Sight for Truth Genesis 31:17-32

Everyone on planet Earth has a sense of right and wrong. Romans 2 .15

tells us that all people have the law of God written on their hearts. But a question we need to ask is if everyone knows

God's standard for morality, then why is it that people disagree on certain moral issues? We see this with the issue of abortion, and this has been a big issue in the news lately because of the legislation that was passed in New York a couple of weeks ago.

The New York lawmakers and governor passed a bill that makes it legal for a woman to have an abortion up until birth.

And we talked about this last week on Sagittalia Life Sunday as well. And if you think about this, let's think about it this way, that a 8, 9, 10 pound baby's life can be cut short and it's legal to do so.

How horrible of a thought is that? And when we think of this and how people could think this is okay, we think, how evil must they be?

Because not only was this legislation passed, but it was also celebrated by those who passed it as if this was the right thing to do, when it could not be further from the right thing to do.

And as we as Christians, as we look on at this, we see clearly, as clear as day, the evil in this.

What we have to understand, as we put ourselves in other people's shoes, is we have to understand the power of sin.

And we know this in our own lives as well. Unbelievers have a conscience that tells them right and wrong, as Romans 2 .15

tells us, right? The law of God is written on the hearts of all humans. But sin distorts this law to the point that people believe that wrong is right and right is wrong, as I read earlier in Isaiah 5 .20.

The unbeliever is blind to the things of God. So in one sense, everyone can see

God's truth and know what is right and wrong. But in another sense, they can't see it.

They're blind to that truth. And this blindness is all around us in our world.

Everywhere you look, you can see it. So what is the solution to this blindness?

The answer is for God to give one spiritual sight.

Another way to say this is to be born again, or to be regenerated, or to have the new birth.

And this comes when you come to know Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote in 2

Corinthians 4 .6, For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

So when you believe in Jesus, God shines the light so that you can see his glory in the scriptures, his glory in the natural world, and the glory of his truth in things of right and wrong.

You are born into this world blind spiritually. Everyone is. But through the new birth, you can see.

And when you see, you can see how beautiful God's truth is.

Yesterday we were celebrating my dad's, my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. They got married on February 2, 1979.

And as we were there at the party, my dad explained his conversion somewhere in the 1970s.

And he said, The Holy Spirit came and changed the way I saw the world. He opened my eyes.

And many of you in this room have experienced that as well. So today, as we continue our sermon series through Genesis, we are going to see two men, one who can see and one who cannot see.

One can see clearly what is right, and one is blind to what is right.

So I encourage you to turn in a Bible with me to Genesis 31. We're going to look at it in verses 17 through 32.

And if you're using a red Bible in the pews, it's on pages 30 and 31. This sermon is titled,

Sight for Truth. Sight for Truth. And our big idea, our proposition, is the world is full of those who can see and those who cannot.

The world is full of those who can see and those who cannot. We're going to see two examples. The first example is one bound by righteousness has clear sight to righteousness.

And we'll see this in verses 17 through 21. But before we jump into our text today, let me give you a little recap of last week's sermon, especially if you weren't here.

We looked at the trustworthiness of the Lord and the untrustworthiness of Jacob's father -in -law,

Laban, in the first 16 verses of chapter 31. In the narrative, Jacob has been told by the

Lord to flee from Laban by leaving Paranaram to go to the land of Canaan, the land of promise.

And in order for Jacob to leave, he knows that he needs to persuade Leah and Rachel that the

Lord is trustworthy and their father is not. Jacob tells them that for 20 years, the

Lord has stood by him to take care of him and prosper him. He has seen 20 years of the

Lord's faithfulness and the Lord has proven his reliability to him. Jacob then contrasts the unreliability of their father,

Laban. For 20 years, Jacob explains that Laban has changed his wages 10 times, cheating him.

As Jacob made this case to Leah and Rachel, it was clear who was trustworthy and who was not.

Leah and Rachel finally agreed with Jacob that their father has proved himself unreliable over the years.

And they became persuaded that the Lord had proved himself reliable. And so they prepared to leave this bondage in Paranaram to go south to the land of promise.

And the application for us in this passage was simple. The Lord proves himself to be trustworthy over and over again.

And so we should always trust him. And in contrast, we know this from our own experience with people, because of people's sin, they prove themselves untrustworthy.

Which shows how wonderful the Lord's trustworthiness is in the face of that.

