(John - Part 34): If the Son Shall Make You Free, Ye Shall Be Free Indeed — A.W. Tozer

The Son Makes His Disciples Free

Now, in the book of John, verses 31 to 44, 45,. Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

They answered him, We the Abrahams see, and were never in bondage to any man. How sayest thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin, and the servant abideth not in the house for ever, but the Son abideth ever.

If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. I know that ye are Abraham's seed, but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you. I spake that which I have seen with my father, and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.

They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God.

This did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication. We have one father, even God. Jesus said unto them, If God were your father, ye would love me, for I proceeded forth and came from God.

Neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and a boor not in the truth, for there is no truth in him.

When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is the liar and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. The Lord said here, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Christ the Savior Who Calls People to Freedom

And this was the world's Redeemer. Any name our Lord bears is a lovely name because we associate that name with him who bears it. But there are few names as sweet as the name that is the title of a great anthem that our choir sings, O Savior of the world.

Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, and here was that Savior of the world saying to certain people, soon to die, If ye become my disciples, ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

And he had said that he was the light of the world, and he was calling them to that light, and he was calling them to himself, the life of all mankind. He was calling them to hope and to deliverance and to freedom.

And now what was the reaction of these persons to the call of the Savior? They were insulted. Now the reason they were insulted by the call of Christ was that his assumptions reflected on them. He said, If you will come to me, I will make you free, and the assumption was they were not now free.

And he said, Ye shall be free indeed, and the assumption was that they were not indeed free. And so they were insulted. And this they could not and they would not endure. They would not let anybody insult them.

Humility as the Prerequisite for Learning

Now I point out to you, my friends, that these persons had lost the power to learn. As soon as we think we already know it, we've lost the power to learn. Did you ever try to explain anything to someone and have them always cutting in with a, sure I know that, certainly I know that, pretty soon you gave up.

It was no use because there's no use to repeat what everybody already knows. And as soon as we have arrived at that place, we instantly cut off all possibility of learning anything. Self-acknowledged ignorance that carries that meek ignorance to all of life is the only attitude possible.

I remember hearing a man years ago preach on the text, The meek shall inherit the earth. Now I know he wasn't right. An old brother told me once that a bee could get nectar even out of weeds as well as flowers.

And I've heard sermons that I didn't believe a word of and yet they did me some good because I managed somehow to translate them backwards into something I knew. Well, this man preached on Blessed are the meek and he told about Frederick Faber, or Henry Faber, the great French naturalist, and he told about his great love for nature and said he made a career and spent a lifetime lying on his stomach examining bugs and worms and beetles and bees and crawlers of all sorts, little humble things that everybody else passed up.

He learned all their secrets, learned how they lived and propagated and grew old and died and their habits and actually studied them until he could write brilliantly about them. I've read his Life of the Bee and some of these other works and they deal brilliantly.

They almost give a personality of the very worm that crawls on the leaf. And he said this was a fulfillment of the meek shall inherit the earth. Well, I think probably his exegesis was a bit off, but there is a sense in which a man, when he comes to study bugs, he must say, I don't know as much as that bug.

I may know other things he doesn't know, but I'm going to have to humble myself and become a learner from this bug. When he goes to the bee, he says, I don't know as much as this bee and I'm going to have to learn from the bee.

And so he goes humbly and meekly to learn. In other words, the day when the only science they knew was all the science of Aristotle mainly, men used to write learned treatises about animals never having seen the animal.

They used to write about elephants saying they'd never seen an elephant, but they were passing on what other people had said about the elephant. Then somebody startled the world one day by suggesting somebody go look at an elephant.

They said, boy, this is terrible. This can't be. Whoever heard of that said, how can you possibly dare to reflect on the wisdom of Aristotle? And somebody looked at an elephant, wrote about the elephant, and after that science got underway.

Now, the point here is I've gone a long way around the well-known barn in order to say that as soon as you lose the power to learn, you're frozen. You can't get any place. You're mentally stymied and you'll never get any further than that.

They had lost their power to learn because they had lost their humility. They couldn't admit that anybody could teach them anything. And then they had not only lost their power to learn, but they had forfeited their hope because they'd lost their sense of personal sin.

