Obedient in Suffering, Part 2 (Hebrews 5:7-8)

The Son’s Suffering and the Meaning of Hebrews 5:7-9

Is he able to sympathize with us? He is because of his suffering in verse seven. And he learned obedience in verse eight. And by that suffering and obedience, he was made perfect in verse nine. So verse seven addresses the subject of his suffering and his affliction.

Verse eight, the obedience that he rendered in the midst of that suffering and affliction. And then verse nine, the perfection that came as a result of his suffering and the obedience that he learned in the midst of that suffering.

So we've talked about the suffering today. We're just talking about obedience. And there is this curious phrase that he learned obedience. What does it mean that he learned obedience? And that's not the only kind of weird or curious phrase here.

What does it mean that he became perfect or was made perfect? How does one who is the essence of perfection, moral, personal deity perfection, how was he made perfect? If we're going to affirm the deity of Christ and his sinlessness, in what way was he made perfect?

We will deal with that next time and not next week, but next time. As I mentioned, I won't be here next week. But today we're looking at what does it mean that he learned obedience? How does the Lord Jesus Christ learn obedience?

Notice, first of all, that he says in verse seven, sorry, verse eight, that although he was a son, he learned obedience. That word although kind of serves the purpose of highlighting the seeming incongruity of all that we have studied in connection with his suffering.

In other words, we have thought of the Lord Jesus Christ in terms of his glory and his majesty and the perfection of his person, that he is the son. And with that goes all that is true of divinity. Because he is the son of the heavenly father, he is not simply some sort of quasi deity.

Instead, he shares fully all of the nature and all of the essence and the being of that which is God. Being separate in person, he shares fully the divine nature. He is the son. And although it seems incongruous with this, but although he was that son, he was not exempt from suffering.

And Hebrews constantly presents us with these two perspectives of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the author seems to go back and forth between two of these, mixing them together as we go through the book of Hebrews.

And here are the two pictures of the Lord Jesus Christ. On the one hand, he is infinite in his perfections. He is glorious. He is seated at the father's right hand. He is the divine son with all of the rights and the essence and the nature and substance of what it means to be God, fully divine in every way.

And yet at the same time, this humble picture of the Lord Jesus Christ that he suffered. And although he was a son, he still suffered. Do you see how those two don't seem to go together in our heads? But to the believing heart and to the believing mind, that truth is most glorious.

We rejoice in that, that our God became a man and suffered in our stead. That makes the believing heart rejoice. It fills us with affection. And when we contemplate the glory of his nature and the reality of his suffering side by side, it makes his suffering all that much more remarkable.

It makes it all that much more stunning, and it just has to thrill our hearts. The unbeliever says, how can you believe that God suffered anything? The unbeliever thinks this is foolishness and stupidity and nonsense, but the believing heart rejoices at the thought that the majestic one, the Holy One of Israel, Yahweh the Lord, would take upon himself human flesh, become fully man and fully God, and suffer in our stead.

The believing heart rejoices at that. And you can contrast the picture of the Lord Jesus Christ suffering here with what we have in Hebrews 1. Do you remember back, it was a long time ago, but in Hebrews 1, those first few verses that filled out who the Lord Jesus Christ was, making the case that he is greater than the angels, that he is the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of God's nature.

He is the creator of all things, the sustainer of all things. He holds everything together by the word of his power. He is seated at the Father's right hand, and he has inherited a better name than all of the angels.

He is greater in majesty, greater in glory, greater in person, greater in nature and in being and in essence and in power, greater in every way than all of the angelic hosts. That's chapter 1. He has inherited a greater name than all of the angels.

There is no higher being than this one whom we refer to as the Son. That's the case of chapter 1. Then we flip the page to chapter 2. He was for a little while made lower than the angels. He tasted death for everyone.

Remember those phrases? He partook of flesh and blood. And then look at verse 7. In the days of his flesh, he offered up prayers, supplications with loud crying and tears. Who did this? The Son did this.

See, those are the two pictures of the Lord Jesus Christ all the way through the book of Hebrews. It's magnificent. It is the Son, the divine one, who offered up prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears.

Those two things we don't typically put together, but they must go together if we are to understand the Lord Jesus Christ rightly. And so the word although there is intended to remind us of this contrast.

