Hope That Only the Gospel Can Bring | Jon Moffitt

The Gospel Hope That Christ Alone Can Bring

The ransomed church of God be saved to sin no more. What a day that will be. It's my privilege to briefly introduce a dear friend of mine, a pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, a co-host of Theocast.

John, we've known each other for five years or so now. That's been a wonderful joy in my life and a privilege. I'm thankful for you, for your friendship, for your partnership in the gospel. And so just without further ado, come and hold.

Christ out to us, my man. Thanks, brother. The greatest part about preaching second is you get all worked up from the first one. Lunch is now gone and we are ready. This is good. My title that was given to me for this afternoon's session is Hope Only the Gospel Can Bring.

Historically, Theocast has developed a reputation, whether good or bad, I guess that's depending on your opinion, of exposing the cultural and spiritual clutter that often is placed on the gospel, things that hide Christ from us.

And we like to point out issues such as pietism and legalism so that the beauty of Christ and really the rest of Christ is restored to us and we can enjoy the effects of His love as we live and serve and seek His kingdom.

Sometimes people ask, why do you spend so much time pointing out these issues? Why can't you just point to Christ? Why is that not sufficient? In a world, in our world, grace and mercy can often be seen as an additive to spiritual diets instead of the entirety of our meal.

We add grace to our efforts, excited that God would help us in our endeavors to make ourselves more sanctified and holy instead of falling into utter despair, realizing no one can make themselves holy.

I have found that until you expose someone's spiritual problem of this additive Jesus, they are not really properly embracing Him as they should as a desperate sinner. And many of you here today, it's been a joy meeting all of you and I hope I get to meet all of you, have had the claws of pietism removed from your soul and you now are breathing in the fresh air that Christ truly brings week in and week out instead of the pain and sorrow of failure.

Nothing can compare to the wonder of Christ's rest and joy it brings in the midst of what we've been talking about, the darkness of our world, the end of all things. And unlike pietism and legalism that attempt to add to the gospel, our topic today has a tendency to ignore, if not completely remove, the power of the gospel.

And if you remove the power of the gospel, well then you are removing the entirety of hope, and there is no hope. So what I did is I broke today's lecture down into three parts to help explain what I mean by what is robbing us of this hope, the power of the gospel.

Our first section, we're going to talk about the problem that we face when dealing with hope. The problem, what is it that's robbing us of this hope? Secondly, our second part is we're going to deal with the proof.

What happened to the history of the gospel? Why is it that it's often ignored? And then number three, we're going to deal with the promise. What happened to the credibility of the gospel? When addressing an issue, either of our physical body or our soul, it's always good to identify what caused the issue in the first place, or you might misdiagnose the solution.

And that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to deal with the problem of what has happened to the hope of the gospel. In the 19th century, there was a Hungarian doctor who was observing within his hospital that there was an enormous amount of not only women but babies who were dying in childbirth or right after.

And they were calling it the child fever because they didn't know what it was. They wouldn't know what was causing it. In the doctor's own words, in his research, he wrote, the physicians had been dissecting infected cadavers.

You know, this is easier to read in your mind than it is to say, had been dissecting infected cadavers with their bare hands. Then with those same contaminated hands, you know I'm about to say, they would go and deliver the babies.

Now, we live in a modern era where we see the problem immediately. There's no one who would be confused by this. But this doctor presented his research to the other physicians, his colleagues, and said, gentlemen, we need to try something washing our hands.

And so they did. And they saw the death rate dramatically drop. So he came back with his research and says, we need to implement this as a policy in our hospital. And here's the research behind it. And they said no.

And they balked him. They called him crazy. So much so that Ignis Semmelweis, was his name, suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to an asylum where he died at the age of 47. A few years later, based upon his research, they implemented his suggestions where we have learned of germ theory and where we practice it even today.

A couple of problems that I like to look at and arise in comparison of what's happening to us spiritually. Because they couldn't see the germs. They couldn't see the danger. They didn't believe it existed.