So this leads us to our text today. Jacob, Leah, Rachel, their children, 12 in all, prepare to leave with all they have and Laban will soon be on their trail, trying to chase them down.

Let's look at verses 17 and 18 of chapter 31 here to begin, to set the stage.

So Jacob arose and set his sons and his wives on camels.

He drove away all his livestock, all his property that he had gained, the livestock in his possession that he had acquired in Paranaram to go to the land of Canaan to his father

Isaac. So let's stop right there. Jacob leaves this region with his family and the text makes clear that he leaves with all of his possessions.

He believes that these possessions are rightly his, and they are. And so they go on their way.

And they leave at an opportune time when Laban is away.

So let's look at the first half of verse 19. We know that Laban would not have just let them go here, so they have to look for an opportunity to leave.

The beginning of verse 19 says, Laban had gone to shear his sheep. So Laban is out in the field shearing his sheep, and I probably don't even need to tell you what that is.

I'm a city boy, right? But they're cutting the wool off of the sheep.

And the second half of verse 19 tells us what was taken from Laban. And Rachel stole her father's household gods.

So the text tells us that Rachel stole these gods, and these would have been little figurines made of metal, made of stone.

And as we look at this, this is odd. What's the point of this? This is one of those passages where we wonder, what is

Rachel thinking? And we've asked that question a lot with a lot of characters in Genesis, and here we see it again.

Last week we saw that Jacob showed Rachel how wonderful the Lord is, as He has always proved Himself trustworthy.

And she even agreed with that, and now they're leaving to go to the land of promise. So you would think, well, then

God must be her God, and no other gods must be in her life. But we see here that her old ways still have a hold on her.

We've already seen the theology of Rachel and Leah as being lacking, to say it nicely.

As we saw a couple weeks ago, Rachel and Leah believed the supernatural mandrake plant was supposed to help with fertility.

But of course we know that there was no power in the mandrakes, but they believed that not only was the

Lord the one responsible to give them the ability to conceive, but also these magical plants had that ability as well.

And so now she thinks, well, I should take these household gods with me, and maybe they will help me.

And so this raises the question, what's the point of taking these household gods?

Now there's been lots of different views as to why she might have taken them. But I guess to summarize, she may have thought that they actually were real, and they had some power where they could help her.

Or they may have been good in the case that they would cost money, and so she could sell them and gain wealth off of that.

Those are a few reasons. We don't know the answer to this because the text doesn't tell us. But what it does tell us is that she took

Laban's household gods. After pondering why

Rachel would have taken these gods with her, let's get back to the narrative here. In verses 20 and 21, we are given

Jacob's motivation in leaving this region without Laban's knowledge.

And maybe you can guess it, but we'll read it right here. Verses 20 and 21, And Jacob tricked

Laban the Aramean by not telling him that he intended to flee. He fled with all that he had and arose and crossed the

Euphrates and set his face toward the hill country of Gilead. So as we saw in the text last week, the

Lord told Jacob to leave with all that he had without telling Laban. And at first blush, we might think, this isn't courteous.

But in this unique case, it was okay and right for Jacob to leave with Rachel and Leah and all that he had.

If a captor is unjustly holding you, the obvious right thing to do is to find a way to leave when the captor is out doing something else.

We just recently saw this in Douglas County, just north of here. We heard the news about Jamie Closs.

She escaped, thankfully, and her captor was out doing something else and she was able to find someone and be brought to safety.

Now in Jacob's case here, this is not the same situation as Jamie Closs's since Jacob was not forced against his will to stay here.

But it was a lighter captivity that he was experiencing since Laban has been taking advantage of him for 20 years.

If Jacob did not know the Lord, he may have thought it was right to stay and to continue to work under Laban and keep his family there.

But the Lord is leading him toward doing the right thing and it's as clear as day to him.

Jacob knows that if he tells Laban that he is leaving, he won't let him go. Or in the best case scenario, if he does let him go, he won't let him take anything with him, so he'll go home alone.

This includes his family. What the text makes clear in verse 21 is that Jacob fled with all that he had across the

Euphrates River, which of course is a famous river in this region, with both family and possessions.

And Jacob did this out of obedience to the Lord. Laban and his sons and maybe others would have told

Jacob, you should keep your family here. It's safer. It's too big of a risk to go somewhere else.

