James White - 2 Corinthians 5:21

To find an answer to. As with Vatican II, they sought to open up the doors and let the dust blow out. Well, they did that. But certainly, I know many in the Church, and I have still some very good, strong relationships still with folks that are in the Roman Catholic Church, that they, when it comes to Vatican II and Lumen Gentium, they almost wish that it didn't occur, which is why I think you have a lot of folks right now that are going to the traditionalist movement, and it's something that's occurring quite often.

But without further ado, six years ago, I had received Christ, had come out of Catholicism, was given all sorts of books at the Baptist church that I was in. It was from really great titles that were helping me in my seeking for the truth, like A Woman Writes the Beast, which I thought was like comic book literature.

As a Catholic, I said, you've got to be kidding me. Most of this is just trash. It was like picking up something in the supermarket line, if you will. But then, I went to a website that someone recommended, Phil Johnson's Bookmarks.

And in Phil Johnson's Bookmarks, there was a blue light special next to this, Alpha and Omega Ministries. And I clicked on at that time, and I finally found someone that would not misrepresent the Catholicism that I came from, and was truly taking the Word of God seriously, and holding not only Catholicism, but so many other aberrant beliefs up to that light, and exposing them for what they are, but also at the same time, who had a passion to share the gospel, and to teach.

That is so rare. And for so many of us that are here tonight, and were here last night, this man's ministry, while it's been criticized by so many, and the main reason they can't stand this gentleman, is because he continues, even though the criticism comes, to still stand for the gospel alone, and never wavers.

And for so many of us out here that are Timothys, he continues to be that Paul. And would you welcome please, Dr. James White. Thank you, Michael. I don't want any of you to panic, first of all. I am going to be brief.

It is late in the afternoon, and I'm not going to make any comments about how preceding speakers went on, and shared their hearts with you. I just want to point out that Eric Svensson finished exactly on time.

And so that's good for Eric, and I appreciate that. And I appreciate the fact that he had a much nicer clicker than I have. I just really am now experiencing a tremendous amount of techno envy as a result of that.

But I'm going to be brief, because we have a certain time we need to be out of here. They're already setting up for a bar mitzvah outside, I think, so we need to be careful as we're leaving. And we obviously, the folks in the back, have to have time to pack up.

And I would like to spend the first few moments of my time, however, thanking some folks. When you come to a conference, you just figure, well, you know, what does it really take to set up some chairs and to do a few things like that?

I have resisted doing anything like what we have done today for many years. The reason is, Alpha Omega Ministries is a very small ministry. We are a small band of folks, and my experience years and years and years ago was when we would take on trying to do something, anything that didn't get done, I'd end up doing, and I just have resisted to the death the idea of doing anything like this, because I know how many details there are in getting tickets done and websites and all the organizational stuff.

And when you get here, I don't care how well you planned, there's a million things you have to, a million fires you have to put out as soon as you get here. Well, if you have benefited from hearing Pastor King this morning, from hearing from Tom Askle and from Phil Johnson and from Steve Camp and Eric Svensson, if you've learned things, if you enjoyed the debate last night, the people that you see running around in the, looking a little bit like a group of people who would be out on the streets enforcing the laws, the folks in the black shirts, they're the ones to thank for the tremendous amount of work.

I think about a third of the membership of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church is currently here. It's going to be very quiet in our church tomorrow morning. I'm sort of feeling badly about that. But the folks that you see here, the vast majority of them are all volunteers and they have all worked very, very hard to put this together.

And so I wish to thank them from the bottom of my heart. And I want to acknowledge their tremendous amount of work. They kept me out of the loop. They just said, you show up, do your thing, and we're going to take care of everything else.

And that's exactly what they did. So I would like to thank them for the amount of work that they have put in to make this available. Now, I only wanted to, in the time that I had, piggyback on what some of the other folks had said.

And since we have just a brief amount of time, what I wanted to do is really to pick up on just one element of what was said. I've appreciated everything that was presented. There's much I would like to say, but the temptation is to start talking about stuff and then not have time to really finish it.

And so there was much that was said just now. There is one thing I will say. I will give unto one temptation. It was just a couple of years ago that I sent an email to a Roman Catholic apologist and I pointed out to this particular individual the contrast between some of the statements that Eric had just posted and something that the Pope had just said in a recent talk that he had given.