And they didn't believe that their actions were the result of the death. And second, the power of consensus. When everybody agrees, it's hard to be the one who disagrees. It's hard to be the one, as Chris says, who stands up and says, there's something wrong here.

I do not agree with the masses. And we can feel this even today. It's amazing how powerful social media can be, wanting to be in line with everyone else. And herein lies our problem regarding the hope of the gospel.

We want the gospel and the book that it comes from to be acceptable and logical. We want there to be consensus about the gospel. But there's nothing, if you're being honest, there's nothing really, from a human standpoint, logical about the It's not logical.

Especially the gospel. This is why Paul had to write and say, you all know I'm not ashamed of the gospel, right? Like, I know you might feel the need to do that, but I'm not ashamed of it. I know it's not logical to you, but I'm not ashamed of it.

This kind of leads us to our first problem when we're thinking about what happened to the hope, the problem. What happened to the hope of gospel? We read our Bibles, what I would say, from is a two-dimensional perspective.

Instead of what I would say the Bible presents itself as a three-dimensional life and view. You see, as humans, we live in a physical world, so it's easy for us to see the world and to make decisions based upon what we can see, touch, hear, feel, experience.

And so those parts of the Bible we relate to. There's a second dimension to our Bible, and it's spiritual in nature. It's God. And we have a category for God, and most people have a category for God. Like, yeah, there is a powerful being out there.

And so we read this book in light of these two dimensions. My relationship to everyone else and my relationship to God. But it kind of stops there. But there's a third dimension, but our brains have a hard time processing it.

We've alluded to it in the podcast. Chris started to allude to it as well. It's the spiritual realm. It's really hard for us to think about the Bible and the hope of the gospel in a spiritual nature. Now, I want to prove to you that your brain has been trained to shut itself off, unfortunately, when you read third-dimensional passages.

We just glance over them, sometimes not even realizing they are there. I remember the first time I was reading the Bible and—not the first time I was reading the Bible—first time I read the Bible and discovered Calvinism.

I literally picked my Bible and flipped it over going, what translation is this? Where did this—how have I never seen Ephesians chapter 2? My brain had been trained to skip the sovereignty of God and salvation and always see free will instead.

We do this when it comes to the supernatural nature of the Bible. Turn with me to Romans chapter 8. I'm going to prove this to you. This is probably one of the most famous verses or section of verses in the Bible.

We know it well. We love it. We often use it as a comfort, as I was reading through it recently. I was dumbfounded how often I have read it and my brain shuts off on what Paul is really saying. For instance, how many of you have ever been worried that an angel would keep you from the love of God?

Anybody? Raise your hand. I woke up this morning. I was like, man, I think an angel might stop me from loving God. Well, this is exactly what Paul says. But let's go ahead and test the theory. Look at verse 35.

Romans 8, 35. Who shall separate us from the love of God? I love this who because he's talking about not only situations but people. Who shall separate us from the love of God? Now, we're about to relate to everything he says.

Shall tribulation or distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, or danger, or sword. You know what those are all? First dimension. We can see those. We can experience those. That's easy for us. We can almost think about today and how there are areas in which we're like, I'm so thankful that in my weak flesh and whatever president is coming our way, that that is not the result of my life between me and my God.

That's a good thing, as even Chris was talking about. But then you read verse 38. For I am sure that neither death nor life, here it is, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers.

Anybody feeling a little tickle in the third dimension of their brain right now? Wait a minute. What does he mean by this? See, Paul, if he didn't think it was a legitimate threat, he wouldn't have said don't worry about it.

You know, what if I told you, hey, don't worry about the dragon in the parking lot when you go out to park the car. He won't bother you. He's kind of like, what dragon? Wait, they're real? You see, your hope is wrapped up in the fact that angels and rulers and powers can't stop God's love from you, according to Paul.

But if you don't understand what he means, you may not actually realize it's robbing you of your hope because your brain said, that doesn't exist. That's not real. Without even acknowledging this issue, I think a lot of us have been robbed of our hope because we don't read the supernatural, the magical, the power that opposes the gospel.

