Who were the Puritans - Guest Speaker: Don Kistler

Kootenai Church

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All right, let's open with a word of prayer. Our gracious God, we thank you for the blessing of another

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Lord's day that we can gather together as your people to rejoice together, to fellowship, to worship, and to hear your word.

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We pray now that you would open our hearts and our minds and keep us attentive to our guest speaker. We pray that you would be glorified through what is taught here and that you would give us understanding in exactly who the

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Puritans were and what their impact has been upon us in our lives today. We ask this in Christ's name, amen. All right, our guest speaker is

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Dawn Kistler. Dawn is the founder of Northampton Press, and I'm gonna give the same introduction for the worship service today, but between Soli Deo Gloria publications and Northampton Press, he's published over 400

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Puritan titles over the course of his ministry career. So with that, Mr.

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Kistler, will you please come teach us? Well, let's deal with the monkey in the room first of all about Puritanism.

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Actually, it's not a monkey, it's an elephant. What about, how can you like those people?

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They killed innocent people in Salem, Massachusetts. Let's talk about that.

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I'll tell you a little story. I used to take my daughter, Michelle, on a vacation, just her and I.

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And the reason it was just her and I was she did not like sharing my attention with mom. So Michelle and I would take a week's vacation every summer, and this particular summer, we went to the

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Northeast. We went to Concord, Massachusetts, to Lexington where the

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Buckman Tavern was. And some interesting historical stuff.

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They had a bar there. This is where the Minutemen used to meet and plan their activities.

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And there was a bar there, and they didn't have any such thing as checking

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IDs for liquor. But you had to be able to put your chin on the bar. And Michelle was only 11 at the time, and she said, dad,

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I could do that. And she called the guy on it and says, anybody could put their chin on the bar.

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She goes, you don't realize that in 1776, the average adult male was five foot four.

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Now, can you imagine Jonathan Edwards at six feet two towering over his pulpit, preaching to those people down below?

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I was five foot four. See, I could have been an NFL lineman back then. I'm five nine.

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And then we went to Plymouth Plantation near Plymouth Rock.

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Very, very interesting, at least when we were there run by believers. And we went into a home there, and the lady, they do it as character actors.

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They dress like it, they talk like it. And one man over his mantle had a bunch of Puritan books.

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Now, there were copies, makeups, but I could see the title and one was by Henry Ainsworth.

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I said, I see you have Mr. Ainsworth. He said, do you know him? I said, well, not personally, but I have his book.

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He says, are you a Calvinist? I said, yes. Oh, pity. I said, why is that?

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I would never want to belong to a church that had a man's name after it.

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They named it after a man. I said, are you a member of the Church of England? He goes, yes.

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Never want to belong to a church that named itself after a country. You know, he was fixing breakfast, and they had mueslicks.

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If you don't know, it was like granola, kind of, and a couple other things. And my daughter Michelle said, where's the milk?

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And the lady said, for what? To put on the cereal. We never put milk on cereal, child.

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Well, what do you put on it? Or why wouldn't you put milk on it? Don't you know that when you consume a liquid, you adopt the properties of the animal that gave you the milk?

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She says, cows are very stubborn. And Michelle was 11. She goes, I guess you don't breastfeed your kids.

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Women are stubborn. Now, if dad had said that, he'd be in trouble, but an 11 -year -old can say that.

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And she said, what do you put on it? She goes, well, beer, of course. And Michelle says,

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I bet you never have any trouble getting the kids to come to breakfast. Well, we went to Salem, Massachusetts, and I always like to get the official tour guide's take on things.

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So we got on the tour bus, and we're driving down the street, and he stops, and he opens the door, and there's a woman there.

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And he says, this is Wanda, the official witch of Salem, Massachusetts. Say hi to Wanda, everybody.

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And everybody waved to Wanda the witch, and Michelle looks at me, said, you're not gonna say anything, are you?

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You don't think I'm gonna keep quiet during this, do you? So he takes off, and he says,

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I'm so glad we no longer live in a day like those hateful Puritans who murdered 16 innocent people.

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Michelle got up and moved across the aisle to another bench, and I said, which ones were the innocent ones?

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And he slammed on the brakes, and got him to turn around, who said that? He says, I did. What do you mean?

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Well, first of all, only 11 people died, not 16. So you've got five extras that you threw in to prove your point.

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Second, they were all tried by a jury of their peers and found guilty. So they didn't murder anybody.

