Marriage in the 1689 Confession

Well, it's very nice of you to allow visitors to teach your Sunday school class. First time here, glad to meet you all. I figured I'd get all the jokes out of the way before we got started. If you weren't here Wednesday and I leave at 4 o 'clock in the morning, you're gone again.

So it's just going to be that way for a while. Exchanging e-mails right now with the brothers in South Africa and Zambia. Vody Baucom, some of you know, has left his church in Texas and is taking up the presidency of the African Christian College in Zambia.

And Zambia is not that far from South Africa. So we're seeing if I can sneak a few days in Zambia as a part of the South Africa trip. But it just means that in September, October, I will be overseas more than I'm in the United States.

So it's going to be a while. But anyways, that has nothing to do with, I'm sorry? Wherever the African Christian College is, I have no idea. Don't know anything about it at all other than when Vody called me, I don't know, six, eight months ago, maybe more than that.

And I mentioned South Africa. He's got to come up, so we'll see what happens. He'll barely have his box open about that time, but we'll see. There are advantages and there are proprieties in being a confessional church.

There are, you know, any good thing can be misused and abused. And there are some Reformed Baptists that do tend to think that 1689 was the high watermark of all things in the Christian faith and that no one's had a meaningful thought since then, so we don't want to go there.

But being a confessional church has some real advantages, especially these days. We have a statement of faith. There are churches all over the land right now that are scrambling to put together statements to try to help them legally in regards to not wanting to be bankrupted, attempting to defend themselves against Caesar demanding that we profane marriage.

Thankfully, we have and have always had a statement on this subject in the London Bapst Confession. I was just asking Brick, y 'all didn't talk about this the last two weeks, did you? No? Okay. Brick said no, but, you know, just from the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every fact be established.

Just a biblical thing. That and the fact that once you pass 50, I sit there, I open up a browser window to do something, and it opens up, and it opens up very quickly on my MacBook Pro, very, very fast.

And then I sit there and stare at it going, what was I about to do? I mean, that is called having a short-term memory that is less than two seconds long. I mean, it's just horrible. So, anyway, we have a section in our confession.

Unfortunately, it is not in, well, I doubt there's almost any difference between this and what's in the Westminster. Let's look at section 25. Is Chapter 25 of the Westminster the section on marriage, since you've got those hymnals in front of you?

It is? Twenty-four. Twenty-four in Westminster? That's interesting. I wonder what we stuck in there that they didn't have. Well, it's Chapter 25 at least, and I'm looking at the modern language version.

But it's fairly short. Marriage is to be between one man and one woman. Well, I'm glad we started off on the right foot anyways. So we can document that from the beginning, when this was adopted as the confession of faith of this church, we didn't adopt this after Obergefell Hodges.

This is what we've believed all along. Marriage is to be between one man and one woman. It is not lawful for any man to have more than one wife. Well, there's the next movement. Nor for any woman to have more than one husband.

And the movement after that. At one and the same time, God instituted marriage for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind in accordance with his laws, and for the prevention of immorality.

The background, I think, of the term immorality would be pornia, which, when we look at 1 Corinthians 6, adultery, fornication, and fornication would include the entire range of sexual sins. And there is absolutely, positively no question that in the context of the writers of the New Testament, homosexuality would be included under the category of pornia.

You can't argue that. The only way, the only way that people are getting around that, and more and more people will be getting around it, you hear each week of another church, another denomination, another major leader, either completely collapsing or moving into a, eh, we don't know, perspective.

The only way that they can do that is to fundamentally say that, yeah, the New Testament writers did understand it the way you're saying, but they just didn't know what we know today. That's the only way around it, is to say they did not know that there were people who wanted loving, committed, covenantal, monogamous, same-sex relationships.

And so, yes, for Paul, what utamalakoi, utarsanakoitai meant, yeah, in his context, that's pretty clear. In 1 Corinthians 6, when he said, neither, you know, the ESV renders it, it simply says those who practice homosexuality.

Literally, it's the soft and the homosexuals, but I think the ESV got it right in recognizing it's the active and passive partners in that relationship. Be that as it may, what Paul meant by that, yeah, sure, you're right, no reason to argue that.

There's nothing, you can't find anything anywhere in Paul's religious context. You might run off to some Greek writer someplace, somewhere, but you simply cannot overthrow the reality that the primary background against which everything that Paul writes in the New Testament, hence Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1, is the Greek Septuagint, it's the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and that second temple Judaism of which he was a part.