Paul, with spiritual eyes, can see all the dangers that we face through his experience of ministry, through the influence of the Holy Spirit in his eyes. He faced them, and that is why he writes of them.

Turn with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 11. This is another section of scripture that sometimes we just read, but we don't believe that we're going to experience it. This is for the early church, not for us.

This is what was going on for them. We don't face these issues now. But this is not how Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians chapter 11. He gives you an example of what an angel can do to you, and he doesn't mean the good kind.

2 Corinthians chapter 11, look at verse 3. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. Not your life, not your faith.

You can't lose your salvation. What's he worried about? Where they dedicate their time and energy, their devotion to the glory of Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one who was proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.

Well, how does this happen? For the sake of time, look at verse 13. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

So it is of no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. That's third dimension. He is actually worried about an entire army of rebelling spirits manipulating your trust of the gospel.

The whole germ thing is here. Yeah, well, you know, maybe. Their end will correspond to their deeds. We will identify the message of their mouth, and their mouth will lead them to their destruction. Now, listen, stick with me, because we've only got started here.

I just opened the door. I know you see the snow, and you see the little fawn, and you see the white witch, and you're starting to think, when will I wake up? We're going to walk through the wardrobe together, just for a little bit.

He mentions two other identities that, again, we don't know what to do with. He mentions rulers and powers in Romans chapter 8. He says, rulers and powers won't stop you from my love. Now, he doesn't mean local rulers like that of Nero or Pharaoh, human.

He means spiritual. I mean, just turn to Ephesians chapter 6. Chris alluded to it. You need to see it. You need to start reading these third-dimensional passages and embracing them. He's talking about demonic rulers, rulers that have powers beyond our comprehension.

At the end of this amazing letter to the Ephesians, I mean, what Christian doesn't love Ephesians? It's so good, right? At the end of this, like, this beautiful picture of what Christ is and His church, He's worried about what might come and remove the lampstand, right?

What might come and bring disunity? What might come rob them of the hope? Listen, if you've ever been in a church long enough, you know we get in fights in the church. We argue. We bicker, and He goes, hey guys, you're not wrestling each other.

Each other's not the problem, and if you are in a fight with your brother or sister, you need to know where it's coming from. Read with me, verse 12, Ephesians 6, 12. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against...

Now, we know this can't be humans because He just said it's not flesh and blood, but against rulers and against... What authority do they have? You ever wonder, what spiritual authority is He talking about?

Is your brain just, like, kind of blown, right? Mine is, like, what authority do they have? Authorities against cosmic powers over this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.

This isn't in my notes. This is free. I'll throw it in there. Do you know that Jude records a battle in heavenly places? Jude tells us that Satan got in a fight with Michael over the body of Moses. Now, tell me that ain't third-dimensional weirdness.

What you want to do with that body there, buddy? And the fact is, it says they fought. I was like, how long? How did it end? Apparently, they can't die, so what's that look like, you know? You got to start reading your Bible with some open eyes here because there's a whole lot more going on, and Jude's just like, yeah, that happened.

Like, you should be aware that's normal. My favorite is James is like, hey, resist the devil, he'll flee from you. I'm like, excuse me, what? Let's back this back up for a minute. You're acting like this is normal.

See, we have a category for Satan. That's just not a problem. He's an adversary. He's probably the most famous one, but we kind of assume it's just him, and he's a... well, he's a little demon that likes to cause little problems.

This is not how the New Testament or the Old mentions this realm, this third dimension that collapses on each other, the spiritual and the physical together. I want to have a conversation with Paul because sometimes conversations, they're helpful, right?

You get to ask questions. This is how the conversation goes in my mind if I were to sit down with Paul and say, all right, I need to understand how this third dimension works that you keep writing about.

You just wrote Romans 8 and Ephesians 6, and you're blowing our brains here. Explain yourself. So, first question, Paul, you wrote that we shouldn't be afraid of angels, which I never have before. What do you mean by that?

Clearly, this is Paul, you haven't experienced that kind of power, have you? Well, up to this point in my day, no, I haven't really experienced anything like that other than hunger. Paul, I can tell you, or I can tell, how much of the law have you read and understood?