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They executed them. And nobody seems to notice that for a hundred years before that in England, over a thousand witches were killed, and burned at the stake, and drowned and hung for being witches.

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And the reason is because the Bible says you do not allow a witch to live. And the

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Puritans believe the Bible, so they didn't allow a witch to live. So where were the innocent ones? He threw me off the bus.

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Sir, I'm going to ask you to leave. So, and then Michelle waited till the next stop to get off and come back.

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Didn't want to be seen with me. There was a group of college students from Gordon -Conwell

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College there that summer in Salem, reenacting the Salem witch trials.

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And they were using the actual transcripts. They weren't making it up, they used the actual transcripts.

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And afterwards, what they would do is get right up to the point of deliberation, and then they would poll the audience.

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How many of you think this woman should die? Of course, nobody did. Afterwards, I went up to the young man who was kind of in charge, and I said, what do you think?

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Guilty or not? He goes, every single one of them was guilty, based on the standards of the day. You know, and we're seeing this today.

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What's unfair is evaluating those people based on what we do today.

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They're wrong because we wouldn't do it. Well, who thinks like that? Well, people do. So just my take on the

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Salem witch trials and all that. By the way, it was the Puritans who put an end to it. Cotton Mather said this has gone to excess, and he led the charge, and they ended the whole thing.

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So if you blame the Puritans for starting it, you can blame the Puritans for ending it, too. Well, what is

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Puritanism? I know that Hillary Clinton has her own definition of it.

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It was basically a religious movement whose goal was the purity of the church. Nearly all those who were called

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Puritans were members of the Church of England, which they believed to be corrupt and increasingly like the

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Roman Catholic Church. A lot of this had to do with intermarriages, that the king would marry a

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Roman Catholic woman, and she would become queen, and then since the king of England was the head of the church, she would start to influence him, and he would adopt alien practices into the

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Church of England. One of the reasons the Westminster Confession starts off this way,

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Christ alone is head of the church, a direct response to the Church of England.

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So the word Puritan was originally a term of derision. It was sarcastic. They just adopted it as a bandage of honor.

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They were called precisionists because they believed it necessary to be precise in your doctrine, and in fact, one man said to John Rogers, sir, you are very precise in your preaching, and Rogers replied,

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I serve a very precise God. They were also called the disciplinariars because they believed in church discipline, or the godly preacher.

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They were basically church reformers and preachers. They felt the Church of England had got sufficiently broken away from the practices and superstitions of Rome, and in their minds, the

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Roman church was an apostate church because it denied and rejected the central doctrine of Christianity, justification by faith alone.

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Now, since the days of John Calvin, I quoted Calvin one time, and a teenager came up to me.

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She said, you mean Calvin and Hobbes, the cartoon? No. Since the days of John Calvin, the church has been defined by three things, the faithful preaching of the word, the right administration of the ordinances, and the proper exercise of church discipline, and when a church departs from any of those, she's forfeited the right to be called a true church, and when a church denies or rejects justification by faith alone, she's an apostate church, has no right to even be called a church.

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The word for church in the Old Testament, ecclesia, from which we get ecclesiastical, which is the called -out ones.

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We normally think of the Puritans as preachers, but they were Puritan lawyers, teachers and professors, farmers and merchants,

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Puritan housewives. J .I. Packer wrote a book called A Quest for Godliness.

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It's his book on the Puritans. It says their war cry was holiness to the

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Lord. They really believed that God required a holy life from those who professed to believe in and follow him.

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Just to give you an extreme example of the opposite, there was a country singer,

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I won't say his name now because he's on a lot of the Bill Gaither videos, and maybe he's been born again since then, but somebody questioned him afterwards, said, you call yourself a

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Christian, but you sing all these songs about getting drunk and sleeping around and drinking double and sleeping single or vice versa.

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And they said, how do you reconcile that? And his answer was, what's believing had got to do with living it?

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What? That's called antinomianism. Our focus is to look at the movement, in particular with the clergy.

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What is it they wanted to purify? And what was so wrong with the church of their day?

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Edmund Morgan wrote a book called Visible Saints, the History of a Puritan Idea. He said,

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Puritanism said much store by preaching, which they considered the principle means ordained by God for instructing people in the great truths revealed in scripture.

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A thorough understanding of those truths was necessary to salvation. And Puritans therefore resented the appointment of ministers who were unable or unfit to instruct their congregations by preaching.

