Lazarus is Dead and I am Glad for Your Sakes

If you'll turn once more in your Bibles with me, please, to the Gospel of John, chapter 11.

The Gospel of John, chapter 11. Once again, before we look to the

Word of God, let us ask him to bless our time together. Let us pray together. Once again, our gracious Heavenly Father, we confess our need of your

Spirit's presence amongst us. We thank you for this, your Word. We confess it is the very

Word of God. We ask that you would cause it to come alive in our hearts and our minds this day, that you would increase our faith and our understanding.

We know we live in a day where the world seeks each and every day to implant within us doubt and skepticism.

We need this time. We're gathered together as the people of God. We say amen to what your

Word says. We hear and we believe. Help us, Lord, during this time.

We pray in Christ's name. Amen. As I mentioned a few moments ago, we are in a sermon series based upon the fragmentary nature of an ancient papyrus that I certainly believe in God's providence has been passed down to us.

It is identified as P45. That particular manuscript is an unusual manuscript.

It contains sections of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and then the Book of Acts.

The poor Book of Acts, which normally lived a very lonely life in the early church, normally cut off from the

Gospels and had its own little place in this particular manuscript, got to be with everybody else and was included in that particular papyrus.

So, the section of John, there actually are a couple of verses back in John 4, so I could actually legally, of course,

I made the rules up so I could do it one way or the other, but we could actually legally cover John chapter 4 before we get done with this, and we might, but I wanted to start off with the fullest section of the manuscript as far as the the pages having the best look to them.

I see Brother George has his P45 with him down there, and if you hold it up just a little higher than that, you can see it actually is a fairly full page there.

There you go. There's the page we're looking at. So much of what we're going to look at once we get into, especially

Mark, is going to be like a quarter of that as far as what's actually still present.

So we are in John 10 and 11. That's the the sections that we're going to get to deal with here, and we began

John chapter 11 the last time I had the opportunity of being here. For those few visiting, a lot of members think that I'm a visitor, too.

I just returned from three weeks overseas, where I did a debate in London, spoke in Wittenberg, Germany at the

Shepherds Conference there in Germany, then taught for a week on Roman Catholicism in the

Czech Republic, and then went from there and taught for a week on apologetics in Kiev, Ukraine, and got home a week ago this evening.

And so I've been gone for a while, and it's amazing you all allow visitors to preach, but here

I am, and so I'm a little bit feeling out of things myself, but we're diving right back into this particular sermon series, and hopefully we'll make some good progress over the course of the summer because that is a normal time when

I end up doing a little bit more preaching because of the rare absence of Brother Fry during this particular time period.

And so probably, I don't know, a month and a half ago or so, somewhere around in that time period, we began

John chapter 11. We emphasized, and we always emphasize, looking at the

Word of God in its full context, recognizing the flow of each and every book, and we recognized the flow of the argument from John chapter 9, the healing of the blind man, into John chapter 10,

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. And working through John chapter 10, to the revelation of the unity of the

Father and the Son, the harmony of the Father and the Son, and the salvation of God's people, leading to the accusation of blasphemy,

Jesus' quotation from Psalm 82 .6, and then the Jews picking up stones to stone him.

Jesus leaves that area, has gone a good distance away, and is experiencing a good season, shall we say, in the sense that people are coming, and there are people who are willing to hear.

In other words, there's not so much opposition here as you get farther away from the center of Jewish power in Jerusalem.

And clearly the disciples are enjoying this as well. We have to remember what it must have been like to be one of Jesus' disciples, and to see the rising anger and rage in the hearts of the very people that you think should be the ones following after Jesus.

And in your mindset, in your understanding of what the

Messiah is to be, these are the very people that should be the first ones. You're going to have to convince them eventually if you're going to be able to establish the kind of messianic kingdom that you as the disciple is expecting to be established.

And so obviously the disciples are somewhat concerned when they see the kind of opposition that Jesus is facing.

And so the messengers come in John chapter 11. They inform Jesus and the disciples of Lazarus' sickness.

And we know that Jesus specifically delays going to Lazarus. It is very plainly stated in the text that that Jesus knows what is taking place.

He knows what's going to happen. And therefore he recognizes the purposes that he and the

Father and the Spirit have in working these things out to the glory of God, to the demonstration of who he is, and we will see today to the benefit of the faith of the apostles.