You should not take them on a couple hundred -mile journey. At this point in history, that would have been a big deal, traveling that far with all of this stuff and all of the family.

But to disobey the Lord's command to leave would have been sinful. And it would have been sinful because the

Lord told him clearly to leave. So for him not to go, he would have been disobeying the

Lord's clear command. So this was black and white. It was clear to Jacob what he was supposed to do.

And he trusted the Lord by leaving and he obeyed by going with all that he had, not worrying that Laban could track them down and do some harm to him.

He was afraid of Laban. He thought that Laban might do something to him. But he went anyways.

And if you know the Lord here today, you know what is right. You can see clearly right from wrong.

This isn't to say that there aren't some gray areas. Occasionally there are. But so often right and wrong is right before you and it's as clear as day.

And the Lord expects you to do the right thing. He expects you to follow Him. To live out what the

Scripture tells us to do. The Bible tells us, do not have any other gods before Him.

Do not take the Lord's name in vain. Honor your father and mother. Do not get angry and do not murder.

Do not look on another with lustful intent. Do not act dishonestly. Do not covet what another has.

Love one another according to a biblical definition of love. I pretty much just ran through some of the

Ten Commandments. We are faced with temptations such as these every day.

And what is right is clear. And we need to act. And when we don't sin, but act righteously in sin's place, we please the

Lord. We obey Him. We live the life He has called us to live as is laid out in the

Bible. And we can't claim ignorance. We can't say, I didn't know.

We can't say this was a gray area when so often it isn't a gray area.

There's some issues. There should be no debate, right? And yet, too often in our world, there's debate over issues where there should be none.

And we know what to do just as Jacob knew what to do here. The Lord spoke to him and he's spoken to us, right, in the pages of Scripture.

And so we know what way to go as we go through the life of faith. So this world is full of those who can see and those who cannot.

And the first example we have seen in this text is the example of Jacob. And someone like Jacob, one bound by righteousness, has clear sight to righteousness.

The second example that we are going to see in this text is one who cannot see.

One bound by sin has blind sight to sin. Another way to say this is, unbelievers are blinded by their sin.

I'm focusing mostly on unbelievers here, but even a believer can be blind. Sometimes we didn't know we were sinning on something and the

Lord might reveal it to us. We need to recognize that that's a possibility too. And that's a part of growing in holiness, by the way.

The Lord shows you things and something that you used to not see is sinful. You start to see as sinful.

So it really is a process of growing. But the point here is that we're seeing an unbeliever,

Laban, who we're going to see is completely blind to what is right. Now a few days ago, in this narrative,

Laban heard the bad news. A few days ago, and here's what he says, verses 22 and 23.

When it was told Laban on the third day that Jacob had fled, he took his kinsmen with him and pursued him for seven days and followed close after him into the hill country of Gilead.

So Laban pursues Jacob and his family worried that he is going to lose so much.

Laban is not pursuing them because he wants to say goodbye. But rather, he doesn't want to lose what he has been selfishly holding onto with the clasp of his hand.

Do you ever have those moments in your life where someone you love is leaving so you try to track them down so that you can say goodbye?

This is not what's happening here. This is not to say that Laban had no love for his family, but what dominated his thoughts was the control over his family and the control over the possessions that were rightly theirs.

And verse 23 says that Laban pursued Jacob with his kinsmen. This is probably referring to his sons, right, because his sons, as we saw last week, were the ones who told him, told

Laban about Jacob's prosperity. And for seven days, they are on their trail, following them close behind.

But as they were traveling, Laban went to sleep, and the Lord, as He has frequently done in Genesis, appears to Laban in a dream.

Verse 24, But God came to Laban the Aramean in a dream by night and said to him,

Be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad. So the

Lord appears to Laban in a dream, telling him, say nothing good or bad to Jacob.

Now this does not mean that Laban was to say nothing to Jacob. What we'll see actually pretty soon here is that Laban has one of the lengthier speeches in this narrative.

So that's not what this is saying, but what this is saying is that he's not supposed to do anything to Jacob, as if to try to bring him back home to pot on a rum.

And so the command the Lord is giving Laban is not to harm Jacob. And what the Lord says to Laban is reminiscent of what

He said to King Abimelech in chapter 20, verse 3. If you can remember way back to that narrative, probably several months ago, in that narrative,

Abimelech took Sarah, Abraham's wife, as his wife, and the Lord appeared to Abimelech in a dream and said,

Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man's wife.