As long as a man can keep alive in his booth a sense of personal sin, there is hope for that man. He may not be saved, but he can be saved. But as soon as a sense of personal sin dies in him, he might as well be in the hell where he's going because he never can be saved when the sense of personal sin dies.

The wise, wily old devil has named that sense of personal sin a guilt complex and has made people afraid to get it. We're afraid if we have a sense of sin that we have a guilt complex. We fell off a table when we were a child or something and we have a guilt complex.

My brethren, let them call it what they will. There is still hope for the man who can feel his sin. But they had lost their power to feel sin. There was their great woe. They were insulted when somebody told them they weren't morally free.

They didn't say, wait a minute here now, this man says I'm not free, I'd better look myself up. I'd better examine myself. They said, I know I'm free and if he says I'm not, he insults me. They walked away angry because he had challenged them and said they weren't free and he could set them free if they became his disciples.

Religious Pride and the Loss of Spiritual Self-Examination

Now, sinners rarely get into this condition. It takes a religious man to get himself in this kind of a fix. As I have said many times here, my people, religion is the greatest thing in the world and also the most dangerous.

There is more glory in the religion of true faith and there is more woe in all other kinds of religions than in any other thing in the world. It takes a religious man to get himself entrenched in his own faith, his own belief concerning himself.

If you do something to a man, you sprinkle him or you initiate him or you do something to him and he feels that he's arrived. Well, after that there's not much you can do. An old French cynic said one time that infant baptism was vaccination against a new birth and I don't speak against infant baptism, though I don't baptize infants, I baptize believers.

But I'm not knocking those who hold that doctrine and hurt any baby to get water on his head. But the only thing is that if that baby is brought up to believe that when he got a little water on his head, he entered a realm where he was untouchable, he better never have had it on his head because he's likely to become entrenched in his religion and his condition become incurable.

These persons believed that they were established in religion and they claim vested rights in it. They said, ours are the father's. Abraham belongs to us. We're the seed of Abraham. We're the descendants of Abraham.

Look at it. We're noses. Look at it. We've got Abraham's physiognomy. We're the descendants of Abraham. And they were firmly assured of their unassailable position. So they were untouchable and beyond criticism.

Oh, brothers and sisters, when we get to a point where we feel touchy about being criticized for our spiritual lives, we have arrived at a state of death. We ought to keep very meek and very lowly about all this.

And if somebody challenges my faith and my right to believe that I'm a Christian instead of it insulting me, it ought to drive me to examine my foundations and see if these things indeed be true. If you couldn't get them to examine anything, they knew.

They were untouchable. They were beyond criticism and any upstart that suggested that these entrenched religionists were not all right was insulting them. Now, this is a deadly snare, my friends, a deadly snare.

It's a deadly snare when a denomination gets the idea that it contains about all the truth there is and that to challenge that denomination is to challenge God. That's a deadly snare. I don't know for the life of me, this may hurt some of your feelings, but I don't know for the life of me how anybody can be a confirmed denominationalist.

Down at Urbana a week before last, I prayed with and walked around and shook hands with and listened to men of Anglicans and Lutherans and Quakers and here's just a Quaker. And why, they just talked like any other Christian.

They loved the Lord. They were happy faith. They prayed. They were interested in lost men. They loved the Lord and the Bible. And for me to sit down and say, my denomination has the major parsh portion of all truth and while we do admit furtive scattered bits of religion here and there, maybe, we've got it.

Seems to me that something has to go wrong with a man's head before he can arrive at that place, brothers and sisters, because there's too many good people all around over the world that don't belong to my church.

Too many people that aren't Baptists. Too many people that aren't Presbyterians. Too many people that aren't Nazarenes. And yet it's perfectly possible for any of us to talk about ourselves, measure ourselves against ourselves, judge ourselves by ourselves and listen to the sweet music of our own self-praise till we actually arrive at the place where we believe we're a little bit better than anybody else.

These Jews hadn't only arrived there, brothers, they were camped there permanently. And they were sure they were right. And if anybody challenged them, they pointed to the hills of Zion. They pointed to the robes of the priests.