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Get this, they thought a minister ought to be learned in the scriptures before he was a preacher. What a novel idea.

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In England, they said too many ministers substituted an affected eloquence for sound knowledge and indulged in fond fables to make their hearers laugh.

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Does that sound familiar? My daughter said, for most preachers today, it's a joke, three points and a poem.

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Or in ostentation of learning of their Latin, Greek, Hebrew tongue and their great readings of antiquities.

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Worse than those preachers were the ignorant and evil ministers incapable of preaching at all.

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This is my complaint about seminaries today. They're not turning out preachers. They're turning out facilitators, sharers, committee members, but they can't preach their way out of a bag.

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Why? Because people would rather have somebody hold their hand and tickle their ear, as Paul said, than somebody who will give them the whole counsel of God.

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In Essex County in 1586, the Puritans complained to Parliament about certain men.

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Mr. Levitt, parson of a certain town, a notorious swearer, a dicer, rolling dice, a card player, a hunter, a very careless person, he had a child by his maid.

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He was a minister of the gospel? Well, he was a minister, he wasn't a minister of the gospel. James Allen, sometimes a servant, unable to preach, he cannot render an account of his faith either in Latin or English, yet he has been a minister for four years.

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Now, I'm reading quotes, so don't get upset at the language. Mr. Phipp, sometimes a saddle -maker by occupation, convicted of whoredom, who kept a whore a long time in his house, a man far unable to preach.

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I was telling your pastor about a magazine I used to get, what a magazine, it was a biweekly printout called the

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National and International News and Religion Report, and in this one issue, they had an article by the leadership of the

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United Methodist Church, and it stated that after the third divorce, a minister ought to take a year off to work on his interpersonal skills.

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After the third? Mr. Atkins, three times presented for being drunk.

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Mr. Ampleforth had a child by his own sister. Mr. Goldenrig was convicted of fornication and of being a drunkard.

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Mr. Mason had a child by his maid, and all these men were ministers in churches.

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Well, with men like that for ministers, the Puritans saw that that church could never be anything but ignorant, degraded, and corrupt.

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Again, the term Puritan was a term of derision, but in 1640, a man named

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John Geeree, G -E -R -E -E, gave this description of a Puritan. The old

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English Puritan was such a one that honored God above all, and under God gave everyone his due.

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His first care was to serve God, and therein he did not do what was good in his own eyes, but in God's sight, making the rule of God the rule of his worship.

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Now, let me stop there. There were two forms of worship. There's the regulative principle and the normative principle.

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The regulative principle says, if it's not commanded by God in his word, we won't do it.

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The normative principle says this, if it's not forbidden by God in his own word, we will do it, or we can do it.

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So the Puritans stuck pretty much to the regulative principle. Back to this description.

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He highly esteemed order in the house of God, but would not under color of that submit to superstitious rites.

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He was much in prayer, and with it, he began and closed the day. He accounted religion and engagement to duty, believing that the best

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Christians should be the best husbands, the best wives, the best parents, the best children, the best masters, the best servants, the best subjects that the doctrine of God might be adorned, not blasphemed.

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He was a man of a tender heart, not only in regard of his own sin, but others misery, not counting mercy arbitrary, but a duty.

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His whole life, he accounted a warfare where Christ was his captain and his weapons were prayers and tears.

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How can anybody have a problem with a guy like that? Okay, you say, big deal.

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What do they have to do to us today? Well, we're indebted for either instituting, indebted to them, we're either instituting or defining these things.

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One, the doctrine of assurance. For the Roman Catholic Church, that's a damnable heresy.

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Second, our modern concepts of democracy. We are a democracy modeled after the

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Puritan Presbyterian Church, where you have courts of appeal, our modern concepts of the

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Christian family, expository preaching. This church is known because your pastor is a biblical expositor, a very good one.

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Practical theology, they call that casuistry. Richard Baxter wrote a book about that thick and that tall called

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A Christian Directory, which is the Bible applied to every area of life.

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For example, how much sorrow is too much sorrow? His answer was, sorrow is normal, grief is normal, until it reaches the point where it keeps you from holy duties.

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Okay, and then he'd lay out the scripture for that. Number six, extemporaneous prayers by the preacher during worship.

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Church of England, everything was read. Bible commentaries, which really the sermons put together on a book.

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Our modern concept of the church, pastoral counseling, spiritual depression.

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They wrote a lot about that. Church discipline, systematic theologies, and church decorum.