There is a tremendous amount of inclusivistic language being used in Rome these days. And he had made a statement that was just so obviously contradictory to an allegedly infallible statement previously that I just put it in an email and sent it to this particular individual.

And it was fascinating, the response I got. The response was, James, who are you to interpret what the church has said in the past? You see, only the church can infallibly interpret what the church has said in the past.

And so if the church says that what the church said back then in plain words, in a language that anyone can understand, does not mean what those words actually mean, but they're actually consistent and harmonious with what the church is saying now, then that's what you do.

The church has the ultimate authority. It's sola ecclesia to the max. And in trying to deal with those types of issues, many people will testify, that's what you encounter over and over and over again, is the original context.

Original intent, something like looking at the Constitution like the Constitution was intended to be looked at, something that the judiciary is supposed to do, but that's become unfashionable now. Same type of thing with anything.

We can simply revise what was understood, what was believed. We can look back in those days. We can look back at what Innocent III believed. We can look at the context and the application. And when you do so, the meaning was clear.

But well, you know, if the church now says this, then that needs to be consistent because our starting point is what? Our starting point is the infallibility of the church. And that's where you get sola ecclesia.

The church is the ultimate authority. And so I've experienced it myself. It's a clearly a circular argument at that point, but it just reminded me of everything that I had experienced as I was listening to Eric's presentation.

The Doctrine of Justification and N.T. Wright's Reading of 2 Corinthians 5:21

But the main thing I wanted to address in just a few moments was something that Phil Johnson did not get an opportunity to expand on. I don't know if you walked in here, like many people do, wondering what in the world is going on with people today concerning the doctrine of justification.

I thought we were all on the same page. I thought the issues were fairly clear. You had the Roman Catholic belief and you had the Protestant belief and we get together and we have debates and we sit around and open the Bible and we talk about things and that's how things went.

But now I'm hearing all these odd things. And of course, Phil did an excellent job in summarizing for you, I think one of the most important books. By the way, fans of N .T. Wright don't tend to like to use that particular book because it is the simplest book.

It is the most easy to understand book. And so when I, just like Phil, have used that as the standard representation of Wright's materials as I've presented seminars on his beliefs, I've heard people saying, well, you know, that's not the best book to use.

There's articles over here and all this scholarly material. But in reality, it's very clear that that is the book that is making the most impact. That is the book that was specifically written to communicate to people in the pew.

And that is really where you can see the essence of what N .T. Wright is saying. Now one thing that Phil didn't get to do was he didn't get to get into some of the scriptural passages and some of the interpretations that N .T. Wright offers.

Obviously, if Wright's perspective is as Phil presented it, and I would agree with everything that he said is in his representation of what his viewpoints are, then there are certain passages of scripture that you might have been sitting there going, well, you know, Phil did cite 2 Corinthians 5 .21.

But how would N .T. Wright understand something like that? If you think that the righteousness of God is only God's covenant faithfulness, and if you don't believe in imputation, then 2 Corinthians 5 .21 becomes rather problematic.

He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Now, that has been a passage that's been understood by generations as involving the great exchange.

Our sins imputed to Christ. I mean, when you think about it, he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf. What does that mean? Well, the Father treated the Son, as I think John MacArthur well put it.

He was treated as we deserve so that we might be treated as he deserved. He lived that perfect holy life, and we get to have that righteousness. The great exchange. Our sins imputed to him. His righteousness imputed to us.

That's how it's been understood, but how would someone who follows this perspective of N .T. Wright understand 2 Corinthians 5 .21? I think by trying to explain this to you, taking just a few moments to help you understand how N .T. Wright understands this passage, you'll be able to see really the impact of adopting this perspective and in essence forcing it upon the text of Scripture.

And I do say forcing. I really do believe that N .T. Wright's view of justification, this is a term I've used, is monochromatic. Monochromatic. Remember those, some of you are, when I mention this to my kids, they sort of chuckle at me, but remember the first PCs that came out and they had those wonderful monochrome screens?

They were green, or if you were really fancy, they were amber, which to me looked like orange, but anyway. And they didn't have much in the way of resolution and there wasn't much in the way of graphics there, though I do remember learning to play Flight Simulator on amber screen.