They pointed to the towers on the temple. They pointed to the grooves worn in the stone steps. They pointed to the scriptures of the prophets. They pointed to the scrolls and the priests and the phylacteries.

And they pointed to hundreds of years of history. They said, you dare challenge our spirituality? You dare say that we're not free men? Look at our background. Look at our heritage. Look at our tradition.

Look what we have, man. Who are you to challenge us and say, I'll make you free if you'll come to me? Who are you to free men already free? And the same thing can go on in any denomination. We say, this is my denomination, and I'll remain with it all my life because this is wonderful.

I criticized somebody here not long ago or something, and it was taken as a criticism of an institution. And somebody wrote me a long, mournful letter, and the burden of the letter was this. How could you ever bring yourself to criticize an institution founded by so-and-so?

He founded it maybe nearly a hundred years ago, and I opened my little mouth and said, well, what's the matter there? Is that lint there on the floor? And somebody said, oh, how could you dare point to a piece of lint on the floor?

Well, this was founded by so-and-so, that good man. He's been dead and in heaven all these long years. His descendants have been busy with his institution. Well, brothers and sisters, let's get free from that.

You won't bother me at all if you come around and say the Christian Missionary Alliance needs a lot of corrections, a lot of things wrong with it. Sure, a lot of things wrong with it. You won't hurt me if you tell me there's a lot wrong with our church because there probably is a lot wrong with it.

There is, but it would be too bad the day we think there isn't. Now, they said this. They said, we're Abraham's seed and we're never in bondage to any man. The old Greeks had a saying, whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

That is, they make them crazy. And the Book of Romans, first chapter, seems to tell the same story. It's the story of a mind that is so fixed on its own self that God takes the light out of it. The light that lighted every man that comes into the world and shines on all men.

Some men God takes the light away and they go into a state of moral insanity, dementia. And these people were in that condition. Now, notice what they said. To protect themselves, they said, we are Abraham's seed.

And they were willingly ignorant of the fact that in their own book, Exodus 1, 13 and 14, it said they had been for 400 years in bondage to the Egyptians. They forgot that when they said we've never been in bondage to any man.

And they forgot that in Judges 6, 1, they had been delivered into the hands of the Midianites for seven years. In Judges 13, 1, they had been delivered into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years. In Judges 4, 1 to 3, they had been delivered into the hands of the Canaanites for 20 years.

And they had been 70 years in bondage to Babylon. And for the very men who were uttering these words were being kept in line by Roman policemen that walked the streets of Jerusalem. Israel was an occupied country under the domination of the Roman Empire.

And they dared to stand up and say we've never been in bondage to any man, deliberately trying to twist it to a political meaning that they knew our Lord never had them in His mind at all. So they hid behind a political meaning and said we've never been in bondage to any man.

And then I can give you six cases, and there were certainly very many more. And right while they were talking, I repeat, they were in bondage to Rome. You see, what these poor friends didn't know was this, that you can't inherit spirituality.

I wish you'd mark that little thing down. You can't inherit spirituality. You can have a spiritual father, and he can beget a little devil of a son. And your mother can be as saintly as Holy Ann, and then she can have a daughter that's as proud as the devil.

You can't inherit spirituality, men and women. But we'll settle that. I wish we could. Wouldn't it be wonderful by even those who believe in eradication that you get the old nature eradicated? Somebody said what happens when an eradicated man marries an eradicated woman and they have a baby?

What's the baby like? Well, they admit it. They said he's born in sin. How can an eradicated father beget a baby born in sin? How can an eradicated mother have a baby born in sin? The simple fact is that they pass on their human, physical, fallen nature and not their spirituality to their children.

And yet there are a lot of God's grandchildren running around the world. They're the children of the children of God. My father's a child of God and everything is all right with me. Ten o 'clock and all is well.

That's what he thinks. You ought to remember this, sir, that you can't inherit grace. The grace of God is given individually to each man. It's not given by inheritance. Sometimes when I go to some of our conferences, and I hope if this is taken on tape it'll never get to headquarters, but sometimes they talk about men will stand up on Moist Side and talk about our heritage, our noble heritage.