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I told you yesterday about why the pulpit is elevated, because we want people to look up to the minister and we want them to sit under the preaching of the word.

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You notice the cathedrals in England are in the shape of a cross. They were mainly preachers of God's word.

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Though a Puritan pastor had academic degree upon academic degree, he thought his highest calling was simply to be known as a, quote, preacher of God's word.

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They were expository preachers, as opposed to being, quote, witty or clever preachers, and they were meticulous and diligent preachers.

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William Gouge preached 33 years on the book of Hebrews. He's letting you off easy.

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Joseph Carroll preached 25 years on the book of Job. If you've ever seen a picture engraving of Joseph Carroll, he looks like a man who's been studying

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Job for 25 years. John Owen produced four folio volumes on Hebrews 7.

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Excuse me, on Hebrews. Arthur Hildersham printed 900 folio pages on the first seven verses of Psalm 51.

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A folio was a book about this tall and about, not necessarily that thick, but a tall book.

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This would be called a quarto book. There was a quote of the day, kind of a joke of the day, why do the

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Puritans preach so long? I mean, a two -hour sermon was not unheard of. The answer is they want to be around when the congregation wakes up again.

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You know why the morning service is at the time it is, 10 .30 or 11 o 'clock, somewhere in there for most places?

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Because the dairy farmers couldn't get there before that. And so they'd milk the cows, throw everybody in the wagon, not the cows, but all the family, and ride to the church.

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The church was usually on a hill because there were no street names. That's how you found it. You had to go up the hill, you could see it.

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And then they'd have lunch afterwards, and then they'd have a two o 'clock service in the afternoon so everybody could be home to milk the cows at five.

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My brother Dan and I understand this. We never could take a family vacation because the cows didn't take days off.

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So we had to take, if there was church camp, Dan went to first week, and I did all the chores, and then he'd come back, and he'd do all this, and I went to church camp.

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A Puritan sermon had three parts. One, the introduction to the topic with the scripture text.

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Secondly, the doctrine stated and explained, or opened, they would call it.

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And then the application of the doctrine to the congregation. Application was at least 30 to 50 % of the sermon.

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I had a complaint about a preacher I heard recently, and I said to him, your content was great.

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What am I supposed to do with it? Now, it becomes obvious how far we've come from that day when

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I'll anticipate your reaction to the following order of events from the daily routine of the

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Westminster Assembly. When they drew up the Confession of Faith in 1643.

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These men were called from all over England by Parliament to come from little teeny villages or big cathedrals, come together as a body, and come up with a confession of faith, a catechism, and an order of public worship.

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It took them six years, 1643 to 1649. Jim, you can just think of it this way, a six -year elders' meeting.

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First, Mr. Wilson gave a picked psalm, or selected verses of several psalms, agreeing to the time and occasion.

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Then Dr. Burgess prayed for an hour. After he had done, Mr. Whittaker preached among Isaiah 37 .3,

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this is a day of trouble. Then, having had another chosen psalm, again, they sang psalms, not hymns.

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And I've heard churches say, you know, it says psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

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I said, fine, where's the psalms? You're singing man -made songs, how about singing psalms that God wrote?

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At least you know you're not singing any error. And I seriously doubt when the

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Bible was written, spiritual songs meant things like kumbaya, back to this.

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Then, having had another chosen psalm, Mr. Goodwin prayed. And after he had done,

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Mr. Palmer preached upon Psalm 25 .12. After this sermon, we had another psalm, and Dr.

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Stanton prayed for an hour. And with another psalm, and a prayer of Dr. Twiss, and a collection for the soldiers, we adjourned till tomorrow morning.

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Didn't get any business done. That's why it took six years. But it wasn't wasted time either.

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Now, we don't conclude that they were special because they prayed and preached for hours. Length does not necessarily mean anything.

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This is just to show one difference between their priorities and ours. A guy prays for more than five minutes and preaches for more than 30, there's mutiny.

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I preached one time in the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was a Lutheran church. And that's not necessarily important, other than that's what church it was.

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Service started at 11. I'm sitting on the platform. They had the songs, they had the hymns, the praise choruses, a children's sermon, an offering,

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I don't remember what else. And at 10 to 12, they introduced me.

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So I asked the guys, what time are they used to getting out? 12. What?

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Well, I got up and I said, I don't even have any introductions that are 10 minutes long.