Did you not pay attention to the story of God provided for you about the various realms and how they're at war with one another in the law? Realms? War? Yeah, I must have fallen asleep during that section.

What book is that found in? Book? Are you kidding me? How do you not know about the war of the gods? You mean plural gods? Gods? I thought there was one God. Now you're telling me there are multiple gods.

You really are losing me here, Paul. Did you ever read my first letter to the church, Church of Corinth? You use a numbering system. I think it's chapters and verses. Chapter four, verse four. Very clever, by the way.

I wrote something in the line of, in their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbeliever to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Sounds like a hope robber. How would an idol or a fictitious God blind people? Well, yeah, but isn't that just Satan? Isn't that just like another way of talking about Satan? Yes, but he is one of many gods.

Do you not remember the great words of the prophet Moses, who wrote the books of the law as they brought them out of Egypt? You use the title Exodus, chapter 20. But listen, listen to what Moses wrote.

What is the first command he gives Israel? And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of his slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

Why would the first commandment be not to have other gods if there didn't exist? Sure, Satan is one of them. But he gave this command because Israel had worshipped other gods for 400 years while living in Egypt.

Wait a minute. Okay, but the gods have power? Like that kind of power? What power do you believe I referred to in my letter to the churches at Ephesus and to the church of Rome? Yes, a whole host of gods and demons ruled the spiritual realm, the kingdom of darkness.

They have been at war attempting to destroy the seed of Eve through the means of the seed of the serpent since the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. Remember when Moses wrote, her seed will be at enmity with the seed of the serpent.

There's been a seed war ever since. The dark spiritual realm only seeks to destroy the king's message and his people. They have rebelled and only seek to destroy the light that it brings. Hold on, hold on a second here though, Paul.

I need to go back to this thing about the gods for a moment. So it's a thing in the Old Testament too? Moses, when writing of Jacob and the tribe of Jacob, do you remember this in the law? This is Deuteronomy.

He says this, 3212, the Lord alone guided him. No foreign god was with him. You see, it's everywhere. This is why we call Yahweh the God of gods in the Psalms, the Lord of lords, the king of kings. And by the way, we're not getting into this today, they're not all bad gods.

Some are those who have rebelled, we know of their story, against Yahweh. And some sit in service to Yahweh, but we all must save this for another day. Here's Paul's concluding thought. Look, this is what you need to know.

This realm hates our God. They want nothing more than to destroy our hope and mission. Our brother Peter warns us about this in his letter, 1 Peter 5 .8, we know it. Be sober-minded, be watchful, your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.

Resist him, oh this is good, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kind of suffering are being experienced by your brothers throughout the world. So how do we fight back against him? By putting our hope in the work of the king.

It's like an armor, it protects us. I'm assuming most Christians today don't see a need for armor. That is, they defend themselves through their own means. And so they've been blinded to the gods and rulers and powers and authorities, and why they probably don't have hope.

The end. Our problem today is that we walk through a spiritual battlefield unaware of the daily dangers. It's hard to fight in a war you don't believe exists. It's hard to change the way you think and the way you act because you don't feel that there's a danger.

This really is the problem. We have left the third dimension of our faith and we wonder why we struggle to believe that our God can save. Part two, the proof. What happened to the history of the gospel?

Well, if you start with part one, you can understand that the history of the gospel becomes useless because it's cluttered with weirdness. The largest section of your Bible is the first part, right? The Old Testament.

Because we have removed a third dimension of this understanding of Scripture, we miss the power of the gospel when claims are made. How do you know that nothing is more powerful than God? You ever wondered this?

See, we all kind of live in an echo chamber at times, in a bubble, and everyone in this room believes that nothing is more powerful than God. But some of you have wondered, what if we got it wrong? My kids have asked me this, hey dad, how do we know we're right?

And the Muslims aren't right. Or the Mormons. Like, how do we know we're right? So many people are leaving the evangelical faith and reverting to other religions or other faiths because of this very problem.

The third dimension of God's power revealed in the Word is now gone. It's hidden. The proof of his hope is presented to you as what I would say a blind faith. You just have to believe. Can I tell you how dumb that is?