That was really cool, trying to land that thing on that little amber screen. And a monochrome monitor doesn't display in color. And so if you displayed a color picture, it just was different shades of the same, whether it was green or amber or whatever it was.

And so his view of justification I've described as monochrome. It is flattened out, it's one-dimensional. Instead of being the rich, colorful, beautiful image of justification that we've come to understand from the Scriptures, those colors are taken out, the depth is taken out, and you're left with this husk of what it is we've always believed.

And that is illustrated, I think, very, very well when we listen to what he believes 2 Corinthians 521 means. What does he say? Well, he says, we look at the context, and 2 Corinthians chapters 3, 4, and 5 are all about the apostolic ministry.

It's about the ministry. You know, you've got Paul and Apollos, and you've got the Corinthians who were arguing about which side they were going to be on and things like that. And you have these ministers who are going about, and they're ministering in the church, and he says the whole context here is the apostolic ministry.

And he says if you turn this into a passage about justification and righteousness and the atonement, this is just some sort of little isolated passage that's just floating around all by itself, as if Paul never, ever, ever once in his life, while talking about something else, would just all of a sudden break into some discussion of the gospel and say, praise be to God for his glorious grace.

Paul would never do anything like that, right? That never happened anywhere in all the rest of his epistles, and so we couldn't let that happen. And so what he understands the passage to mean is this.

Remember, righteousness of God, for right, means God's covenant faithfulness. So his understanding of 2 Corinthians chapter 5 is this. He made him who knew no sin, that is Jesus Christ, to be sin on our behalf.

Our is the apostles. This is not a statement that really, in essence, has anything to do with you today. That wonderful statement, he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf. The our there is not the our we see so often in Paul, that is the people of God.

He's talking about the apostles. And so what happens is, is the atonement has empowered the apostles. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we, the apostles, might be made the incarnation, the fleshing out of God's covenant faithfulness.

So even though we apostles seem to have failed, even though we apostles do not have a glorious ministry in the eyes of men, in reality, our apostolic ministry will succeed and we become the enfleshment of God's covenant faithfulness.

He remains faithful to the apostles in the apostolic ministry. And as such, that's a demonstration, despite what it looks like to the world, that's a demonstration of his covenant faithfulness to the apostles.

Now, I don't see a lot of you going, amen, because the fact of the matter is you listen to something like that and you go, what? The apostolic ministry is a demonstration of the faithfulness of God? Well, that's a true statement, I guess.

Wouldn't it be true? I mean, God was faithful to the apostles. He was faithful to their work. There's no question about that. So it's not like that's a lie, but is that really what Paul's talking about?

What amazes me is, is I've taken the time. I mean, he presents this in his book and he says, I've elsewhere demonstrated. Unfortunately, he forgot to put a footnote there. And so you got to go digging around through all of his articles and stuff.

And I finally dug up after a fair amount of work, the scholarly article wherein he allegedly demonstrated this. And he actually didn't go into much more detail there than he did in the book. But what amazes me is when someone of his obvious intelligence, of his obvious abilities will look at a passage of scripture like that.

And there are entire concepts right there in the text that just go flying by. Why in the world would Paul say, he made him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf. If all he's simply talking about is that God is going to bless the apostolic ministry and the apostolic ministry is going to be a demonstration of God's faithfulness.

Isn't there a whole lot of sacrificial language here? There's, why even mention the fact that Jesus knew no sin? What does it mean to, what does it mean when it says he made him who knew no sin to be sin in our place?

There's no connection between that and the demonstration of God's covenant faithfulness in the apostolic ministry. We have always thought, wow, here you have the sinless one who is made sin. That doesn't mean that his nature was changed.

We have here the very, a very important element of what it means to impute righteousness. Our sins were imputed to Christ. That did not make Christ less than God. It did not defile him in that sense. God as judge treated him as if guilty of those sins that did not change him in the sense of making him guilty of those sins and making him impure in that sense and ceasing to be God or something like that.

But he bears, he is treated, those sins are imputed to him in the very same way that his righteousness is imputed to us. We are treated as if we have fulfilled the law of God perfectly. We are treated as if we have done what Christ did in the fulfillment of that law.

And that is why we can have peace with God. And the same way Christ is treated as if he has been guilty of all the sins of his people that are laid upon him. And so the wrath of God falls upon him. He made him who knew no sin to be sin in our place.