You can't get away from that. And there was no one in that context that had any other view whatsoever than that homosexuality would be included in pornia, and hence would be included in this phrase for the prevention of immorality.

Let me just mention in passing, well, what does that mean then? Well, I certainly was not the first one to point out that that argumentation, which, if you take the time to read the flood of articles coming out from those who are attempting to find a way to give up on the subject of defining marriage, within the Christian church, I'm not even talking about politics here, we're just talking Christian theology here, I cannot see how they can maintain scriptural sufficiency, because the scripture becomes the result of nothing more than the thinking, the thoughts of men who are limited at their time by their understanding of things.

What's more, it raises, I think, a significantly more important issue, and that is, what do you do with Jesus? It's one thing to say Paul was unaware of the desires of the hearts of certain individuals.

Whatever percentage you want to put on things, the cultural, it still shocks me, some of you know that a couple of years ago they did a survey, it was only about a year and a half, two years ago, they did a survey of thousands of people in the United States, and the large portion of the American population believed that one quarter of the human population is homosexual.

One quarter, 25%. The actual number, according to the CDC, according to the people who are paid enormous amounts of money to know these things, straight out of our pockets, you're talking, when you put them all together into one big group, maybe, at the top end, 3%.

But most Americans thought it was 25%. Just absolutely unbelievable. What I have to point out is it's one thing to say Paul didn't know about those people. What do you do with Jesus? What do you do with Jesus?

Jesus knows the hearts and minds of men. It's said over and over again, throughout the Gospels, all the Gospels. It doesn't matter if, well, you know, John has a very high view of Jesus, and Mark, Jesus, knowing what they were thinking in their hearts, said.

So it's a universal reality that the Jesus of the Bible knows men's hearts. And so you're telling me that he didn't know that there were people in front of him that wanted freedom and liberation from the constricting traditions of men and had tremendous opportunities given to them.

Right there in Matthew chapter 19, he could have said, well, you guys, you are not knowing the Scriptures or the power of God because you have limited marriage too much. And I am here to set the captives free.

And so I want you to know there are people right amongst us that want to have these kinds of marriages. No, he didn't obviously do that. And so the question becomes, how come the Jesus of what's called red-letter Christianity, ever heard of red-letter Christianity?

How many of you have heard of red-letter Christianity? How many of you have not heard of red-letter Christianity? Okay. We now have a fairly good indication of who's on Facebook and who isn't. Just look at that.

People like Brian McLaren, the remnants of the emergent church, which emerged and immediately croaked. These folks, Brian McLaren and his group call themselves red-letter, and Tony Campolo, who came out recently, calls himself a red-letter Christian.

Red-letter Christianity is where you say Jesus is everything, and so you interpret the Bible through Jesus. And that sounds wonderful, I suppose, on one level. It ignores the fact that God didn't send Jesus first and give us the rest of the Bible.

There was all this preparation, prophecy, all that kind of stuff first, and all this dealing with Israel for a long, long time, and then the Messiah comes, and so on and so forth, and he comes in a particular context and seems to have a very high view of the Scriptures and all the rest of that stuff.

But that aside, what they're really doing is they create the Jesus that is comfortable to them, which, amazingly enough, always looks very much like the red-letter Christian himself. It has the same political desires and concerns and so on and so forth.

And then once you've created that Jesus, you've picked the verses that you like, you then use that as a lens, and basically the Old Testament just disappears. I mean, if this was the red-letter Christian lenses, you put it on, and whoa, man, my Bible just got really thin.

The Old Testament and everything that God does back there that you don't like just disappears, because Jesus wouldn't do that, and God is in Jesus, and therefore the Amorites were never wiped out, and the Amalekites were never wiped out, and God never said any of that kind of stuff.

And this was just the Israelites thinking about God, and it really wasn't what God commanded, and so on and so forth. It's a real easy way to get rid of all that kind of stuff. And then you come to the stuff in Romans 1 or 1 Corinthians 6, and you just have to read it through the red letters.

Those are black letters. They're not the red letters. And so these people are all over the place. They're published widely, and they're having a tremendous influence. And so what you've got to do is, even those places where Jesus doesn't fit this paradigm, what you do then is you say, well, that's just Matthew, or that's just Mark, or Luke, or John.

