And so my mind was once again brought back to this text.

And once again, I sat back and I looked at just this... Really, it's only one or two sentences depending on how you want to divide things. I mean, the original languages did not have sentence breaks in them in that sense.

So, it's a fairly short amount of text. And yet, I was once again overwhelmed by the fact that in these few words written so long ago, the Apostle Paul showed an insight into the behavior of man that transcends time, culture, language, science, and everything else.

It is an amazing thing to me, this first chapter of Romans. And I thought about what it means for God to give them over. But notice, just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, and is that not the description of our land today?

We think of in relatively recent years. I've been reading a couple books recently on some of my rides. I don't always read heresy. And I'm not always reading theology. I actually have an interest in other things as well.

So, I've actually read two books recently, I'm not finished with the second one yet, on the Normandy invasion in June of 1944. And I've been struck by the fact that both have made reference to the public pronouncements that were made at that time.

And that there was no embarrassment on the part of the leadership of our nation to call for prayer and fasting in regards to the success of the invasion and the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany.

That wasn't that long ago. But for our society today, that was ancient history. That was ancient history. Today, they do not see fit to acknowledge God any longer. God has been removed from the public sphere because God is no longer a part of the private life.

If you do not view yourself as the creation of God, if you do not view yourself as having duties before God, if you do not believe that God has the right to say this is right and this is wrong, then you do not see fit to acknowledge God any longer at all.

You have proclaimed your own autonomy. You will determine what is right and wrong for yourself. You will determine what you will do. You will determine the course of your life. And you do not have to acknowledge or consider God and His ways at all.

This is secularism. This is the secular society. It is the essence of the secular society. It is becoming the very dogma of the law of this land. There will be only one result to that. And that is God gives such a person who will not acknowledge Him over to a depraved mind.

A depraved mind. A mind that literally, in the original language, is unapproved. It does not pass muster. When it is tested, it fails. It's not the mind that God created us to possess and to have. And God gives them over.

Many Christians today seem to believe that there is a position, a place of neutrality. That you can be the secularist, but you're not the enemy of God. You just haven't made a decision. You're going to walk the middle way.

I cannot find anywhere in Scripture this middle way. I cannot find where an apostle functioned upon a worldview that there was room for creatures of God to live as if they're not creatures of God without being in rebellion against God.

And yet we have been taught, we are taught by example and by subtle insinuation every single day by the world around us that there are many people that fit right into that mold. And that we are the radicals.

We are the extremists. That's the new term. We are the extremists when we say that there is no middle ground. That you are either going to acknowledge God, seek to live in light of His truth, or you will be in rebellion against God.

And man, when he engages in that rebellion, is fundamentally altered to the very core of his being. What does a depraved mind look like? Well, it's not going to do the things that are proper. In fact, it's not capable of doing so.

Oh, you mean they can't help little old ladies across the street? Yes, but not for the right reasons. Not for the right reasons. Not with purity. Not in holiness. Not out of service to God. It may be something that they just want to do.

It's something they were taught to do. They may do it. They may not do it. They may not feel any necessity to do it. They do those things which are not proper. They are filled. And they cannot stop the filling with all unrighteousness.

Now, mankind doesn't even give thought to what that means any longer. You and I are amongst a very small number of people on the planet that are concerned about what that term righteousness means. But that which is in accord with God's purpose, with God's revelation, with God's character, we are concerned about that.

The depraved mind is not. They are filled with wickedness. It is wicked to murder unborn children. It is wicked to proclaim your own autonomy at the cost of others. That's wickedness. They're filled with greed.

The idea of serving others, content with what God gives to you? No, no, no, no. They're filled with greed. Filled with evil. It doesn't, as long as there's any restraint from God, ever come to its fullest expression.

And when we see God especially withdraw His hand and we see mass murder and we see the killing fields in Cambodia or what is going on in North Korea, when we see these things, we see what evil is really like.

And yet God continues to hold down the vast majority of that. They're full of envy because they're focused upon themselves. You're only envious when you put yourself before others. They're full of murder.