So that what? And people say, well, so that we might be. And they don't understand that the language is not expressing doubt there. The language is expressing purpose. The purpose of the cross, the purpose of the atonement, the purpose of the fact that Christ, a sinless one, experiences the wrath of God.

The purpose of that transaction was so that we, not might in the sense of hope, not might is in the sense that that came out in the debate that took place a few years ago on Long Island. When going through the same passage that Brother Steve read earlier in Romans chapter four, verse eight, I asked Father Peter Stravinskas, who is the blessed man?

And he had never been asked that question before. It's a question I ask a lot of Roman Catholics. Who's the blessed man of Romans four eight? It's something I would recommend you ask Roman Catholics. And I know we asked Roman Catholics here today.

So I'll ask you, who is the blessed man of Romans four eight there in discussing that wonderful truth of, of imputation once again, of the righteousness of Christ, you have this blessed man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.

Well, if you're a Roman Catholic or a former Roman Catholic, ask yourself a question. You commit a venial sin to whom is it imputed? Well, it's imputed to you. The temporal punishment of that, that sin is born by you.

Is it not? That's why there's such a place called purgatory because there's temporal punishments for those sins and you bear them. Nobody can bear them in your place. But if you commit a mortal sin to whom is it imputed to you, you commit a mortal sin.

You lose the grace of justification. You become the enemy of God. You have to be re-justified. You have to go to the sacrament of penance, confession. So there is no such thing as the non-imputation of sin within the Roman Catholic theological system.

And so who is the blessed man to whom the Lord will not impute sin? And father Pierce Trevinskas' initial answer, which he sort of had to give up on later on, because I don't think he'd ever been asked this question before was Jesus.

Think about that one for a moment. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. That didn't work too well. Jesus isn't the blessed man being discussed in Romans 4 .8. And so I pressed the issue a little bit more and eventually said, I hope to be someday.

I hope to be the blessed man someday. And I can only hear someone say that. And my heart is broken for anyone who would have possession of the word of God and yet would say, well, I hope someday to be the blessed man.

I understand why he said that. He said that because he does understand what Ludwig Ott said years before when he said, the uncertainty of the state of grace lies in just this, that no man without a supernatural revelation can know whether he has fulfilled all the conditions which are necessary for achieving justification.

That would be, in my opinion, the best example of bad news that I could ever hear. If I have to fulfill conditions which are necessary for justification, and I know the holiness of God and I know my own heart, that's bad news.

That's not the gospel. I am so thankful that as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, someone did fulfill the necessary conditions for my justification, that someone is my savior, Jesus Christ. And it's only in his righteousness that I can stand.

Who is the blessed man? I had one Roman Catholic tell me, it's the person who was just baptized before they leave the church. I'm serious. And that one at least made sense. They've been baptized, sin's been washed away, they haven't walked out the door of the church yet where, you know, someone can drive by and splash them with water and they committed venial sin because they're mad at that person.

And there's your blessed man. Doesn't last very long, but that's the blessed man. Is that really what Paul's talking about? Of course not. The blessed man is every single believer in Jesus Christ, bar none.

That's what the whole message of the gospel is. And so when we look at 2 Corinthians 5, he made him who knew no sin to be sin in our place, on our behalf, so that we would be made the righteousness of God, but only in one way, in him.

You see, one of the reasons that justification by faith is under attack is that justification by faith is an anti-pluralistic doctrine. What do I mean by that? It's always only in Christ. You see, justification by faith talks about sin, it talks about wrath, it talks about the necessity of atonement, and there's only one place where that exists, according to Christianity, and that is in Jesus Christ.

And all these folks who want to be pluralistic, all these folks who want to say, oh, you know, the Muslim worships the God of Abraham, the Muslim is, we're together in the one faith. No, you're not. You haven't read Surah 4 and 5 in the Quran, if you think that.

You have no concept of what Islam believes, or really what the Bible believes, if you can actually make statements like that. The doctrine of justification precludes us from being pluralist. It precludes us from denying the centrality and uniqueness of Christ, because the doctrine of justification by faith is based upon the finished atoning work of Jesus Christ, and it's only in him that we can have the righteousness that justification speaks of.

And so it's not a popular doctrine these days, because in the church today, there is this fear of offending anyone. I had the opportunity last, is that last weekend? I'm starting to lose track of what weekend it is.