Although he was a son, he was not exempt from suffering. Now think about that for just a moment. Although he was the Son of God, that did not exempt him from suffering. And I would ask you this, if being that divine Son did not exempt him from suffering, do you expect that you will be exempt from suffering?

Ought you to think that your course is going to be an easy and rosy one? Do you think it will be? You and I cannot fathom and comprehend the ineffable and profound and infinite love and fellowship that existed within and between the persons of the Trinity from eternity past.

That the Father loved the Son with a singular and unique love that he reserves only for his Son. And the Son loves the Father and submitted to the Father and enjoys fellowship and communion with the Father.

A love and a fellowship between the persons of the Trinity that we cannot comprehend or understand. And although that was true, the Son was not exempt from suffering. And if the Son is not going to be exempt from suffering, then you and I cannot think that our paths will be exempt from suffering.

If God did not withhold that from the Lord Jesus Christ for his glory and our good, he will not withhold from us any affliction or suffering that is for his glory and our good. If he didn't do it for Christ, he's certainly not going to do it for you and I.

Now, I know that sounds kind of terrorizing or terrifying at that prospect, but I would just remind you that there is no such thing as pointless suffering. There's no such thing as pointless suffering.

And the sufferings that God has appointed for us, and I'm choosing my language carefully, the sufferings that God brings to us, causes in our life and appoints for us that he has ordained for us to endure are always for his glory and for our good.

And ultimately for our glory and our good, as we share his glory with him, we will be glorified and enjoy his glory. And the path to that is through suffering. And though God may keep us from a multitude and a host of afflictions, which we righteously and justly deserve in this life, he will only appoint for us that which is for his glory and for our good.

We can have that confidence. Now, what does it mean that he learned obedience? Although he was a son, he learned obedience through the things that he suffered. If we affirm that the Lord Jesus Christ is the eternal God, Yahweh, in human flesh, if we're going to affirm that, and that is right and that is true Christian orthodoxy, that he shared fully the essence and the nature of God, that the man Christ Jesus who walked among us was at the same time limited in his knowledge as a man, but infinite in his knowledge as God, in what way can we say that he learned obedience?

What does it mean that he learned obedience? How does God learn anything? In fact, it is heresy to suggest that God learns anything, isn't it? So if Jesus is God, what does it mean that he learned obedience?

In what way did he learn obedience? And that's a challenging question. To answer that, we're going to have to rule out a couple of possibilities of what this might mean. Here's what it might mean. Well, no, that would be the wrong way of saying it.

It doesn't mean this. It can't not mean this and might mean this at the same time. So let's handle it that way. Here are two things that we know that it does not or cannot mean, two suggestions. The first is that it cannot mean that he learned obedience in the sense that he came to know that obedience was his duty, and it was something that was required by God.

This would be to learn something in a material sense, if you're technical in that way. It cannot mean that he learned obedience in the sense that he came to know what obedience was and that it was required by God.

See, if that's what the passage means, then it means that in his suffering, the Lord Jesus had a moment when he said, oh, so that's what obedience is. That's what it means. I get it now. Now I understand what obedience is in the midst of as if he didn't know that before, and he had to be trained or learned in some way the nature of obedience and the requirement of obedience before God.

He could never have learned it in that way. This is how David describes it in Psalm 119 verse 67. Actually, I said David, but it's just the psalmist because we don't know who wrote Psalm 119. So Psalm 119 verse 67, the psalmist says, before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your word.

What is the psalmist describing? The affliction and suffering came his way because he was disobedient. Before I was afflicted, I went astray. I leaned away or strayed from your commandments, but then affliction and suffering came, and it brought me back to the right path, and I learned obedience, and I learned to keep your word because of the affliction that came.

That might be appropriate and true to speak of the psalmist or any other person in Scripture, but the Lord Jesus Christ, it can never describe the Lord Jesus Christ because there was never a time when he went astray and was afflicted that brought him back to being a keeper and obeyer of God's law.

So it doesn't mean, and it cannot mean obedience in that sense. Second, it cannot mean that he learned to obey because this would be how we learn obedience. We learn to obey. And if you have a child, if you have children, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

This is how most of us learn that we need to obey authority. If you have a child, what is the first lesson you need to teach your child? To obey. What is the second lesson you need to teach your child?