And as Jesus told us, that's not just simply the act. But it's the attitude. Full of murder. Strife. There's no peace. There's no peace in their own hearts. How can there be peace in their relationships?

They're deceitful. Truthfulness? Why worry about truthfulness? That's not really a genetic advantage to the evolutionary system. They have malice toward others. There are gossips they love to repeat. Whether it's true or not, it's not the new word out on the street.

They slander others. Again, that's something that someone does who thinks more of themselves than others and isn't concerned about truth. And then the next term in the original language can be translated one of two ways.

The most natural translation of it is not haters of God. And the reason that most translations say haters of God is because of the context. It's a list of things that people do that are representative of having a depraved mind.

And so the vast majority of translations, no question about it, render it something along the lines of haters of God. But the natural form of the word itself is not haters of God. It's hated by God. It's hated by God.

It's being the object of God's detestation. Now maybe some translations avoid that just because they don't have a theology that would allow God to detest anything. It's strange that we would be called to holiness and to a hatred of sin, but God wouldn't be able to do that.

But be it as it may, a natural translation would be hated of God. Detested by Him. And that seems to go, though, with the next few lines, the next few terms, insolent. Man, that is a word... Let's be honest.

When was the last time you heard the word insolent outside of a church? We don't use that in our society, do we? Because what's the basis for even using it? I mean, when you think of insolence, when I think of insolence, I think of that woman because she is insolent.

She has no concept of submission to authority. It's not surprising the very next term is arrogant because if you know about how language works, terms have what's called a semantic domain. Some words have a very narrow semantic domain.

Capacitor has a very narrow domain. That's a certain thing, and we know what it is, and it can't be used in a bunch of different ways. But thing, the Greek term logos, word, oh my, broad semantic domain.

Depending on the context, it can be used in a lot of different ways. And it's interesting that a lot of these words, when you look at their semantic domain, they cross over each other. They share common areas.

They're related concepts. And so, just as, well, one of my favorite painters, Claude Monet, he would use a very narrow number of colors, but by bringing them together could create vibrant colors other than the ones he was using.

And the same way the writer can take different words and by bringing those semantic domains and crossing them over can fill in in a rich, colorful fashion a description of what's being talked about here.

And here this depraved mind is insolent, arrogant, boastful. That's what man has to be once he is cut off from God. Once he has said, I will not acknowledge God any longer. I am autonomous. There's no ground left for humility.

There's no ground left for service. Might be why we haven't seen too many atheist hospitals founded, huh? Yeah, theology matters. It ends up having an impact on things. Insolence. An ungrounded, arrogant rejection of proper authority and order.

Insolent. Arrogant. Boastful. Inventors of evil. I mean, have you ever thought about what an inventor of evil is? That means you don't think the people before you got it good enough. You need to come up with something new.

You want to invent new ways of rebellion. For a lot of folks, you work through those terms and then you get to the last one in verse 30 and it's like, eh? It's like Paul just hung a right. Or a left, depending on how you want to look at it.

Disobedient to parents. Now, I don't know if it's just because every single one of us was disobedient to our parents at some point or another. Sometimes it was open, like when at age four or three, whenever it was, I went running down the middle of the road, County Road 15, with my fingers in my ears because my mom was running after me screaming, Jimmy, stop.

So I figured, you put my fingers in my ears, I'm guiltless. It's wonderful how that, I'm not sure how that happened given I was such an innocent child, right? That's the term we all use, innocent child.

Yeah, right. Any parent that has a two or three year old knows that doesn't work that way. But I was disobedient to my parents. But I think obviously what this goes along with is this rebellion against the very order that God has established in human society and determines those boundaries for our own good and our own flourishing.

And today, the idea of the family as a unit, authority invested in father and mother, where does that come from? It comes from God's revelation. You reject that and you have no basis for it anymore. They're just your biological parent one and biological parent two.

That's all that's left on birth certificates, right? That's what's happening. You all do know that. In many states, it's going to be forced on all of us for long. You have to change the birth certificates.

No more father and mother. That's sexist. I am thankful for a father and a mother. Disobedient to parents. Without understanding. We're supposed to have understanding. God made us that way. Untrustworthy.