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So I'm gonna make you a deal. I'm gonna preach till I'm done. You need to go, go. It can't be more fair than that.

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There were three things that mattered supremely to the Puritan preacher. First and foremost, the glory of God.

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Second, complete obedience and personal holiness. They weren't striving for a perfect church, but they were striving for a pure church.

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As John MacArthur has often said, if you find a perfect church, don't join it, you'll ruin it. The third thing was sound doctrine.

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Now, there were areas of disagreement among the Puritans, but they were peripheral for the most part. Church government.

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Some believed in Presbyterianism or elder rule, if you will, others in congregational or independency.

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I was telling Jim at lunch the other day about a small church when I lived in the town of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

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At the college I was working at had a speaker's bureau. And a lot of small churches in Western Pennsylvania, one pastor ran the whole show, and if he was sick or on vacation or had to be away, he didn't have anybody.

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So they'd call the college and, can you send us somebody to preach? Well, there was a church downtown

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Beaver Falls, a congregational church, and they were without a pastor because he had died.

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And so when I got there, I asked the man, what happened to the pastor? Well, the pastor would preach and then he would go back to his chair, fold his hands and bow his head and pray.

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And he wanted us to meditate on the sermon for five minutes. I think that's a pretty good idea.

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But just one Sunday, he finished preaching, he got up and sat in his chair, fold his hands, bowed his head and died.

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Now, there's no better way for a preacher to go than that. I mean, finish your sermon and the next thing you do is see

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Jesus. And I, well, I'm sorry to hear that.

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So I decided since this is a congregational church, I will try to break the ice and be friendly and get off to a good start.

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And so I started this way. You know, I'm very pleased to be preaching in a congregational church.

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Some of my heroes are congregationalists. Jonathan Edwards, Solomon Stoddard, Jeremiah Burroughs, Thomas Goodwin.

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I named four or five other ones. And then I did the sermon and went to the back and afterwards that deacon came up to me, he says, you know, we're without a pastor.

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Do you think any of those men would be interested in candidating? No, you can't make this stuff up better than it is.

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I got a call one day, the lady had a strong Texas accent. Hello, this is

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Wanda from Sweetwater, Texas. I'm calling from Reverend Billy Bob. Yes, ma 'am, what can

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I? Well, he just read your book, Thoughts on Family Worship by James W. Alexander.

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Yes. We'd like to schedule Reverend Alexander for our next family conference.

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Now on the back of the book, there's a engraving of James W. Alexander and his dates, 1798 to 1847.

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So I'm used to being punked. I kid a lot and I'm used to people trying to get at me.

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So I waited a minute and I says, well, ma 'am, James W. Alexander's been dead for 150 years.

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It was quiet for a minute. And then she said this. So shall I tell the Reverend he will not be available?

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Yeah, tell him that. So church government. Secondly, conformity or non -conformity to the practices of the

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Church of England. Basically, most of them said, no, we can't do what they're asking.

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Things like every time you say the King's name, you have to cross yourself. Every time you pray, you have to turn and face

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London. That's where the King lives. Every time you do this, you have to do that.

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And they said, that's not biblical. No, we're not gonna do that. So parliament passed the act of conformity, the act of uniformity, which said that you have to do all these things or you can't be a minister in the

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Church of England. And the Puritan said, God called us, you didn't. So in 1662, they had the

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Great Ejection where 2000 ministers, professors, and teachers were put out of their living.

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That's why a lot of them came to America, by the way. England didn't want them, so we got them. Well, one man in particular,

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Philip Henry. You familiar with Matthew Henry, the Bible commentator? This was his father. He, in so many ecclesiastical words, says, nuts to those guys.

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He kept right on preaching, as did many of the other Puritans. Then parliament passed another act in which it said, if you do not conform to the rules of the

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Church of England, you may not preach in front of your congregation. As I was saying, they're not in front of me, they're behind me.

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You may not preach from the podium. As I was saying, you may not preach in the building.

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So in Philip Henry's case, he went out, they opened the windows, congregation stayed inside, he preached through the window.

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Then they passed the Five Mile Act. You see what that is? You may not come within five miles of a school or a church.

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So they just started to house churches. But Philip Henry says, no, I'm not doing that.

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Well, one day in the middle of a sermon, the doors burst open and in walked troops, the king's troops.

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And one man walked right up to the pulpit where Philip Henry was, put a cocked pistol to his temple and said, keep preaching and I will blow your brains out.