You'd think that we had inherited spirituality from A .B. Simpson. No, you can't inherit it, dear friend. You can't inherit grace. They should have known, these learned teachers of the law, they should have known that to stand where Abraham stood, it was necessary that they have the faith of Abraham and the obedience of Abraham.

Sure, we will respect and honor the Presbyterian church. John Knox, that fearless Scots preacher that made the evil queens tremble with his prayers and his mighty preaching, founded the Presbyterians.

But for any modern Presbyterian to have what he had means that he has to have the grace John Knox had. And so are the Methodists, founded by the great John Wesley. But any modern Methodist, I'd tell him, I did tell one Methodist church that one time and got invited elsewhere, but that was years ago when I didn't have any better sense.

Many years ago. But to stand where Wesley stood, you must have the faith of Wesley. A book of discipline won't make you like Wesley, nor a hymn book marked with Wesley's name won't make you like Wesley.

You're going to have to have the humility of Wesley and the faith of Wesley and the penitence of Wesley. So was Moody. One of Moody's instructors one time said, you know, Moody founded Moody Institute, but Moody Institute never produced another Moody.

A .B. Simpson founded Nyack, and Nyack never produced another A .B. Simpson. And you can go all around and say the same thing about all these institutions. They try to inherit the blessing of their founders.

No, it won't do so. It won't do. You don't become spiritual by going to a spiritual church and having it rub off on you. You become spiritual by going the way that spiritual men go, by paying the price they've paid, by believing what they believed and sacrificing as they did and trusting and yielding and surrendering.

That makes men good. Well, Jesus our Lord said, I know you're Abraham's seed, but this did not Abraham. If Abraham were your father, he made a distinction between being Abraham's seed and Abraham's father, or Abraham being her father.

He said, you're the seed of Abraham, but you're not the sons of Abraham. You know what I think? I think we Protestants ought to rethink our whole position. I really do. I think that instead of spending our time trying to create, as they did up at Evanston, artificial ecumenicity, which means all getting together.

See, that's what that word means. Instead of trying to create a united Protestant front politically, it seems to me that we ought to all call a moratorium on activity and wait before our God and see if we're worthy to be called the sons of the Reformers.

The Reformers paid a price for Protestantism, my friends. They paid a price for the German Bible. They paid a price for justification by faith. They paid a price to be delivered from bondage. And we glibly accept the deliverance and think that we have what they had because we're the seed of the Reformers.

Perfectly possible to be a descendant of the Reformer and not be a son of a Reformer. Ever think about that, sir? You're a Protestant. I don't want to say I'm a Protestant. I want to say I'm a Christian.

And if I'm even remotely worthy to be called a descendant and a spiritual descendant of such men as Huss and Luther and Melanchthon and the rest of them, I humbly thank God for them. But never take it for granted, sir.

Never take your Protestantism for granted. Thank God for every treasure that's given you, but never take it for granted. To have what our fathers had, we must pay the price our fathers paid. In humility, I repeat, in meekness and penitence and holy tears.

Conduct Reveals Spiritual Parentage

Our Lord said, you're not children of Abraham, and I know why. He said, it's because you don't act like Abraham. Abraham was a friend of God. And here I come from God the Father and you reject me. How then can you be true sons of Abraham?

Now, the logic here is simply this. The logic is that we take our nature from our father. There is a law in the Bible, after his kind, that everything bring forth after its kind. And that law runs through every bit of life, everywhere.

And the logic is that we take our nature from our father, and we act according to that nature. And they were claiming to be sons of Abraham, and Jesus said, you're breaking one of the simplest laws of spiritual heredity.

You claim to be a son of Abraham, and it's well known that a son of a father has the nature of the father. Normally a boy, a man, acts like his father acted before him. Modification, certainly, but not major modification.

And Jesus said, you're acting like the son of the devil, and you're claiming to be the son of God. And of course, they were getting madder all the time. Our Lord should have had Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

He'd have sought for a common ground of interest. Find out what you believe together, and emphasize that. And avoid speaking of those things about which you do not agree. All right, Brother Carnegie. But our Lord didn't know that, fortunately.