So the Lord told Abimelech that if he did not return Sarah to Abraham that he would surely die.

The Lord is giving a similar warning to Laban here. What He's telling Laban is if you leave

Jacob and his family alone, things will go well with you. But if you don't, things will not go well with you.

There will be consequences. So as Laban is warned and probably frightened in this dream, he finally tracks down Jacob and his family.

Verse 25, And Laban overtook Jacob. Now Jacob had pitched his tent in the hill country, and Laban with his kinsmen pitched tents in the hill country of Gilead.

So the text says Laban overtook Jacob. And what this means, the Hebrew verb here, what this means is to reach or to take hold upon.

And in our modern English what this means is he caught up to him. So he was running him down for days and he finally reached him.

I'm assuming too that Jacob and his family and all that he had, they probably were traveling much slower than Laban and his sons, and they tracked him down.

And when Laban reached Jacob, Jacob and his family were settled in Gilead. This would have been across the

Jordan River. So this would have been within the confines or the premises of the land of promise.

So they had reached pretty much the place they wanted to be. And as Laban encounters him, as you might expect, he's not happy.

Do you ever have a situation in your life where you do something and you know someone is going to be upset when they find out?

Well, Jacob is feeling that right now. When he meets Laban, he knows, okay, I'm going to hear an earful here.

He's going to be rebuked by Laban. And what I want you to see here, and the focus of this point, is that Laban sees that he has done no wrong.

When we know that this is not the case. Laban believes he is the innocent party and Jacob is the offender.

Let's see this here in these verses. 26 through 30. And Laban said to Jacob, what have you done that you have tricked me and driven away my daughters like captives of the sword?

Why did you flee secretly and trick me, and did not tell me, so that I might have sent you away with mirth and songs, with tambourines and lyre?

And why did you not permit me to kiss my sons and my daughters farewell? Now you have done foolishly.

It is in my power to do you harm. But the God of your Father spoke to me last night, saying,

Be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad. And now you have gone away, because you longed greatly for your

Father's house. But why did you steal my gods? So Laban accuses

Jacob in verse 26 of taking away his daughters like a captive would take someone away with the sword.

But we know this is not true, since in verse 16 we saw that Leah and Rachel left on their own accord.

They wanted to leave, and part of the reason they wanted to leave is because of the oppression caused by Laban.

And the irony of this captivity referenced by Laban is that he was the one keeping Jacob and his whole family captive for many years.

So why is Laban doing this? Doesn't he see what his family clearly sees, and what we clearly see as we look at this text?

And of course the answer is, no, he does not. Anyone who is deep in their sin is blind to their sin.

In his mind, the captivity that he held his family under for many, many years was no captivity at all.

He thought he was in the right to do that. And what Laban says in verse 27 and 28 is comical.

He pretty much says, why didn't you tell me you were leaving? We would have sent you off with a parade to celebrate your departure.

Then in verse 28 he says, why did you not permit me to say farewell to my daughters and grandchildren by kissing them goodbye?

And the comedy continues for Laban who, as I might remind you, has no credibility and is blind to his sin.

At the end of verse 28, Laban says that Jacob has acted foolishly. Is Laban in the position to tell someone that they are acting foolishly?

Of course not. Proverbs is a wonderful book that really explains the wise person versus the foolish person.

And if you were to look through Proverbs and see what the foolish person looks like, Laban would fit that bill very well.

And after hearing all of this, Jacob would have been thinking, this is why we left. What comes out of Laban's mouth is deceit, manipulation, and a desire to control.

And hearing this one final time from Laban would have confirmed even more to Jacob that they made the right decision to leave.

Not only did the Lord tell them to leave, but this is even further confirmation that it was the right thing to leave.

So after lying to Jacob by saying I would have given you a nice send -off if you would have told me you were leaving,

Laban reveals to him that he can't do anything to him because of what the

Lord told him in the dream. This is what Laban says in verse 29. He says,

It is in my power to do you harm, but the God of your father spoke to me last night saying,

Be careful not to say anything to Jacob either good or bad. So Laban tells

Jacob that he has the power to do him harm. And pretty much everything he has said here is wrong.

He just says I have the power to do you harm. No he doesn't. God of course is sovereign and Laban has no power to do what he says he wants to do to harm

Jacob and everyone else. But we have seen this whole period that Laban is wrong and he is blind to his sin.