To obey. Now, having learned those two lessons, you can finally teach them the third lesson, which is to obey. And those three lessons, you teach them all the way through their entire lives until they're about 18, and then you tell them how to balance a checkbook and kick them out of your house.

But for the entire time that you have them under your tutelage, you're teaching them to obey. That's the first, second, and third, and every lesson that all of us need to learn to obey. It cannot mean that the Lord Jesus Christ learned to obey in that sense because then it would mean that there was a time when He was disobedient and had to be taught how to obey.

But Scripture affirms that He is sinless in everything. He knew no sin. He did no sin. He committed no iniquity, nor was any guile found in His mouth. He was utterly and completely morally perfect for His entire life.

So, it does not mean that, that He had to learn to obey because that would suggest there was a time when He was disobedient. So, what then does it mean? It simply means that He learned obedience in the sense that He learned it experientially.

He learned it experientially. Now, the Son, the eternal Son, before He came to this earth, submitted Himself to the will of the Father and agreed to come down here and take upon Himself humanity, and then to die on a cross to redeem those whom the Father has chosen.

That was the agreement that was made, and the plan of salvation worked out amongst the persons of the Trinity, that the Father had elected a people, the Son would die in their stead, and the Holy Spirit would regenerate them.

That was the Trinitarian plan of redemption. The Son submitted to the Father and obeyed the will of the Father, even in coming down here. And Jesus recognized two things when He walked the face of this planet.

He spoke of these two things often in the Gospel of John, that He was sent and that He came quite voluntarily. He came here being sent by the Father, but His act of coming here was not against His will.

It was a willing act of obedience to the will of the Father who wanted Him to come. And so He came, and that act of obedience even took place before He was even born of a virgin in Bethlehem. He knew that act of obedience.

But what the Son, the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ, did not know by experience was what it meant to obey the Father in the face of and in the midst of incredible suffering. There is a type or a degree of obedience that can only be learned by experience in the fires of affliction.

That is the type of obedience that He learned by experiencing it. It's not that He didn't know what it was. It is that He had not learned that obedience by experiencing that obedience. Let me give you an illustration of this.

You might say that you want to learn to fly. You want to learn to fly airplanes. So you can get a manual on what it means to fly an airplane, and you can read all up about it. You can read all of the technical stuff about how airplanes are lifted up into the sky, and how the air pressure does this or that, and what the wings do, and you can learn when the landing gear should go up and go down.

You can read all of that. You can read about the instrument panel, and you can read about how to read them, and what they do, and why they work the way that they do, and which dials are important, and which dials are not so important, and what you're supposed to do before you take off, and while you're in the air, and then before you land, and then after you land.

You can learn all of that. You can learn about the FAA requirements, and policies, and procedures, and all the laws for landing an aircraft, and maintaining an aircraft, and all that. You can learn the FCC requirements for talking on the radio, and when it's appropriate, and what you say, and all the protocols.

You can learn all of that by reading books. And one says you can get to with all of that and say, I have learned to fly. Right? No. Because if the pilot that I'm going to see this afternoon, when I get on a plane to leave this afternoon, if that's what he said to me, this is my first time, I have read all about this.

I would not for a moment think that he had actually learned to fly. Because until you sit in the cockpit, and you go through the pre-flight checklist, and you put your hands on the control wheel stick, whatever it is, and you hit the throttle, and you flip the flappers, and you flap the flippers, and you do all of the stuff that's necessary for that, and you taxi out onto the runway, and you take off, and you fly for a while, and then you land, and then you wrap it all off, and hit the off switch.

Until you have done that, you really have not learned to fly in an experiential sense. You can learn about flying, and you can learn to fly theoretically in a theoretical sense that all of the knowledge is there, but until you have endured it, you have not learned it in the sense of experiencing it.

Right? You can know what turbulence is at 25 ,000 feet, but until you are strapped into a cheaply assembled collection of non-flying parts at 25 ,000 feet, and you're shaken about like a rag doll while everybody around you screams, and your coffee falls into your lap, and you feel like you're going to fall out of the sky from 25 ,000 feet, you have really not learned turbulence in the sense that you have experienced it.

In that way, the Lord Jesus Christ learned obedience. He knew what obedience was. He had obeyed all of His life, but He learned by experience what obeying the will of the Father meant in the midst of His suffering.