I was at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and they set up a Q &A session for students there on campus. I didn't know what I was walking into. You know, folks at college campuses, they tend to be a little bit on the odd side, especially the ones in ministry and college campuses.

And so they named this get together Stump the Chump. And until we got there, I had no idea. I finally pick up the flyer. Literally, here's what the flyer that's been distributed all over this campus, Stump the Chump.

It says, and then underneath it says, think you can prove God doesn't exist? Do you like just to argue? And then it says free pizza. Now there's a combination that's, I'm doomed, you know? So I'm the chump, okay?

And we filled the place up. You know, it worked. It was a pragmatic approach and it worked. And boy, did we have some conversations there. Wow. We had some real conversations with some folks. And in fact, to be honest with you, I'm carrying in my PDA case back there, a question asked by a young man there in Peoria, Illinois by the name of Eric.

And I sat down afterwards and talked with Eric for quite some time. We were surrounded by most of the people and had a real wonderful conversation with Eric. Eric had some epistemological problems. And how can we know anything?

How can I know that my jacket exists? And, you know, some of that basic kind of stuff. And we had quite the conversation and I let him talk until he finally, see, just in passing, you might say, how do you talk to someone like that?

How do you talk to someone who's not sure that their jacket's there or not? You know? I mean, that's a little bit of a challenge. It was. There's no two ways about it. What I did is I recognized this is how I do apologetics like that.

There is no neutral ground between me and Eric. There's no such thing as neutral ground. You see, if God created everything, then everything exists because God created the way that he created it. Any fact that exists, exists because God made it that way.

And so I can't prove the Christian God by starting off by denying the Christian God. To admit neutrality, to admit there is an exact, there is a fact that exists outside of God's creative command, is to deny the God I want to try to prove.

So there, I don't believe there's a neutral ground, but I do believe this. Every single person I'm talking to is created in the image of God. That's the connection. And every single person, because they're created in the image of God, when they live in rebellion against God's truth, is living inconsistently with that image.

And eventually they're going to prove it. Eventually they're going to slip up. Eventually they're going to say something that demonstrates that they're not living consistently with their worldview. They're actually borrowing from mine.

And I just had to let Eric talk long enough before he hung himself. And he did. I pointed out to him, look, you don't live consistently with your own worldview. You can't walk out the door and drive down a street or walk down a sidewalk in a way that's consistent with the worldview that you're talking about.

And then he said this. He said, well, I know I should try to be consistent. Gotcha. I said, why? What do you mean? Why should you try to be consistent? And I pushed that. In fact, he started getting a little upset.

And I calmed him down. And eventually at the end of the conversation, I said to Eric, I said, I'm going to be praying that every time in your life, you speak and act inconsistently with your own worldview.

God's going to convict you. He's going to remind you of that silly looking bald man that you talked to that one night. And he is going to just chase you with the hounds of heaven until you stop suppressing the truth that you know about the God who's there.

And I've kept the question that he asked. He asked a number of them. He started off by reading from the Atheist Manifesto, but he turned in a note card with a question and I have it in my PDA case. And so I would invite you to join with me in seeking the hounds of heaven upon 19 year old Eric in Peoria, Illinois.

But the whole reason I said that was here we are doing this presentation and there are so many worldviews being thrown at me. There are so many questions being thrown at me. I mean, I would literally have a question.

How can we really know that the Bible is true? And is there really anything wrong with gay marriage? You know, as if that's those are the two in the person thinking they're the same question. In some ways it's true they were.

But one of the consistent questions that came up more than once was, how can you Christians think that you're right and other religions are wrong? And I was so thankful that I've always been very, very consistent.

I've been very, very consistent in resisting any kind of pluralism and in resisting any kind of compromise the fact that Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation. God has the right to save the way God chooses to save.

It's amazing how people think that we can tell God how his grace is going to be manifested. How he's going to save. What an amazingly arrogant creature we are. The doctrine of justification is the single greatest bulwark against the diminishment of the centrality and uniqueness of Jesus Christ that God has given to us.

And that's why in those denominations that have become all ushy-gushy, feel good with all the religions of the world, and they're out there. I remember years ago, I was asked to, I used to do what these two guys are doing, except that the cameras were a lot bigger and I used to do it professionally.