Your God did not come up to you and say, I just need you to believe. Thankfully, he wrote it down through eyewitnesses. Stop and think about that for a moment. You ever hear a story from a person who, from a person, from a person, you're kind of like, yeah, I think it went like this.

Like, that's kind of weird. Aliens, huh? Cool. Then you talk to the person who saw the alien and you're like, really? Like, you touched it. All right, man, tell me more. It changes it, right? You have first encounters with God written on a page and then thousands of readers who believe it and then confirm it and experience it by adding their firsthand experience.

It's not one. It's not one person who wrote it down. Multiple authors over hundreds of years documenting, let's just be frank, really powerful, powerful claims. Turn with me to Psalm 78, real quick. This is a great section that summarizes the craziness of God's power through eyewitnesses who experienced it and wrote it down that we might see it so our hope might be encouraged.

This is Psalm 78. We're going to begin, for the sake of time, in verse 12. Do not miss the third word, in the sight of their fathers. Dear brothers and sisters, they saw God's power in the sight of their fathers.

He performed wonders in the land of Egypt, in the fields of Zion or zone. He divided the sea and let them pass through it and made the water stand like a heap. In the daytime, he led them with a cloud and all the night with a fiery light.

He split rocks in the wilderness and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep. He made streams come out of the rock and caused waters to flow down like rivers. Do you know that no one else can make that kind of a claim?

Hey, so what's your God done? Oh man, he brought us good harvests this year. Mine can hold water up in the sky for as long as he wants. This is what was going on in Egypt. It was a battle of the gods.

You have to understand, 400 years of being in that culture, they had embraced the gods and a lot of them. Moses was sent as a representative of the God of gods of I Am. He was the representative of Yahweh.

And as he came before Pharaoh, guess who was standing behind Pharaoh? The representatives of their gods. And when Moses stood to say, I am representing the God of Israel and of this universe, they wanted proof.

And so Moses provided proof to which they matched. And it was not a magic trick. When I was a kid, and maybe even recently, I used to think, are there any kids in here? I used to think how dumb Israel was.

I'm like, y 'all like worship idols? That's so stupid. That's just a piece of wood, man. They weren't dumb. They had seen with their own eyes the capacity of the gods. By the way, this is what Paul's talking about.

I know some of our brains have that little spinny wheel when your hard drive crashes. Wait a minute. But he's worried about us not taking it serious and then affecting us. The Old Testament is the story of God's power overcoming, listen to this, this is related to our hope, any obstacle our redemption would face.

He proved there was nothing stronger, wiser, more powerful than him. He would preserve this nation for thousands of years to bring us the God-man, our Messiah. And when that God-man showed up and said, I am God, he had a history.

I mean, that history is unreal, right? Some have documented 87 different miracles in the Old Testament that are unmatched by any other god. Because what does Israel keep doing? They keep falling back to these false gods, and God keeps proving to them not only his power, but what they do not experience with the gods, his love, his grace, his mercy, his kindness.

And before we even touch the New Testament, I want to stay in the Old to show you how powerful the story of the hope of the gospel is, which leads us to our final part, part three, the promise. What happened to the credibility of the gospel?

When you remove the third dimension of your understanding of Scripture, you're removing the power from the gospel. See, when God says, I will save you, and you don't read how he did it before, you can wonder if it's really going to happen.

What's the ground that I'm standing on? When you don't believe in the sufficiency and the power, you don't believe in the magic of God, it's easy to slip in another gospel, another explanation. And it doesn't come from our king.

He doesn't provide another gospel. His is sufficient. This is why Paul on multiple occasions says, be weary of other gospels. Be afraid when there might be a logical gospel. A gospel that makes you uncomfortable, that is the gospel.

A gospel that makes sense is most likely not the gospel. For us who have the Spirit within us, he will never be able to remove our faith, this evil realm, but he can weaken it, as Paul says. He can distract us, how 2 Peter says it, he can cause us to be ineffective and unfruitful.