He learned a type and an extent and a nature of obedience that cost Him everything, cost Him His life, and in that affliction and in that suffering, He learned experientially what it means to obey. So now He knows it not just in a theoretical sense, but in an experiential sense.

So He learned in the midst of the suffering the cost of obedience, and the struggle of obedience, and the temptation to disobey and to take an easier route. And all of His life, He learned in various stages and at various times what it meant to obey God and to experience that obedience and to learn it in experiential sense all the way through His life.

So early in His life, He understood what it meant to obey the will of the Father and have His family mock Him and think He is crazy. He learned in an experiential sense what it meant to obey the Father and have the Pharisees turn against Him, and the Sadducees and the scribes threatened Him and His life.

He learned what obedience meant in that. All the way through His life at every turn and every opportunity to do righteousness and to obey the will of the Father, He learned by experience what that would cost Him and what that was like in all of life's various situations.

So that we can honestly today say that He has been tempted in all points as we are, yet He is without sin. Because at every point and at every turn, every opportunity, He obeyed and He learned by experience what that obedience would cost Him until there was that one, I wouldn't even call it the final, but that one penultimate example, that climactic example of His obedience in the garden when He said, not my will, but yours be done.

And that cost Him everything. And in His experience of that obedience, He learned what it means to obey and have it cost Him everything. That is what it means that He learned obedience. Philippians 2 .8 says, being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

That was the act of obedience. It cost Him everything. It was a death on the cross. And now He knows what it means as a man to experience obedience, to be obedient, even in the face of unspeakable suffering and of an infinite and complete and total cost.

He knows the experience of suffering. He knows the experience of obeying in the midst of suffering. He knows the cost of that obedience. He knows the suffering that can come as a result of obedience, and He obeyed anyway.

Obedience, Suffering, and the Cost of Following Christ

Now, let's take this back to the original readers of this letter and to our context and say, what does this tell us then about the Lord Jesus Christ? And here are a couple of things. First, obedience can be costly.

Obedience can be costly. There is nothing in Scripture that promises that if you are obedient, that you will not pay a cost. Nothing. Not a word. You can live an entirely obedient life to the will of the Father, and if that is the case, I can almost guarantee you it will cost you something.

Because there's nothing in Scripture that says, if I am obedient and I have God's favor, I will never experience any kind of affliction or suffering. There is no such promise. We're promised nothing like that in Scripture.

In fact, the promise is the opposite. It is through many trials and tribulations that we enter the kingdom of God, that those who live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution, that obedience will cost us something.

Obedience can be costly, and it can be very costly. Often, we think in the exact opposite terms. We think that if we're going through a difficult time of trials and tribulations and suffering and affliction, that that must be an indication of God's disfavor with us, that God must in some way be angry or upset with us because of something that we have done, that we're now going through and enduring all of this.

And we have a hard time thinking that God's unmitigated and eternal and loving favor can be upon us, and we can still be enduring suffering and affliction. We tend to think that if everything is going well, that that's an example of God's favor.

And if everything is going poorly for us, and we're suffering affliction, that is an example of God's disfavor, and that is bad theology. I can have upon me, and you can have upon you the favor and the blessing and the smile of God, all the while you are going through unspeakable suffering and affliction.

And we have to think of our obedience in those terms, that obedience can be costly, and we must be willing, and we must be ready and prepared to face that affliction and to pay the penalty, or to pay the cost, we should say, the cost of our obedience, because obedience can and sometimes is very costly.

Second, suffering is a good teacher. If the Lord Jesus Christ learned obedience through the things which He suffered, do you think you and I might have some things to learn through suffering? If He can learn something, you think there's something for us to learn?

All kinds of things for us to learn. Suffering can be a very good teacher. We can be trained in obedience. We can learn the cost of obedience. We can learn the value of obedience. We can learn, as we've said from this pulpit before, that obedience is its own reward.

We can learn that. We can learn through our suffering, holiness, patience, long-suffering, faithfulness, endurance, obedience, compassion, sympathy. We can learn of God's ability to comfort us, of His ability to draw us near to Himself, what it means to trust Him fully in the midst of suffering.