I was a cameraman. I learned at the large church we were at, and I did professional camera work where I actually got paid, got paid good money. Doing shooting, I shot some television commercials and stuff like that, and learned how to run a television camera and things like that, do television engineering.

I've done a lot of stuff in my life. And one day I got called up and it had been years since I had done it. I had stopped doing it. I was already involved in ministry. The guy said, I really need a cameraman.

We're doing the Episcopalian National Convention in Phoenix. And I said, well, okay, it's been a long time. Put me on the camera farthest away. Cause you know, I mean, you got a nice wide shot. No one can see if you're sort of jerking a little bit, but if you're real close up, you know, any little movement is exaggerated.

This is going to be live uplinked to Episcopalian churches, Anglican churches all over the world. And so we're there for the warmup, the practice run through session. Guess where they put me? Right down front.

And they were in a situation where there were four microphones in the room representing North, South, East, and West. And first of all, they had American Indians come in and do a dance, which was nice.

Except it wasn't to, you know, Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so. It was a pagan ritual to bless the building. And I'm just sort of going, oh brother. Now remember, we've got those little microphone, those little headset thingies on, you know, and whenever you see someone doing their type thing, they're normally saying something very funny and you wish you could be listening.

And so I kept my mouth shut, but then they had these people come up and practice the prayers that they were going to use. And in every single one of the four, there was something along the lines of Lord bless us, heterosexual and homosexual, straight and gay, lesbian and this, and all the rest of this stuff.

And finally, I just could not help myself. And I got on my little headset and I said, okay, gentlemen, when the roof comes in, get under the tripod of your camera, we might make it. Oh, the pluralism.

Well, is it not surprising? Is it really surprising to any of us that that kind of attitude exists there? Because folks, the doctrine of justification got nixed in that place a long time ago. And so once you're no longer preaching justification by grace through faith in Christ alone, then it's easy to start bringing in the pagans.

We can bring in the Wiccans. I mean, the Anglicans in England are well known for the fact that they, at their conventions, they'll have all sorts of these Wiccan prayers. And just this week, someone sent me a URL to a Anglican minister, Episcopalian minister in Pennsylvania that wrote a mass using Druid prayers for women.

And this was on the Episcopalian website. They pulled it eventually, but someone of course archived it. Once you put it on the internet, you're dead. That's just all there is to it. So it's just amazing.

How do you get to that point? Well, you threw out the inerrancy and inspiration of scripture a long time ago, and you threw out the gospel a long time ago. And so, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. Something's going to come rushing in.

Something's going to come rushing in. And so when we think of this doctrine, as we have thought about it today, and I'm going to wrap up with this. When Paul said he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, he was not limiting that to the apostles.

Thank God. It's true of the apostles, but thankfully what he was talking about was the great exchange, the great gospel that Jesus Christ is our substitute. He bore in his body upon the tree, our sins, the wrath of God due to that.

That is why, that is why I find so heartbreaking that prayer that I have mentioned many times in my debates, that prayer to Mary, where the suppliant says, protect me from the devil, protect me from my sins and protect me from Jesus, my judge.

And I've said many times, oh, anyone who could pray that has no idea of the Christ of the New Testament. If you think you need a mediator with the mediator, you haven't met the mediator yet. And so this doctrine that we've talked about today, I hope, you know, there are people running around saying, oh, you folks, you just, you just think these doctrines, the solas, or these, these, these truths that flit about above your heads and they never touch down to earth and you never experienced them in your life.

These truths define the very way we live and the gospel we preach. I hope you've listened well. There are brothers and sisters of ours across this world that would have given almost anything to be where you are today.

They don't have the freedom to gather in places like this. They don't have the word of God to be able to open it up as we've been able to look at it this day. We are a privileged people and I thank you for being here today.

Let's pray together. Indeed, Father, we thank you that we have this freedom. We thank you that we have the opportunity to open your word and to consider your truth. And most of all, we thank you for your mercy and grace toward us.

We ask that you would bless all of those who have come, that you would bless them with traveling mercies if they're leaving now, or if they're remaining with us for the rest of this experience, Lord, whatever it might be.

Thank you for all who have been here, who were here last evening. And especially Lord, I thank you for all those who have made it possible for this to take place. May you bless them in the way that only you can for the service and ministry that they have been to all the rest of us.