In other words, you fundamentally overthrow even a confession that what we have in the Gospels accurately represents what Jesus said. Now, how you can have a red-letter Christian without a reliable Gospel narrative, I have no earthly idea.

It's indefensible. That's why these folks won't debate, because as soon as you start cross-examination, they just vaporize right in front of you. But they don't have to worry about that, because they have the narrative on their side right now, and they don't have to worry about actually answering questions.

And so that's the only other way around it. And the result of all that is the utter overthrow of the Gospel, because if you can't know what Jesus taught, and the Bible is just the thoughts of men, so much for the divine reality of the Christian faith.

Just pack it all in from there. It's just another religious social club, and that's what you have with so many people today. So anyway, Section 3. It is lawful for all sorts of people to marry, provided they are able to give their rational consent.

But it is the duty of Christians to marry only in the Lord. In consequence, those who profess the Christian faith should not contract marriages with infidels or idolaters. It is also quite unfitting for godly persons to become partners in marriage as persons who lead wicked lives or who maintain damnable heresies.

So the little Mormon girl may look wonderful, young men, but don't do it. Don't do it. Not going to work. Actually, the little Mormon girl would fit into a number of those categories there when you put it all together.

Believe me, I've seen so much missionary dating over the years that I only chuckle a little bit at that point. I could tell you some stories, but we will not do that this morning. Marriage must not be contracted within degrees of blood, relationship, or kinship forbidden in God's word, nor when such incestuous unions occur can they ever be made lawful, either by any law of man, neither by any law of man, or by the consenting parties, and the persons concerned can never rightly live together as man and wife.

Beautiful. It sounds like there is a fundamental definition of what marriage is. Wow, look at the first verse cited in support of section 4. It's Leviticus chapter 18. Leviticus chapter 18 doesn't just refer to incestuous relationships, though it certainly defines all of them, doesn't it?

What else does Leviticus 18 refer to? Well, Leviticus 18 .22, hopefully you're familiar with that by now, in regards to homosexuality, the very next verse, bestiality. It's all right there, and it is interesting, notice as well, 1 Corinthians 5 .1.

Remember that the context of 1 Corinthians 6, if you go back a little bit, is Paul remonstrating with the Corinthians in the sin that exists amongst them, and what was the great sin that he addresses with them.

But a man had his father's wife. Well, why wasn't that legal? Because of Leviticus 18. And the whole point is that Paul expects the Corinthians to understand, well, if it's forbidden, Leviticus 18, if it's immoral, if it's against God's law, what are you doing?

You should have, not even the Gentiles do this type of thing. I don't remember Jesus re-quoting Leviticus 18 anywhere in the Gospels. How could they have known that? Well, it seems to have been a part of apostolic teaching, that there are certain abiding moral principles to be found in God's law.

So we have a statement of faith, and it is very clear, and it would require the governmental authorities fundamentally telling us that we have to overthrow and reject our statement of faith to continue existing as a body.

I don't know what the future is going to bring. I do know that in many, many nations in this world, the church does not exist with property or tax exemptions as an entity that is recognized by the state, because the state will not allow a meaningful Christian church to exist in that way.

There are millions and millions of our brothers and sisters this day who are meeting in what are truly biblical churches. They have elders. They have discipline. They have the Lord's Supper. They have baptism.

But they simply do not exist as far as the state is concerned. And we have had, of course, great blessings and great advantages within our nation for a very, very long time, but we live in a nation that has for a long time been expressing its rebellion and now on a level that is so direct and so clear rejecting God's law that we should not be surprised whatsoever that there is great concern on the part of many that those freedoms are going to disappear.

I'd be interested in how many of you for the past, well, it hasn't even been a full month yet. We're six days away, seven days, so a week. Yeah, we're just one week short of it being a full month. Since June 26th, it'll be easy to remember the date of that Supreme Court debacle because what else is, did I say December?

Hopefully, June. Yeah, I did say June? Oh, good. See, my short-term memory is completely shot. It's just gone. It's history. What else happened on June 26th? I look back at Roxy, the encyclopedia of all things memorable.

Huh? No, it was not my anniversary. I'm thankful it missed by one day. If it had been June 25th, I would have been really bummed. But what record was set here in Phoenix on June 26th, 1990? 122 degrees, 122 degrees on June 26th, 1990.