Because we cannot forget the fact that certainly these apostles had to have been fundamentally changed by what they saw in the resurrection of Lazarus.

How could any one of them forget that day? How could any one of them for a moment lose the impact of what it must have been like to stand there with Jesus and to hear him command that the stone be rolled away and then to cry out,

Lazarus come forth. Can you imagine what they were thinking at that time? But then to see that man come forth.

What a faith establishing and grounding experience that was that then with the indwelling presence of the

Holy Spirit within them after Pentecost must have been something that was an incredible life -building, life -affirming experience for them.

And Jesus is going to make reference to that in what we see happening here. And so at the end of the opening section we have

Jesus' discussion of the are there not 12 hours in the day? And I mentioned to you last, at least

I think I mentioned to you last time, sometimes when it's been so long I forget exactly what it was that I have said.

But I point out at that time that the Jews and the Romans both divided the day and the night up into 12 equal segments.

And so that meant of course that as the yearly cycle would go on that would mean that an hour was not a fixed entity in their experience.

That the hour would be a longer thing during the summer months than it would during the winter months for example.

But the point was that there was an equal division of day and night and they have the light now.

And so there's going to be a time coming when they're not going to have the light of the presence of Christ with them.

And so while they're with him they are to walk with him and to accomplish their work.

And so having said these things, verse 11, Jesus said to them,

Lazarus our friend has fallen asleep, but I am going in order that I may awaken him.

And so he announces to them, Lazarus our friend. That's a pretty encouraging word.

Lazarus was not just the friend of Jesus. All of the disciples should have been concerned about what was happening with Lazarus.

But we know that there was fear amongst the disciples. The disciples had already said, Lord we're going back to Judea. They just wanted to stone you.

They recognized that it was too close. The anger would still be there.

They had seen the rage. And if you can imagine what it looks like to see people who pick up stones and they're going to publicly murder someone.

They're going to publicly execute someone. That can't be something that you forget very quickly. And so there is in the background this concern amongst the disciples.

And so Jesus says, Lazarus our friend has fallen asleep, but I'm going that I might awaken him.

And the disciples response is, well Lord if he has fallen asleep, then he will get better or the term literally is he will be saved.

And we need to recognize that John is very very purposefully in the selection of his terminology.

Giving us two levels of meaning for many of the words that we find here.

Especially when we get into the discussion of the resurrection and the life. What it means to die. And what it means to live.

There is going to be the spiritual and there is going to be the physical. And this really is, it really does continue on with the very same type of dichotomy that we had seen in John chapter 5.

If you remember John chapter 5, the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and they will live. And there's both the spiritual aspect of the

Son of God raising to spiritual life as well as the final day in which the final judgment takes place.

And the Son of God will be the one that brings them to life and he will be the one before whom they stand as judge.

And so that same kind of dichotomy can be found here. And so the disciples say if he is able to sleep, if he has gained the ability to sleep, then he will be healed.

He will get better. And yet the very same term that is used here, and it's probably been explained to you many times before, the

Greek term that is used for salvation when it's applied to physical things would refer to healing, obtaining of wellness.

And so this is the sense in which they are using it here. And of course we may wonder if possibly this isn't just a matter of conversation on the part of the disciples.

Maybe it's like we don't really need to go. We don't want to wake him up. If he's now getting rest, the last thing we want to do is interrupt his sleeping.

So we're sure he's going to get better. It's nice here. That may, you know, we just don't know.

That possibility is there when we get into discussion between Jesus and Mary and Martha.

There's also going to be a lot of speculation as to is there an intimation of this meaning here or that meaning there?

And I don't think the text is meant to answer all the questions that we necessarily want to ask of it at times.

And so the disciples, Lord, if he's sleeping, he will get better. And Jesus, however, was speaking concerning his death, but they thought that he was speaking concerning the slumbering of sleep, the rest that one gets from sleeping.

So therefore in verse 14, Jesus spoke to them openly saying,

Lazarus died. Now in our language, we would normally say something along the lines of Lazarus has died or Lazarus is dead, speaking of the state of lacking life.

But Jesus uses a very interesting form here. Now, it's the most basic form of the

Greek verb. It just simply is stating that something happened in the past. It's not stating anything about the continuing effects of it or anything like that.

He just simply says, Lazarus died. That's an interesting way of putting the statement.