Unloving. Unmerciful. These are positive traits that should flow from our relationship to our Creator. They can't anymore because we won't acknowledge God anymore. That means the source of understanding, the source of loving, the source of mercy is God.

And when man cuts himself off from God, he's not going to find another source he's going to provide. And then, the amazing words of verse 32. And although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death.

Now really? Man, I can guarantee you. If I had quoted those words to this particular woman, the Twitter explosion would have been probably the biggest I've ever recorded. I don't believe any such thing.

I think what I did was good. You know, when someone starts a movement, shout your abortion. It tells me. In the dark of the night, they're hearing the screams of their dead child. And this is how they cover it up.

You see, if you can get other people to join with you, and to yell and encourage you, and to do the same things as you, you think you can tap that down, you can get rid of that shame, you can get rid of that conscience.

You can't. They know the ordinance of God. You can't know if she's ever read Leviticus. No, she probably hasn't. But this ordinance of God doesn't require them to read Leviticus. It requires them to read their own conscience.

They know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death. Knowing that, they not only do the same, purposefully, willfully do the same, but they also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Sin loves company. Rebellion loves company. And so sinners will gather together and they will encourage each other in their rebellion. Here, truly, is the end result of being given over. Not only your own self-destruction, but let's bring as many with us as possible.

Let's destroy as much life as possible. Mine's not enough. I'm going to take everybody else with me. So I am going to engage in behaviors in my family, in my community, that damages and harms. And we wonder why.

Scripture tells us why. Once you've been given over to a depraved mind, you do not want the image of God. I have said many times, I believe the greatest suffering under the punishment of God in eternity to come, I don't believe God is going to have to extend a finger to cause anyone suffering.

No, because you see, once you are in that place where there is no longer anything you can do to anyone else, you cannot harm God's creation, you cannot express your rebellion in any other way than the aim that the one thing that bears His image, that's you.

For me, the most frightening thought about the phrase eternal punishment is not demons. It's not Dante and all the rest. It's darkness, isolation, and absolute self-loathing and the result that that brings.

I don't even want to think about it. Depraved mind. Was God just to give them over? Would any one of us in this room be any different had it not been for the grace of God? No, apart from the grace of God, I can't imagine what idiotic, self-destructive hashtag I could have come up with.

And you too. Each one of us knows our own heart. Each one of us knows if we have some self-righteous anger that comes up within us, we better not wrap ourselves in the robes of the Pharisee. We instead had better adopt the position of the publican.

Recognize our debt to mercy. It doesn't mean we compromise. It doesn't mean we stop saying that's evil. It certainly changes the way that we pray, that we think about those who remain absolutely enslaved to their sin.

This is the world we live in, my friends. This is where we are. How do we live faithfully? Well, we better know what we believe and we better be thankful for the grace of God that delivered us from slavery to death and has transferred us into the kingdom of His beloved Son.

And while we still have the time and while we still have the freedom, we need to be salt and light. We need to proclaim that message as best we can. Sometimes the result, a lot of hatred, a lot of nastiness.

But you never know when God's going to use that message to draw yet another one of His beloved elect to Himself. We want to be the instruments He uses. Let's pray together. Our gracious and merciful Heavenly Father, we do thank You for the grace that has caused us to differ.

We know that in and of ourselves the descriptions that we've read here and Your Word would be of us with full accuracy. And Lord, even as it is, we can think of the times in our lives when we've been insolent and arrogant and disobedient, and yet You have been merciful to us.

We thank You for that mercy and that grace which is found only in Jesus Christ. And we would pray, Lord, that by Your Spirit You would bring a great revival in our nation. That You would be pleased to draw many unto Yourself.

We know it is our only hope. We strive toward that. We work toward that. We know that You are just in all that You do. And so if You call us to speak to many before even one responds, may we be faithful even in that situation.

We ask that You would help us to speak with no compromise and yet the grace of the redeemed as we speak to those in the world around us. May we be salt and light to Your honor and glory. We pray in Christ's name.