So that's going to make it a little bit easier to remember because I see a direct correlation between it being as hot as you know where here in Phoenix and what's going to, anyway. It's been less than a month, and in that time, I'd be interested, how many of you have actually read the entirety of the Supreme Court decision?

No way. I'm getting the sign from the back row there. I won't touch that one with a 10-foot pole. Well, it wasn't short. The dissents were entertaining, at the very least. Scalia, what was the term he used?

It wasn't hocus pocus. I think he used malarkey at least once. There are a couple interesting phrases that he used to describe the arguments of the majority. But when you read it, if you read it straight through like I did in the PDF that comes from the Supreme Court specifically, the first, of course, is what's called the MD, the majority decision.

And then that's referred to in all the dissenting opinions that are written later. Roberts wrote one, Scalia wrote one, Thomas wrote one, and Alito wrote one. And I have to confess that listening to, I was listening, I was driving, so I converted to MP3.

I was driving back from Utah at that point, and listening to the majority opinion, it was ironic to be doing that while driving in Utah, of all places, when you think about it. It's like, hmm, especially southern Utah, where there were all sorts of people around me that already weren't really over-concerned what the federal government said about marriage anyways.

But listening to Kennedy's majority decision really did remind me of reading articles that you would encounter online on Facebook, and especially the Huffington Post. It was an absolutely, well, heart-rending on one level that this is actually coming from something called a Supreme Court in a civilized nation, or at least a once-civilized nation.

I mean, it was all for the children. Literally, one of the primary sections of the argumentation is that we have to do this, because children living in a family with two lesbians or two homosexuals as their parents could be hurt by being told that their family isn't as good as other families.

This actually appeared in argumentation from the Supreme Court as one of the reasons why we have to redefine marriage. Now, on any level, you just go, well, that's insane. That means that any kids who find themselves in, what about kids who are adopted by three lesbians or three homosexuals, or what about all the kids in polygamous marriages right here in Utah?

You just kicked the door open to a complete redefinition of everything. You just threw marriage under the bus. Yeah, that's exactly what they did. But I'm also sitting there going, excuse me, excuse me, but those two guys did not produce that kid.

Okay, that didn't come from, no, no, that doesn't. And you just sit here, and you're going, is it? Am I really hearing this? Am I really reading this? Is this really coming from a Supreme Court justice?

And the answer, of course, is yes. Yes, it is. So what do we do now? Well, you know, a lot of people have pointed out that it's been quite some time since Roe v. Wade. And events of the past week have more than ever, I think, raised some hopes on the part of many people that we could see a further dismantling of that decision over time.

I mean, we know so much more about the development of the unborn child, the humanity of that unborn child today than we ever did before. I mean, the excuses are gone. And so we go, hey, we didn't. For most Christians, that was actually the start of the battle, not the end of it.

Isn't that the same thing here? Well, I could wish that that were the case, but I see some differences here. I really do. I mean, certainly the progressive and, of course, progression, you know, if you fall off a mountain, you do progress to the bottom of the mountain.

So that's how I see that term, progressive, today, is we are progressing. It's the direction and the point of impact that is the only thing that really is a question. The activist court came up with rights that no one who originally penned the words of the Constitution could have ever thought of, and they did the same thing with Obergefell Hodges as well.

So to be honest with you, once words no longer mean anything, which the Supreme Court decision right before that one also demonstrated that words don't mean anything, the law said X, eh, they meant Y, and therefore we're fine.

Once that happens, there really isn't, all bets are off. There's really no way of reformation or correction at that point. But beyond that, it does seem to me that on this subject, what you have here is just such a tremendously knowledgeable and purposeful cultural act of rebellion that I see differences between this and the Roe decision.

Now, if God grants grace, could we see 30 years from now a recognition? Wow, that was really dumb. But it would require a whole lot of people to recognize that marriage is absolutely central to the continuation of culture and to the flourishing of mankind, and that would require, I think, a major change in worldview.

What we have here is just what finally is the millennial generation that is the first fully secularized generation. The generation that they were raised by still had the remnants of a morality that was based upon a Christian worldview.

It's gone. You just watch the heartbreaking videos of the responses of young people to the profaning of marriage, and they see it all as a mere issue of fairness. Mere issue of fairness. No concept whatsoever of recognizing the total redefinition of the institution itself.