Is it because Jesus knows that Lazarus is going to be one of the very, very, very, very few human beings in all of history that are going to be able to say,

I died once. And not because they're trying to get into the

National Enquirer or anything along those lines or Ripley's believe it or not or anything like that.

But there are very few people. The widow's son from Maine could say the same thing.

I've been there and done that. Yeah. And it's an incredible experience.

A very, very small number of people. And then you've got that really odd group from Matthew's gospel that the tombs are opened and the saints' bodies come forth and they go into Jerusalem.

And that must have been pretty interesting too. We don't know how long they live. We don't know what happens in that situation.

But a very small number of people about whom that could be said, Lazarus died.

And then we know that later on we're going to hear Lazarus speaking and not in the afterlife.

We're going to know that he is going to experience life once again. And so Jesus says,

Lazarus died. And then the very next two words were, and I rejoice.

Lazarus died. Our friend Lazarus died. One that the

Jews are even going to say in just a matter of verses, behold, how much he loved him. And we've already had described for us at the beginning of this chapter.

There was a special relationship that existed between Jesus and this family.

And this man, Lazarus, and his sisters. He's died and I rejoice.

Now, it's real easy when we read through a text like this to start getting the idea of Jesus is just sort of floating through these events and he's, you know, he knows everything's going to happen.

And so these things don't really matter. The text is going to disabuse us of that. It's going to more than once tell us how deeply moved

Jesus was, how troubled he was in spirit. And of course, at least in the

English Bible, the shortest verse of the Bible, Jesus wept is only a few sentences down the way.

Notice I said in the English Bible, it's not the shortest verse in the Bible. I've already told our people that.

I hope I'm not ruining anyone's preparation for winning a Bible trivia or something along those lines, but it's not the shortest verse in the

Bible as the Bible was written. There is a shorter verse, I think in 1 Thessalonians in Greek.

And so now you can wow all your friends with that particular piece of knowledge. But the point being that Jesus weeps,

Jesus is moved. This is not some automaton, some robot that's just moving through these events and they don't really have any meaning.

There is a temptation, I think, that simply because Jesus knows what it is he is going to go and do, he knows what the outcome is going to be, that somehow the events therefore don't matter.

This is a major, major problem with many people, because when you look at what the

Bible teaches concerning God's absolute sovereignty over time, when you look at what it says about his absolute knowledge of all future events, and when you recognize the relationship between his knowledge and his sovereignty, that is that beautiful divine decree, it's very easy for a lot of people to say, oh, see that, we're all just a bunch of puppets and none of this stuff really matters and none of it has any real meaning.

I was asked at some point during the past three weeks, I forget which of the countries

I was in where I was asked it. I think it was Germany, but it might have been the Czech Republic.

Anyways, I was asked by someone, how would you respond to those people that would say that a belief in God's sovereignty renders time and what happens in time irrelevant, and I would say the fundamental refutation of that is the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The fact that he entered into this world, this realm, this time -bound realm.

The fact that he lived for 33 years. He didn't just appear as a fully grown man, pop in, accomplish redemption, and pop back out again.

He entered into this realm and the things that he did mattered and he himself, as we're going to see, is moved in spirit.

He knows that what God has decreed to accomplish in time is still, because it is decreed by God and to his glory, vitally, vitally important.

And so when Jesus says, Lazarus died and I rejoice, this is not some heartless statement.

I mean, those in our congregation know that for a number of years, many, many moons ago when

I still had hair, for example, I was a hospital chaplain.

And that as soon as the Sunday morning service was done, and sometimes a little bit before, I had to exit quickly.

Because I worked up at Thunderbird and I had to work almost every

Sunday afternoon. And I can assure you that in various of the classes that I took and things like that,

I don't think they would have suggested to you that in your grief counseling, in your working in the emergency room, that you announce someone's death and the first words you say afterwards, and I rejoice.

This would not work overly well. But Jesus says it to his disciples anyways.

Why? I rejoice for your sake in order that you might believe that I was not there.

That I was not there. But let us go to him.

Let us go to him. So Jesus informs the disciples of Lazarus's death.

And then says that he rejoices not in the presence of death in this fallen world, but in the fact that there is a purpose in this death.

And that part of that purpose anyways is for the disciples in order that they might believe.