Going back to, you don't have to turn there, turn with me to 1 Peter, but referencing 1 Peter chapter 1, referencing, again, 2 Corinthians 11, 3, but I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from sincere and pure devotion.

If your hope is wavered from Christ, it's because the third dimension did it to you. That's Paul's conclusion. I'm afraid that he's done it. So how do we put the credibility, the power, and the weight of the hope of the gospel back in so that it actually does its intended effect?

Well, brother, I stole your thunder and you stole mine. 1 Peter chapter 1, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ according to his great mercy. Man, you read that Old Testament, it requires a lot of mercy upon him.

He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. For the sake of time, I'm not going to read verse 4, but I will read verse 5. Who by God's power.

You're not keeping yourself. You're not keeping your inheritance. You're not keeping your sanctification. You're not keeping your position. So you go back and you realize God is proving to you there is no human and there is no God.

There is no demon. There is no angel. There is nothing. There is no nation, no president, no Nero. Who can beat me? Because I've won. Every story God wins. Then you read that and you go, yeah, you see, if Peter really means that God holds my salvation, there's no bully bigger than him.

There's no being who can outsmart him. See, the hope of the gospel rests in the power of a supernatural God that has nothing to do with your physical capacities. That's the hard thing about the hope of the gospel.

That's what's changed about the modern gospel. All of our hope is placed upon the reality of our own capacities, our own power. We misquote passages such as, without holiness, no one will see the Lord.

And you know where we're pointing? What holiness we're pointing to? Your power to obey. You want to stand up to God's power with that? Go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and just crawl up in his hands and say, do your best because I've already seen it.

I'm good. I got nothing to worry. You see, Paul doesn't rest on just making a statement. Hey, you know, you don't need to be afraid. You ever talk to a salesman who's trying to sell you something you really don't want, and he's doing his best to give you all the evidence as how the benefits of other people.

And then you talk to someone who's actually owned it and experienced the benefit of it. You don't need no salesman. Why? Their experience sold you on the reality that it's good for you. Paul does not stand up and say, here are all the reasons and listens.

He pulls the God of the old and says, do you remember him? He's the God that saves. And it's not like anything you've ever seen. And by, let me tell you, you're going to be under the attack of the mind.

This is why, how many times does Paul and Peter see, be sober minded, be sober minded, be watchful, protect your mind. They, as we, as elders and shepherds have to be on the lookout for those. I mean, first John literally says, test the spirits to make sure they're of the Lord.

That's another third dimension. When everybody had like hiccup on that, we'd be like, whoa, man, sounds Pentecostal to me. What? We speaking in tongues now? What's going on here? That's because Paul really believed that the angels of darkness would appear and start twisting the truth that we rely on.

This is why Paul says, if myself or anyone else, I don't know if Paul thought maybe someone could like shapeshift and look like him. If someone shows up and looks like me and preach another gospel, that isn't me.

Or that angel shows up that was freed. Didn't even have that thought till now. Super fascinating to think about though. If an angel shows up and starts telling you a gospel that makes sense, reject it because it's not God's gospel.

Donald Gray Barnhouse in this book on the invisible war made this observation that I found helpful for me. If you're like me, whenever I have to put something together, I was recently building a bike rack for my kids' bikes and I read the instructions and I was like, uh, got no clue.

What did I do? Flipped it over and looked at the photos, the illustrations. I need to see the end product, what it's supposed to look like. We need the illustrations to prove to us this is going to work.

Barnhouse makes this argument that he has let the realm of the rebellion have their best shot. Do your best so that my people will know I win. I win. Who can separate you from that? They've never been able to do it.

Believers, we got to start living our life in the third realm. It will renew your hope and you will start to rely on gospels, the gospel in ways you never have before. How foolish is it to you? Do you start thinking that your little acts of obedience are going to do something against that realm?

But it's like the little brother who goes into the fight with the big brother next to him. He's like, let's go. Let's go. Our Father, we are so thankful that we have a hope that actually is based upon not us but you.

We have a hope far beyond our capacities. Lord, thank you for gathering us together, for building us up, in Christ's name, amen.