Suffering and affliction can teach us the value of a heavenly mindset, of mortifying sin, of fixing our hope upon Christ. It can teach us about the curse of sin upon this creation, about the temporary and fleeting nature of all of life, of the vanity of our comforts and our conveniences, our life and our health, and even the fleeting joys of this life.

All of that can be learned through affliction and suffering. In fact, we learn more from 10 minutes of affliction and suffering than we would learn about God in a lifetime full of comforts and conveniences and ease.

Suffering is a great teacher. It teaches us great things about ourselves, about life, about God, about truth, about reality, about our hope of heaven. The temptation for us as fallen beings is to avoid suffering at all costs.

Have you noticed this about yourself? We want to avoid suffering at all costs. And unfortunately for us, sometimes the cost of that is disobedience. And we are willing at times to disobey when the cost is great.

And we choose instead of obedience, which we know is going to cost us, we choose disobedience instead because that is the easier route. We can avoid suffering by disobedience. And we must learn that obedience is its own reward.

We are called to be obedient. The Lord Jesus Christ in the garden was obedient even though He knew what it would cost Him. And He said, not my will, but yours be done. He learned obedience in experiential sense through the things that He suffered.

And the third thing is our high priest knows this obedience. If you're faced with something in your life where you think, you know, if I obey the Lord in this, if I do this, it's going to cost me. This could be difficult.

This could result in my suffering, my afflictions, trials and tribulations. That's right. It might very well, might cost you those things. Your high priest knows exactly what obedience costs. And you've not, in the words of the author of Hebrews, you've not yet resisted sin to the point of shedding blood.

Right? So we have a high priest in the heavens who sits at the Father's right hand, who knows fully and perfectly because he has experienced it himself, exactly what perfect obedience can cost someone.

And so we can go to Him knowing that our high priest is merciful and compassionate, and He is able to deliver us. And we can go to Him and tell Him about our suffering and our affliction, knowing full well that He knows it full well.

Because in that sense, He learned it. He doesn't know the cost of obedience simply in a theoretical sense. He knows the cost of obedience because He has experienced the cost of obedience. So He knows and He learned obedience in that way.

Now, this would be the encouragement to the original readers of the book of Hebrews. He said that they had walked away from the temple sacrifices and the feasts and the festivals and all the old covenant stuff, and they had embraced fully Jesus Christ, and now it was costing them something.

Because now their parents and their families and their friends and everybody who was still tied up with the old covenant system, they were mocking them. And they had, in some cases, we find out in chapter 10, they had suffered the loss and the seizure of their property.

They had been put outside the camp and excommunicated from the synagogue. They faced financial costs and social costs and cultural costs because of their obedience to Jesus Christ. And now the author of Hebrews comes along and says, do you think that holding fast to the assurance that you have of your hope in Christ firm into the end is not going to cost you?

It might. Because the original audience that's reading this had a choice. We could go back to all of this and it would be easier, much easier than facing the mockery and the seizure of our property and the soft and persecution that they were experiencing, as well as the hard persecution that was coming.

They could go back and it would be much easier, but that would be an act of disobedience. And so would they press on in full assurance of faith all the way to the very end, or would they be like the disobedient generation in the wilderness who came right up to the edge of resting Christ and then turned and walked away?

Those were their two options, disobey and it will be easier, or press on in full assurance of faith all the way to the very end, but it might cost you, and it might cost you your very life. It might cost you of resisting sin all the way to the point of shedding blood.

It might cost you all the way, not just mockery, but being put outside the camp and maybe even persecuted and killed for your faith. Those were their two options. And what is the author of Hebrews saying?

You have a high priest who learned obedience and the things that he suffered, he knows full well what the cost of obedience is, and he obeyed all the way to the very end. Do likewise. Press on in full assurance of faith all the way to the very end, knowing that your high priest who sits at the Father's right hand has done likewise, and he knows exactly what you're going through.

There's an aspect of the obedience of Christ that we've not yet talked about because up until this point, we've been talking about what theologians refer to as his passive obedience. That is, that he went to the cross in a passive sense, that this affliction suffering came upon him, and he suffered in our stead and paid the penalty for our sin through his death upon the cross.

That's the passive obedience, what's typically referred to as the passive obedience of Christ. There's another aspect of Christ's obedience, which is also just as necessary for our salvation, and it is what we refer to as his active obedience.