And that is the argument that won the day. It's not actually an argument. It's a means of deceiving the mind because there was no unfairness. Anyone could get married who wanted to get married. The problem was they didn't want to get married in that way.

They wanted to change the definition of what marriage is. And so it was a redefinition that was snuck in under the fact that there are very few Americans that would ever want to deny, quote-unquote, equality for anybody else.

But as I've pointed out over and over again, we don't live that way. When you really start thinking about what that's all about, then you're basically saying from each according to his ability and to each.

You know, you start going, oh, who wrote that? Oh, Karl Marx. Yeah, I remember him. If you want true equality, as I pointed out right when this happened, I think it's unfair that Shaquille O 'Neal is over seven feet tall.

I want to self-identify as an NBA basketball player. And therefore, I want to be able to dunk, too. And so I think a six-and-a-half-foot rim would be ideal. And that dude for Golden State, what was his name?

Who's the? Yeah, yeah. Man, I want to be able to shoot threes like that, too. But the thing's only 18 inches wide. That's not fair. So I think 36 inches wide. I think I could nail a lot more threes if it was 36 inches across.

And so, huh? What? Oh, OK. Oh, yeah, OK. Well, yeah, it's gotten a little bit more narrow over the years. So what would happen to establish equality in the NBA for me if the rims were six-and-a-half feet tall and 36 inches wide?

OK, we'd have games of 479 to 442, which might be interesting, but I think a little boring. And obviously, what's neat about Curry nailing a three-pointer from five feet beyond the arc is much less neat when I do it into a peach basket or whatever.

It requires the utter redefinition. It removes what's special about what's being redefined so as to make everything equal. And that's exactly what's going on with marriage. People say, well, your marriage isn't effective.

Yes, it is. No, my personal relationship with my wife isn't. My relationship for God isn't. But when a society says, you know what? We're not going to be concerned about families. We're not going to be concerned about whether children have a father and a mother.

And don't get me wrong. Fundamentally, what they want is the children. That is the eventual goal. We want the children. We want the children to be dependent upon the state. We want the children to be taught by the state and to go that direction.

When you deny to children that father and that mother, then they have to look someplace else. And the only place they want to look is to the state, to the culture. It does impact everything. It is a profaning.

See, profane, when something is holy and then you remove it from its special use as it's being set apart as holy and make it common, you're profaning it. And so when I talk about the profaning of marriage, what I'm saying is marriage is a gift from God.

It's defined by Him. When you redefine it and remove it from its holy purposes, you are profaning it. You are making it common. You are making it something that is no longer special and a gift from God.

And that's exactly what is happening. And it is a part of a much larger cultural movement that is promoting the absolute fundamental autonomy of man. Man is autonomous. Hopefully you see the relationship between that Supreme Court debacle.

I don't call it a decision because it wasn't based on anything in the document or anything from this worldview. I don't know if there are any decisions anymore, to be perfectly honest with you. Now it's a living document.

But anyway, I hope you see the direct connection between that and last week's ESPYs, if you saw any of that. It's sort of hard not to have seen some of it. And Bruce Jenner. Did any of you see what happened on Dr. Drew, the same program I was on?

Ben Shapiro, a Jewish guy, conservative Jewish guy, was on Dr. Drew Wednesday night. Very same show I was on. Same panelist as, well, one of the same panelists that Sam Shocker, Shockter or whatever her last name is, chick was on.

And the former pilot from Afghanistan, now pertaining to be a woman, Zoe Tur, Francis Albert, something Albert Tur is his real name, but anyway, was on as well, who had been on both times I was on. And if you didn't see it, I put something on Facebook about it, but at one point, Zoe Tur demonstrated that he is he, not she.

Because Ben Shapiro was going toe-to-toe, and this guy dressed as a girl reaches around, puts his hand on the back of his neck, and he's much bigger than Shapiro. And he leans over, and in a voice unmistakable to anyone, says, if you say anything like that again, you're going to be going home in an ambulance.

Now, two things to note. First of all, every guy is sitting there going, mm-hmm, and you're a chick, right. Sure you are, uh-huh. Because we've all experienced that before. And he was demonstrating that he's just as much of a guy as he ever was, even if he's in high heels.