And they got madder and madder all the time, because he was proving to them by the, our Lord would have made a great prosecuting attorney. He's the defense attorney at the right hand of God tonight. He's the advocate above, the Savior by the throne of love.

But he'd have made a great cross-examiner, for he knew how to make men convict themselves. And here he made these persons convict themselves. He said, you say you're the seed of Abraham? All right, I grant it.

But you're not a son of Abraham, because a son acts like his father, and you're acting like the devil. You are of your father the devil, because you're full of lies and violence. He was a liar and a murderer.

Oh, my friends, this bothers me. I'm afraid of it. I can't preach this glibly and go home. This bothers me. I've been preaching a long time now, a long time. And I want God to keep after me. I really do.

I want him to keep after me, keep me penitent, keep me distrusting myself, keep me bothered about myself. Because if I ever settled back into the entrenched privilege I did, firmly assured of the unassailable position that I got, how easy it would be for me to settle back and say, now I've written some books, and I can die.

I won't even read those books. I refuse to let anything tie me down. I will not. I don't own one. And I will not allow yesterday's victories to tie me down there and make me believe that I'm a better man than I am.

I want the God's sun to rise on me every morning and expose the blemish and save me from the idea of entrenched privilege. Settled, established, with the past to prove it. I proved my past. Look at the record, the politicians say.

Look at the record. Never want to hide behind records. The Jews said, look at our record. We be Abraham's seed. And Jesus said, I looked at your record and you're not acting like Abraham. That's watching.

Examining Conduct as Evidence of Faith

Now, I just want to make a little application of this in close. I promised I wouldn't preach as long. I heard myself four times this week preaching on tape. And how you people ever have the patience to sit through as long as I preach, I can never tell.

So tonight I'm going to be briefer and simply ask this question. What did your conduct prove you to be last week and yesterday and last night and last month and last year? You are the descendant of somebody.

The son of somebody. And from somewhere you've received a nature. And you'll act like that nature. You'll act in accordance with that nature. What did your conduct prove your nature to be? Now, that's a fair question and it's one that's found right here in the text.

I didn't put it in, it's here. Are you the son of ambition? Are you the son of desires? The son of evil thoughts? The son of evil words? Your deeds? What do they prove about you? You ought to consider what they prove about you.

Or are you a son of faith and love and pity and humility and if you are happy, how are you? And in great meekness you can say, I am his and he is mine. And you can say, arise my soul, arise, shake off thy jealousy, fear.

I don't want to so preach as to keep anybody in hot water or in a state of uncertainty. You can be sure, but your certainty will not be the certainty of pride, it will be the certainty of humility. You can know that everything's all right between you and God, but it won't be the sharp, proud knowledge of the Pharisees, it will be the meek knowledge of the saints.

For you can know, oh, there are sons of lust walking the highway and sons of spite and pride and greed and pleasure. But if you ask them, what about your soul? I'm a Presbyterian. What about your soul?

I'm a Methodist. What about your soul? I heard Dr. A .B. Simpson preach. What about your spiritual condition? I once heard Moody preach. I don't think that meant anything. I didn't ask anybody what denomination he was in, but what about your soul?

What does your conduct prove your origin to be? Whose child are you? But oh, I'm glad to tell you that whatever you have been and are, I'm glad to tell you you can be a child of God through Jesus Christ.

I'm glad to tell you. Do you accept Christ as your Savior all right, well, and good? Now, if that works, if it works, it changed your nature and you became a child of God. And if it changed your nature and you became a child of God, you'll be living like a child of God and proving whose son you are by your conduct as the Jews did.

But I wonder now what your conduct proves you to be. Now, this isn't preaching works. This is preaching conduct as a proof of nature. Jesus said bluntly, you're a father of the devil. You know that in all the years of my ministry I've never preached on that text and only referred to it two or three times.

I'm afraid that's an awful text. I can't use it. I'm not a good enough man to use that text. It would take a wholier man to use that text and not hurt himself by using it. So I could never tell a congregation you're a child of the devil.

Your old brother Nicholson told us we were hogs and dogs here one night. And I wondered if you'd ever come back, but you did. But I can't use those texts. It takes a better man than I am to use those texts and not hurt his heart using them.