And the only reason he is not going to harm Jacob is because the

Lord told him. And so he is afraid of what might happen to him. He knows the Lord's power. He has seen the prosperity that the

Lord has given him over the years because of his association with Jacob. And he knows that the Lord is the one who is responsible for giving him that prosperity.

But he is blind to the fact that what he did is wrong. He just wants to be okay.

And so that is why he is not going to harm Jacob. He is blind to his own depravity.

If you look at world history it is interesting. We see some of these great villains who do unspeakably horrible things.

You think about Adolf Hitler for example during World War II the concentration camps where they sent all these

Jews to and the final total was that over a period of several years they murdered 6 million

Jewish people. And of course the world looks on and sees how horrible this is and how evil this is and how could

Hitler and his men do such a horrible thing. But in Hitler's eyes because of his great blindness to his own depravity he thought he was doing the world a favor by eliminating the

Jews. He thought that the Jewish race was inferior to other races including his own race in the world.

And how blind he was to his own depravity. How unhinged and how horrible that sin could lead to that.

And it shows us how horrible sin is that it can lead someone to do such horrible things.

And that's an extreme example. But it goes at different levels. And Laban too here is continually blind to his pattern of sin.

And he doesn't know. He's blind to it. In one sense he knows right and wrong.

The law of God is written on everyone's hearts. But in another sense here he's completely blind to his own sin.

And at the end of verse 30 here too, he not only says, why did you leave?

Why did you take away my family and my possessions? At the end of verse 30 he also says, why did you take away my gods?

And so not only is Laban a liar and an oppressor and a manipulator, but he's also a polytheist.

And what that means is that he worshipped many gods. As Christians we are monotheists, which means we believe in one

God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But at this point in history the belief in one

God was fairly unique. The dominant belief from the Babylonians to the

Egyptians to later the Greeks is that there were many gods. But of course Scripture tells us that these are false gods.

And yet, Laban believed them to have real power. And so Laban is concerned that these were stolen away from him.

And Laban charges Jacob with stealing these figurines that would have been made of metal or stone.

And he responds in this way in verse 31 and 32. Jacob answered and said to Laban, because I was afraid that this is why he left, because I was afraid, for I thought that you would take your daughters from me by force.

And anyone with whom you find your gods shall not live. In the presence of our kinsmen, point out what

I have that is yours and take it. Now Jacob did not know that Rachel had stolen them.

Okay, so Jacob here finally gets to respond to Laban who's been saying, why did you leave?

Why did you take my family? Why didn't you let me send you off the right way? And of course, he's been dishonest the whole time when he was saying that.

And then he says, why did you take my gods? And so Jacob answers the first charge first here.

He says, I left because I was afraid that you would leave me. And actually, later on in this narrative, he says,

I was afraid that you were going to leave me empty -handed. So Jacob thought, at worst, you're going to keep me here as a prisoner, and at best,

I'm going to leave to have to go back to the land of promise alone without Leah, without Rachel, without my children, without all my possessions.

That's why I left. And the Lord told me to leave. And then he addresses the household gods.

He said, anybody who takes them will surely die. But the end of verse 32 tells us that he didn't know that Rachel took these household gods.

He was ignorant to that fact. But what we see here, and this is worth noting, we've seen

Jacob's life for a while here. Jacob was once one who stole without batting an eyelash.

He was a deceiver. But what we have seen is a great improvement in his life.

The Lord has done a work in Jacob where he regularly acts honestly. And this is a great contrast to Laban, who has never changed.

His lack of change is because he's in bondage to sin. He's blind. I read in the call to worship,

Isaiah 5 .20, that many times on many issues, unbelievers see right as wrong and wrong as right.

They have morality backwards. How often do we see this in our world today?

And case in point, right, is what happened in New York just a couple weeks ago. And to believers, right, these issues, it's as clear as day.

But to those in bondage to sin, they can't see. It's blindness to it.

Blindness to one's own sinful ways. So we've seen here, the world is full of those who can see and those who cannot.

And the second example we have seen in this text is one bound to sin has blind sight to sin.

So these are the two examples that we've seen this morning. And everyone is born into this world a sinner in need of a

Savior. And until the Lord turns the light on in people's hearts, humans are blind to what is clearly right and openly embrace what is clearly wrong.