Now, what would you have thought if you heard those words? You're going to have plenty of time to mull these things over.

We're not exactly certain where the location of where Jesus is right now is.

There's a couple possibilities. It's a big river to be on the other side of. It's probably the farther distance.

There's two primary areas that are looked at by Bible scholars. It's probably the farther one away. You're probably going to have many hours, at least a day, of travel.

to mull over what Jesus just said. How can our faith be established or strengthened by Lazarus's death and are now going to wake him?

Now for you and me, it's real easy to sit back and go, What's with these disciples? How dull can they be?

I mean, if I had been one of Jesus's disciples, I would have figured all this stuff out long before these guys did.

I mean, come on. Jesus said he's asleep. He's died.

Going to wake him. Jesus is going to raise Lazarus from the dead. This is great. I would have been excited. But you see, we know the rest of the story.

And you need to be very, very careful that you do not prejudge these men.

In fact, I think most of us, if we're really honest with ourselves, we should probably see ourselves in the disciples' dullness.

And the longer we live as Christians, how many times do you look back over some spiritually, morally idiotic thing you did and realize, you know,

I had learned that lesson 47 times beforehand in my life, and I keep forgetting it. Maybe if we would recognize that we're a lot like the disciples, it would go better for us.

But the point is that Jesus himself specifically makes a statement.

Your faith is part and parcel of why

God has brought this circumstance to pass. And man, I'm going to tell you something. There's a lot of people in this world.

They don't believe God has the right to do this. The idea that God would bring this level of sorrow and anguish into his faithful servant's lives, just so somebody else might have their faith increased.

I will never love a God like that. I've heard people speak like that.

I've heard people talk like that. Now, of course, these are the disciples.

Well, one of whom's the devil, but the others that Jesus is going to use to be the primary vehicle through which his whole church is going to be founded and the message spread to the four corners of the globe.

And so their faith, the grounding of that faith, it's sort of an important thing, and God gets to determine what is most important.

And Lazarus and Mary and Martha going through this, I can guarantee you, I can guarantee you, after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the coming of the

Holy Spirit upon the believers, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus would look back upon these events and look back upon the suffering they went through, and they would praise

God for it. And they would rejoice that God had worked in their lives in this way.

How about us? Say, well, yeah, for them, it's pretty easy.

I mean, resurrection took place. What if there is no resurrection?

The point is, my friends, that in any believer's life, when death touches that life, it has a purpose.

I don't understand the many people who name the name of Christ and carry a

Bible in their hand, read about the fact that my days are written.

Psalm 139, my days are written. Read those words, and yet still come to the conclusion that somehow

God got caught unaware. That, well, no, this bad stuff that happens in life, oh, there's horrible things that take place.

There are children that get cancer. There are terrible things that happen. God couldn't have decreed any of that.

So what you want us to believe is that there's a God who either didn't know this was going to happen.

That's the only consistent way of doing this, by the way. Go become an open theist. God shot the dice, and that's just what turned out.

He didn't know. He knew it was a possibility, but he didn't really know. If you really believe

God knows the future exhaustively, then you either have to believe that he knows it because he's decreed it for his own glory, and therefore everything that takes place has a purpose, has a meaning, we may not know it now, but we will eventually, or God created a bunch of absolutely purposeless evil.

Why? Well, there's lots of theories, I guess. The fact is, if death touches the life of believers, sickness, tragedy,

Jesus is just as in charge there as he was here. Just as in charge there as he is here.

I rejoice. Let's go to him. Then you have verse 16.

Good old Thomas. Good old Thomas. I don't know about you, but when

I read what Thomas says in verse 16, now some of you younger folks aren't going to get this.

I'm sorry. I'm getting to that age where some of my best illustrations just...

The gap, especially to the millennials, is just really big. And of course, half the time when they speak to me,

I'm just sitting there going, what language are you speaking?

But when I hear Thomas, this is how I hear Thomas. Well, let us go that we might die with him.

I gave my daughter a plush toy once. I wonder if she still has it. Of Eeyore.

Okay, now how many young folks will admit you don't have a clue who Eeyore was? Anyone willing to admit you don't know who

Eeyore is? No one in this room is willing to admit. You all know Eeyore. Okay, good.

Illustration worked. I'm not sure I'm believing you. My worship service should be a place of honesty.

But Thomas seems to have been the Eeyore of the 12.

Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, I'm not going to believe.

And unfortunately, many of you from now on, every time you hear Thomas, are going to hear poor

Thomas in Eeyore's voice. I didn't mean to ruin Thomas for you. Because I can guarantee you when he says, my lord and my god, that's not

Eeyore. Okay? But it took divine revelation to sort of kick him out of that.

Okay. And technically, you could, in the way that he said this, there's two possibilities, grammatically speaking.

Let us go that we may also die with him. Well, who's the him?

Well, there's two possibilities of the him. Jesus or Lazarus. But I just don't see how there's any real possibility of the

Lazarus part. I mean, that would really be, like, incredibly depressing.

I mean, that even makes Eeyore look bad. All right, let's go and we'll just all die.

I'm just not really sure that's what it's about. But clearly, it seems to me that die with him is with Jesus.

That's a lot better way of reading it, I think. But still, how deeply influenced had the disciples been by the experience they had just had?

And how violent was that crowd there in the temple?

That here, we don't know how many days later, but some time has passed, that Thomas's reaction is, we're toast, but let's go.

So there's an obedience together with a, what we would say, not a fully formed faith.

Because Jesus has already said, I'm going to wake him. And yet, for Thomas, it's like, well, even if we're going to die, we're going to stick with you,

Jesus. And so on one level, we can go, yeah, Thomas. But on another level, we go, poor

Thomas. And isn't that just like you and me? I mean, on one level, we should at least hope and pray to say, let us go, whatever it's going to cost me.

Even if our faith is so weak that we can't believe God can sustain us. Even if our faith is so weak that we can't believe

God's going to do what he says he's going to do, at least there's a level of obedience that says, let's go die.

So on one level, yay, Thomas. On another level, wow,

I wonder what Thomas thought about his words as Lazarus came out of the tomb.

I wonder what he thought. And I doubt that he,

I'm pretty certain Thomas never read the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John is probably the last to be written.

There's a fair amount of tradition that Thomas went east and that he was martyred. A number of churches in,

Eeyore eventually got a backbone. He didn't remain a plush toy, that's for sure. And did some incredible things to the

Lord that in the future we will probably find out about in the eternal state, which tells you something about what the

Spirit of God can do with anybody. But I don't think he ever read this, but I wonder if after he got to heaven and found out about it, he just went, oh great.

Why did I get quoted? I could have given you some other quotes from the other guys too, you know.

I wasn't the only one. That's how it works. That works. So, let's go that we may die with him.

Therefore, Jesus came. Nothing about the, it's fascinating.

Nothing about the trip. Nothing about the discussion. So many times there are these big gaps.

And we are left to ponder, if we take the time to ponder, what was the conversation like?

Was there any conversation at all? How were these disciples being changed as they see the familiar territory there around Jerusalem, knowing what they might be experiencing?

What they had just escaped, and now what they're walking right back into. And how they simply have to trust

Jesus. There's a lot we can learn from these things. But when Jesus comes, well, they find that he's already four days in the tomb.

Now, why are we told this? Well, don't worry. I'm not going to go Harold camping on you. Some of you are going, you're going camping with a guy named

Harold? Completely lost me there. That's okay. I'm not going to get numerological on you or anything like that.

But there was a reason. Almost all commentators point out that in the rabbinic literature that, again, what's called the

Mishnah was compiled about 250 years after this. Some of it goes back specifically to the days of Jesus.

Some of it does not. There's really good evidence that this particular section is definitely contemporaneous with the days of Christ.

And there is mentioned in the rabbinic writings of this time period, the idea that the spirit hovers around the body and continuously comes back to the place of burial for three days after death, hoping to reenter the body until the spirit sees the change in the look of the body.

In other words, the decay process setting in. And then the spirit leaves. So the spirit's not going to be there on the fourth day.

And so there is this idea that by having these events take place in that context, you have a further demonstration of the reality of the miracle that Jesus is going to work.

But you also have, just simply on a simple biological level, the explanation of a statement that is going to be made to Jesus later on.

When he comes to the tomb, he's going to say, roll the stone away. And this was a time period when people were much more exposed to death than you and I are.

We are absolutely, I mean, other than the fake stuff we see in movies, we are protected from seeing what many people in the world see rather regularly.

But seeing death and seeing dead bodies and knowing something about dead bodies.