And sometimes a hard and fast line is drawn between those two things, and they're sort of split up in a very unfortunate way, but both of these things describe the obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ, that yes, in a passive sense, he did obey the Father and die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, but in a very active sense, he obeyed the Father through his entire life in all of the keeping of the law.

And that's what the active obedience of Jesus Christ speaks of, is that those acts of obedience that he gave in fulfilling all of the demands of the law on behalf of his people. Because in order to stand before God in eternity and for my salvation, I needed two things.

I needed to have all of my sins forgiven. I needed to have the penalty, the debt that I owed because of my iniquity, my violating of the law of God, I had to have that penalty paid. And the cost of that for me was an eternity in hell.

And I needed to have that debt removed from me, taken away, out of the way so that they're hung over me no more, the curse of God and the wrath of God for my sin. I needed that taken care of. But if the Lord Jesus Christ, when he came, had only died on the cross in order to pay my penalty, then my penalty would be paid and I would have no penal demands of the law upon me, but neither would I have anything to commend me before God.

I would have all of my sins forgiven, but I would not be righteous. I would be neutral. I might not have a sin debt hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, but neither would I be righteous and have anything to commend me before God.

Any way in which I could stand before the Father and receive his favor and his blessing because he sees me as righteous, I needed forgiveness and I needed righteousness. The death upon the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ in his obedience in that way paid the sin debt for me.

His acts of obedience to the law of God in every way purchased my righteousness, made me righteous. So there is an imputation of two things going on in our faith. It is the imputing of my sin to Christ because he paid the debt.

So my debt is imputed to his account and all of his positive righteousness is imputed to my account so that the Father sees me and you, if you're in Christ, not just as forgiven, but as righteous. Understand the difference between just forgiven and righteous because the law said you must obey your parents always and in every way and I have not done that.

I have not done that. The law said you must tell the truth always and at all times and there must be no sin and no guile and no wickedness upon your lips. That was the demand of the law and I have not done that.

And the law said I am to love my neighbor as myself always and forever and I have not done that. And that I am to love the Lord my God with all my heart, my soul, my mind, and my strength and I have not done that.

Those were the demands of the law and my not meeting the demands of the law gave me my sin debt, which the death of Christ takes away. But those demands of the law must be met on my behalf. I must be able to present a case before the Father that says I have obeyed my parents and I have loved my neighbor as myself and I have always told the truth and I have never sinned and I have righteously and perfectly kept the demands of the law in every way.

I've obeyed the Sabbath and loved the Lord my God with all my heart, my soul, mind, mind, and strength for my entire life, never failing to do so. That was the case that I needed to have presented before the Father.

Jesus Christ in obeying the law gave me that righteousness and you that righteousness if you're in Christ. So now you can stand before the Father and He sees you as if you have obeyed your parents fully and you have loved your neighbor as yourself and you have kept all the requirements of the law and you have only spoken truth and you have been pure in thought, word, and deed for your entire life.

Those are the righteous demands of the law that have been met so that you can be not just forgiven of your sin debt but have all of the acts of Jesus Christ's obedience to the law of God for His whole life imputed to your account.

That's what happens in salvation. So that at the moment of faith in Jesus Christ all of my sin is taken out of the way because He paid it and all of His righteousness becomes mine. So that we can stand before the Father not in our own righteousness we have none but in the righteousness of another.

A righteousness that we could not earn and did not earn and we cannot blemish in any way and we cannot lose in any way because it is a righteousness earned by another. It is a righteousness paid for by another.

It is a righteousness that is imputed to us on the basis of faith. I can't improve that righteousness. I can't diminish that righteousness. I can't change that righteousness. I can't cloud or dilute or pollute that righteousness at all because it's not mine.

It's His and it is credited to our account. That is what we remember as we reflect upon the death, the burial, and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ at His table. That in His obedience and His act on the cross He has paid the penalty for our sin but also given us an infinite, perfect, and unblemished righteousness.

That is salvation. So as we reflect upon the Lord Jesus Christ and that today we would begin first by bowing our heads and confessing our sin and acknowledging this great gift that God has given to us in His Son.

A righteousness that is not ours, not only the forgiveness of our sins but also a righteousness that belongs to Christ and Christ alone. We'll confess our sin together and then we'll observe the Lord's table.

Let's pray.