But I can tell you that if your conduct has proved you to be a son of the devil, then I can't see how you can be anything else. And if you claim to be a son of God and your conduct is not in line with God, then I don't know how you can claim to be a son of God.

So that's the teaching of Jesus. It's not very inspiring, but it's wonderfully diagnostic. It gets through to you, finds out what's wrong with you. That's what diagnosis means, you know. It means knowing clear through.

And the Holy Ghost through the scriptures here will know you clear through. Now look at yourself. You say, I believe it's faith that saves me, not conduct. I agree with you there, all right, sir. But conduct follows faith, faith just as a stream of water follows the fountain.

And if the water that runs away from the fountain is dirty, the fountain is dirty too. You can know whether your life is flowing from the pure fountain by looking at your conduct and knowing whether it's pure conduct or not.

I hope it is, and I know in many instances it is. We thank God for wherever it's found. But let's not take too much for granted. Let's not say, I'm an Alliance Christian. All right, so what? Lots of Alliance people be in hell.

I'm a Methodist, all right. There'll be more Methodists in hell, and you know what to do with them and where to put them. I'm a Presbyterian. Lots of Presbyterians in hell. I belong to a Bible church.

Lots of fundamental Bible church fellows with a Schofield Bible be in hell. Won't have the Bible there. Why? Because they took for granted their spirituality and thought that by believing what somebody else believed and joining a good church and getting along with the crowd, they'd be saved.

Oh, no. I know you're Abraham's seed, but you're not Abraham's son, said Jesus. And he made a distinction, a sharp distinction, between my profession and my possession. What I believe I am and what I am actually.

And it isn't very hard to find out. Look yourself over. Look at your past days. Look at yesterday, the day before, and last week, and last month, and last year. Look it over. Does that tell you that you're acting in keeping with your holy character as a child of God?

If it does, well and good and thank God and happy are you. But if it doesn't, then it ought to disturb you. It ought to bother you. It ought to say, wait a minute here now. Is it possible that I've been trusting to false, on false premises, that I've been leaning on things that aren't sound?

If so, you ought to do something about it. And I think we ought to do something about it now. Let's pray. More concerned that if everything be all right with us, now, and in the day of our death, or at the coming of thy son, we're more concerned than that we stand well in religion, that we have a reputation among the saints, we're more concerned, Lord, that things be now right with us.

Oh, we thank thee, Lord Jesus, how didst say to such poor world wonders as we are, if ye become my disciples and follow me and go on and become disciples, indeed ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

And if the sun sets you free, you shall be free indeed. For I am the light of the world and he that followeth me shall never walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. Thank thee, Lord, there need be no concern, need be no doubts, need be no worries.

We can know that we're following thee as we walk in the light, as thou art in the light, we have fellowship with thee and with one another. And the blood of Jesus Christ, thy son, cleanses us from all sin.

This is a greater treasure than all the gold of Ophir or the diamonds of Africa. More to be desired is it than all jewels, all rubies, all the corn and wheat and all the granaries of the world. So we seek tonight to know and be sure that we're not only sons of the descendants of the reformers, but true sons of their faith and obedience.

Whatever our denomination is, we're not only in the tradition of our denomination, but that we have the spiritual experiences of those who in other days brought those denominations into existence by their faith.

Thank thee for every true Methodist. Thank thee for every holy Presbyterian. Thank thee for every godly Baptist. Thank thee for every happy Nazarene. Thank thee, O Lord, for every blessed, heart-happy Quaker.

Thank thee for every man and woman of God of whatever denomination that loves thee tonight. And we feel we're a part of their fellowship. O, save us, we pray thee, from the tragedy and snare of entrenched privilege, of vested interest, believing everything's all right because we're descended from the right.

Great God, save us from this. Send us out from this church with quiet, certain, sure gaze at the light of the world, meekly disclaiming all self-righteousness, humbly denying ourselves, willingly taking the cross, sorry for all that is imperfect and wrong, glad for the blood that cleanses, grateful for the grace that pardons, and remembers sin no more forever.

Blessed be thy name.