And when Jesus says, roll the stone away, even the scriptures themselves record for us,

Lord, in the beautiful poetic language of the King James, he stinketh. Recognition of the decay and that repulsive process that takes place and will take place unless the

Lord does something supernatural in the sense of his return for every single one of us.

I sometimes wonder how many people would be so full of pride and arrogance about their physical bodies if we had to more often contemplate the end of every physical body, including our own.

There are many people in the world that face that all the time. And it may have something to do with the foolishness of Westerners in our refusal to ponder death and judgment afterwards, that we never see it.

We hide it away. The point is that Jesus comes and finds that Lazarus has already been buried and has been buried for a period of time.

And I'm not going to go into all the discussions that many of the commentaries would go into, again, as to where Jesus was, how long it would have taken to travel.

Why hadn't messengers come to announce to Jesus the death of Lazarus?

Only the sickness of Lazarus. Jesus knows about the death of Lazarus supernaturally. There's all sorts of speculation about these things in regards to the commentary on the text.

But the point is that the mourning process was well underway.

And we are told that Bethany was nigh unto, near unto Jerusalem. And in fact, when you do the conversions for the distance in verse 18, it is approximately 1 .72

miles, approximately. That's not a long distance.

And so when we are told that many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary in order, they might console them.

They might weep with them. They might mourn with them concerning their brother, given this was still a two -mile walk.

We have an indication here, and we also have an indication later on in the anointing of Jesus by one of these sisters, that these were not lower class.

These are not part of the lower class of the Jewish people. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus seem to have substance.

They seem to have a decent home. They seem to be well known in the community. And unlike today, where we attend a funeral service, we have some refreshments afterwards, and that's pretty much it.

There was a lengthy period of mourning in the ancient world. And that period of mourning was already well underway at this time, when

Jesus finally comes upon the scene. This is all purposeful.

And as we conclude our consideration this morning, we will continue this evening.

We definitely go against the trends in the United States today.

We actually have two services on Sunday. What an amazing thing that is. When we come back this evening, we will continue right at this point with the initial encounter between Jesus and Mary and Martha and the conversation that takes place.

But once again, I draw your attention to the fact there's a pretty rough four days for Mary and Martha.

It had been a pretty rough period for Lazarus before that. And yet,

God had a purpose. God had a purpose. We get to, in this one instance, see what it was.

But my friends, we have to recognize that for every instance where we get to know what the outcome was, we get to know what the purpose was,

God asks us to trust him for the other 99 instances where we don't get to have that knowledge.

We don't get to have that knowledge. You may be going through something like that right now.

You may be called in this coming week to go through something like that. You may be able to look back in your life upon those times at the deathbed, at the hospital, at the doctor's office, wherever it might be.

And you don't know the purpose. As Jesus is walking toward Jerusalem, Mary and Martha are weeping.

Their hearts are broken. They may even feel abandoned by God.

But they haven't been. They haven't been. And you might say, well, why couldn't

God have sent down an angel to let them know what was going to happen or something? And we all know it is that time we spend in the dark.

In the darkness, being called upon to trust. It's that time that changes us.

Even in those times where we do get to see the purpose, it's still the patience we had before finding out what the purpose was that has the greatest sanctifying effect upon us.

And so let us learn. Let us learn from what the scriptures teaches here in John chapter 11.

To trust, to believe. Jesus is going to say, I am the resurrection and the life.

Beautiful words we've all heard at pretty much every funeral we've ever gone to. But what do they mean when they were spoken?

And if we can enter into understanding what that situation was, can they become even more meaningful to us?

Well, Lord willing, that's something we'll find out this evening. Let's close the word of prayer.

Our great heavenly Father, as we consider your word, once again, we thank you. Not only that you have preserved it for us, that you caused it to be written for our edification and for our encouragement.

But here especially, as we have a situation where you orchestrated these events so that your disciples, and therefore through them, us, here, 2 ,000 years later, might grow in faith, might learn to trust you ever more.

Lord, here we are. We want to grow in our faith. We recognize how weak our faith so often is.

May you by your spirit minister within our hearts. May you cause us to trust our

Lord and Savior and your purposes in our lives more and more because you are worthy of our faith, our trust, our confidence.

Make us more like our Lord and Savior who trusted perfectly in his life upon this earth. That is our prayer.