Not just approving it, but celebrating what is clearly wrong. And if you have anger in your heart, that's a good thing.

There's a such thing as righteous anger. Oftentimes our anger is sinful, but there is a place where righteous anger is true.

When we see Jesus Christ, when he goes into the temple and they're treating it like a marketplace. This holy ground that was meant as worship to God.

Jesus goes in there and he drives everybody out. That's what we call righteous anger. And so as Christians, as we look on at a world who doesn't recognize what true morality is, if you have anger in your heart towards that, that's a good thing.

Now it doesn't mean taking things into your own hands to the point where you seek vengeance. God says vengeance is mine.

But to have a righteous anger is a good thing. And this blindness that is in people's hearts, it's the sinful human heart.

And Satan himself, as 2 Corinthians 4, 3 and 4 says, he blinds the minds of unbelievers from seeing the glory of God, the light of the gospel, the truth.

So my question to you is here today, has God turned on that light in your heart?

Do you see the world through the lens of scripture? And do you see God's truth as beautiful and glorious?

If you do, that means God has turned on that light. Do you realize how remarkable that is? One moment you're dead.

The next moment you're alive. There's miracles happening every day around us.

This happens every day, everywhere on planet Earth. And it can happen today to you if this hasn't happened to you yet.

So my prayer is that the Lord would turn on that light. And as I mentioned earlier, it comes through Jesus Christ, right? You believe in the

Lord Jesus. And this is where the light turns on. My dad told the story yesterday, but he's told it before too about how when he came to faith in Christ, he lived in the party scene his whole life.

His parents, they were drinkers, drank heavily, partied every weekend, looked forward to that.

His brothers were brought up in that too. And then he met my mom. And my mom introduced him to Christ and the light turned on.

And he said that when he went back to see some of his friends who were still living in the darkness, and he actually went to a bar where his friends were, and it was a place full of people who didn't know the

Lord. And when he walked in, he told the story of it was like walking into that scene in Star Wars when, is it

Han Solo? He walks into the bar and there's all these strange creatures in there. He said it was like, it was a place that he once thought was so full of life, he saw it as lifeless.

And things he thought were so boring and dead, he saw that they were full of life. And he actually looked forward to going to church.

There's so many people today, right? They don't want to come here. This isn't the place where things are happening. This isn't the place where there's life.

And that's wrong. If you know God, He is the author of life.

He's the giver of life. And He gives the Holy Spirit to people. And when you can see that, it's beautiful.

And it's a life that's here now and forever, because it's eternal life. So I can't tell you how wonderful it is.

And I've been reading a book lately. I didn't even write this in my sermon. I'm going to tell you this right now though. I've been reading a book lately.

It's called Things of Earth. It's an excellent book, written by Joe Rigney. And he talks about how we enjoy

God through His gifts. You see Him everywhere, at every corner, from an eagle that flies by, to the beauty of a child, to the calmness of a summer morning,

I love going running when there's fresh snow on the ground. You see the Lord everywhere. You see

Him in His creation. He's the author of it. It's just like when someone writes a poem. You see that person in the poem they wrote.

And you see God in the world He created. And if you don't see that, you're blind to the reality that God, all of it points to Him.

He's meant to be enjoyed in all of it. And so that's when the light turns on, right?

You can see it. You can see it. You can see His glory. You can see His glory in the Scriptures. The book

He wrote, and in the world He created. So, my prayer is that everyone in this room would have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

That the Lord shines in you when you come to know Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior, and treasure.

So with that, next week, as we continue our sermon series through Genesis, we will look at the surprising peace agreement between Jacob and Laban.

We'll see the Lord's providence in protecting Jacob and sending these two peacefully away from each other.

So with that, let's pray. Father in Heaven, thank

You for turning on that light in our hearts. It's the very thing that Paul prayed for in Ephesians 1 .17,

that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened to see the glory of God.

Oh Lord, I pray that people would see that here today. And if you don't have it, you don't know what it's like.

And I pray that everyone here, Lord, would know Jesus Christ in the way where they see

Him as precious and glorious. And they see Father You as precious and glorious. And the Holy Spirit as precious and glorious.

And that we would live our lives that way. That it's not dead religion.

It's a life -filled religion of following You. And may we do that,

Lord, here at Eureka Baptist Church. May everyone who hears my voice right now have this and live this in their life.