But then the amazing thing was, everybody on the panel jumped on Shapiro for being a jerk. Not upon the trans guy for threatening to beat somebody up. You can do that all you want, because you've been offended, and if you're offended, then that's, you know.

They all jumped on Shapiro. It was absolutely amazing, the level of abject hypocrisy. That's what we're facing in our world today, is that kind of amazing thing that is happening all around us. The change in our culture on the level of worldview is just simply, I suppose in hindsight, we should have seen it coming.

We should have seen that once this next generation fully threw off the restraints that the Christian worldview had provided up until that time, that it would happen much faster than we were predicting it would.

And it is. It is. Now, very briefly, this gives us tremendous opportunities. As long as you are prepared for the backlash, remember, you're talking to people who cannot live consistently with the worldview that they are now professing.

They can't do it. I mean, at one point, Sam Shacker on that program was angry with Shapiro because he said he instead of she at one point. And her actual statement was, what was it? You need to be... Yeah, it wasn't offending, but it was another term.

You need to respect the pronouns. You're being offensive, or something along those lines. And I'm just sort of like, wow. We now have to be, we can't offend pronouns now. I mean, and it's so easy. If you can just get some of these folks to say more than three sentences to point out their utter inconsistency.

They cannot live within that worldview. And so, as long as we are in a position to speak and a willingness to speak, we will have opportunities like I don't know what to be able to bring up the lordship of Christ and his teachings.

Yes, sir. That came up the next day. The next day, so this would have been Thursday morning, someone tweeted Zoe Tur and said Ben Shapiro needs to be curb stomped, which is what Nazis did to Jews. And Ben Shapiro's Jewish.

And instead of rebuking that, Zoe Tur said, yeah, I agree. And so, yeah. The tolerance crowd, we all know, is anything but tolerant. And words don't mean what words used to mean. That's the issue, is the redefinition of terms.

Yes, sir. No. No. No, can't. Can't do it. Can't do it. No. No. And there's lots and lots and lots of Christian leaders today saying otherwise. No, that is a, to me, that is a fundamental capitulation on reality itself.

You can, there are people who really suffer in that area. I don't think the vast majority of the people that are running around today actually have a, what's called gender dysphoria. I think they're doing it as pure rebellion, and it's a way for them to express their sinful desires.

There are some that really do feel that way, but they're a small minority. No, I could never do that. And we have to be prepared to explain why, and to do so with boldness, not with chagrin. And I would take the offensive.

I would say you are asking me to deny not only scientific reality, but the only moral and ethical reality that can give any meaning to human life. That's what you're asking me to do. That's what you are doing.

And I say to you, not only is your stance destructive to these people who, as a result of that, are being encouraged in immoral behavior, but it's destructive to yourself as well. I would put the shoe on the other foot and really point out what's actually being done here, and that is an open demand for compromise and rebellion against God on our part.

So, no, I would never, could not give in on that point, because you're being asked to join in a fundamental denial of reality itself. And look, their answer, I know what their answer is. You don't understand what gender is.

They've come up with this completely unbiblical idea that natural assigned sex at birth, which sounds like the doctor just sort of went, ah, boy, ah, girl, as if he didn't go, ah, boy, ah, girl, you know.

I mean, seriously. And that's just one thing. Gender is so much more than that. Well, it may be more than that, but it's never less than that, and it cannot go against that. That's the problem. And, oh, but there are people that are born with XXY or XYY.

Okay. Very, very, very small number of people. You deal with them on an individual basis based upon what their particular manifestation is. But 99 .9 of these people, that's not their issue. That's not their issue at all.

And we're pretty much out of time, unfortunately. I know it's 10 .30. Sorry. It's an issue that we all are thinking about. We have to keep thinking about it. We need to give a biblical response to it.

That's why we need to know what Matthew 19 is about. We spent a lot of time on Matthew 19 last year. It was probably its time well spent, and I'm sure those are up on Sermon Audio someplace. So you might want to review those Sunday school classes we did on that.

With that, let's close our time. Father, once again, we do thank you that we still have the freedom to at least discuss these things. We would ask that you would give us opportunity and that you would help us to count the cost, that we would be prepared, that we would not fear the faces of men, that we would understand what you've called us to be, that we would hope for opportunities to introduce people to the truth about who Jesus Christ is and how he can free from bondage to sin.

We ask that you would bless us now as we go into worship. May you be honored and glorified in all that takes place. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.