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Now, at that point, I would have said, let's go to the offering. Philip Henry turned to the man and said, on whose authority?

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He says, by the authority of the King of England. Philip Henry says, the

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King of England didn't call me to preach. God called me to preach. I am a loyal subject of the king and I will die for my king, but I will not be damned for my king.

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And he went right back to preaching. And the guy didn't have a nerve, he uncocked his gun, the troops left.

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The issue of baptism, believers baptism versus infant baptism. But 99 % of the

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Puritans believed in infant baptism, but not baptismal regeneration. Two different things.

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They were scholars of the first ranked. Today, the theologians are largely sequestered in the seminaries.

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Then they were in the pulpits. Puritan pastor was a first rate theologian as well as a first rate preacher.

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They were also masters of logic and carried every doctrine to its logical extreme. When I was a member of Grace Community Church in the singles department, we had over 600 singles.

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And we couldn't hold Bible studies together. Obviously there was no house big enough for that. So we met in different suburbs.

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The one I was at was in Glendale, California. And they asked me to preach.

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We had four guys. So once every four weeks. And as you can imagine, my messages were largely doctrinal.

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Well, there was a young lady named Tricia there who didn't care much for all this doctrine.

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And in the middle of one of my talks, she slammed her fist down on the floor and she goes, why do we need all this doctrine?

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Why can't we just love Jesus? And again, I wasn't as sensitive and compassionate then as I am now.

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So I said, Tricia, why don't you tell me about the Jesus you love? What? You said you want to love

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Jesus. Tell me about him. Well, he's the son of God. Oh, no, no, no. Tricia, that's doctrine.

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I don't want any doctrine. Just tell me about Jesus. Well, he was born of the virgin Mary. Tricia, you keep giving me doctrine.

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I just want you to tell me about Jesus. He lived a sinless life. He died a substitute.

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Tricia, will you stop with all the doctrine? I just want to love Jesus. Finally, she realized that without doctrine, you don't know anything about Jesus to love.

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My favorite English Puritan is Christopher Love. We had several books by him on the book table. And they believed in the authority of scripture, hence the regulative principle.

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If there's no scriptural warrant for it, it's wrong, said the Puritans. Here's some examples.

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Now, this is not pointing any fingers. I don't know what you do here. I'd find out if I don't fall again.

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Worship choirs, special music, or congregational singing only, psalm singing or hymn singing.

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In Leviticus 10, God killed Nadab and Abihu for doing something he had not commanded them to do.

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They weren't doing something he had told them not to do, but they were doing something he hadn't told them to do.

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Jeremiah Burroughs wrote an entire book on that called Gospel Worship. I published it years ago.

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I think it's still in print, not by me anymore. But Burroughs was calling for worship that was

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God -centered. In fact, he says in the book, worship is for God. It's not for us.

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What? I've been to churches. Some of you older folks like me remember

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American Bandstand, Dick Clark, when it was in Philadelphia. And every issue, they'd have a panel of five teenagers listen to a brand -new song, and it was called

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Pick to Hit or something like that. And they'd listen to it, and then the teens would give it a number, like they do in Olympic diving.

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Okay, what do you think of this new song? Pretty cool, huh? What do you give it, Bob? I give it a six.

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It's snappy. It's easy to dance to. Okay, Susanna, what do you think?

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This was a nine. I can't wait to buy this record. That's what churches do today. Why'd you pick that song?

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Everybody likes it. Is it doctrinally sound? I don't know. Pastor Jim and I were laughing about how wrong it is for any congregation to sing that hymn,

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I Surrender All. It's a lie. You've never surrendered all in your entire life for one second.

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But try to get anybody to honestly sing, I surrender a little bit.

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So to summarize Puritanism, it was a life dedicated to the glory of God, regulated by the scriptures, and devoted to personal holiness.

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It's an ancient proverb that we become like the people we spend our time with. That's true.

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Let me suggest that these are men with whom we can spend a great deal of time and should.

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Now, they would say this, don't follow me, follow Christ. That's always what it should be.

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But that's an introduction to the Puritans. I hope that has whetted your appetite. Film at 11.

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And that you'll avail yourself of the many reasons today, not only by me, but Banner of Truth and others, that would let you get into the minds and hearts of these men.

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Jim, should we pray and then we'll be dismissed. Father, thank you for this time and for bringing us all together.

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May our hearts be encouraged, edified, and instructed. And may we go from this place more in love with Christ than ever before.