None Greater (part 6)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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So this week we are covering another chapter of None Greater by Matthew Barrett.

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Over a month ago we started this chapter. We got about halfway through my notes for the chapter and we just ran out of time.

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And because I do almost anything Pastor Steve tells me to do, I got the look of please continue this next time and don't rush through this.

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So we're picking up on the second half. So what I am going to do is kind of rush through the first half of my notes.

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If you have your little quiz from last time you will have half of the answers or more, or if you're super smart you're all set.

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And if not then hopefully you can still continue to fill this in as we go along. So yeah, it's literally been a month and then somehow

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I ended up preaching in the middle of that. I don't really know how that happened either, but you know the secret things belong to the Lord. So let's just pray and then we'll get started.

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Heavenly Father we just thank you for being able to come together again. It's been a long and difficult month. There's still things that we're dealing with as a congregation, but I just praise you that we're able to come together, have

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Sunday school Lord, and then sit under the teaching of Pastor Mike in a few minutes.

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I pray that you would just bless this study, this conversation as we really just focus on the simplicity of God, understanding what this means, understanding how simple is not easy.

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But I just pray that you'd be with us and that you would guide our minds and our hearts that we could seek to understand you better. We pray.

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Amen. All right, so this is chapter 5, Simplicity. I started off asking about chapter 4 last time because, you know, review is always helpful.

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Chapter 4 was talking about the aseity or the aseity, depending on which theologian you ask, of God.

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Does anybody remember what aseity is? Yes, exactly.

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God is from himself. He is self -sufficient. He does not need anything. Jonathan Edwards, God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself.

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He was not created even by himself. He simply is. And I always like to review because nobody ever remembers what we talk about up here sometimes, it feels like.

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And also because these things tend to stack on top of each other, and we're going to come back to this concept of God's self -sufficiency later.

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So we talked about simplicity before, of course. Can somebody define the simplicity of God for me?

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Let's not all sit at the same hands. Mrs. Cooley? Yes, exactly.

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God cannot be divided. He is not made up of parts. I think that this word simple,

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I kind of alluded to this, it has almost like a derogatory subtext to it, right? Like if you're like, oh, well, he's just simple, right?

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Like this is how we use this word in our modern vernacular. Dolezal, James Dolezal, writes that to us moderns, it may even sound wrong or insulting to call

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God simple. And if God is the creator of all things, then would he not need to be the most complex of all?

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Kind of tracks, right? It seems incongruous that we would even consider him simple, but it is true.

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So if we step away from our preconceived notions of what simple is, then the concept seems easy.

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Okay, God is simple, he can't be divided. And yet we have hundreds, if not thousands of years of theological heresy to look back on to suggest that maybe it's not as easy or simple as we think.

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So, Dave, pretty much, that's pretty much true. And so, you know, last time we talked about this,

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I guess I talked mostly, but I talked about quarks, quarks and leptons and bosons.

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Remember those? No? All right, would anybody like to help

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Becky remember what, or learn what quarks and leptons and bosons are? Anybody remember the fancy scientific term for this?

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Close, close. Particle. Right, so as science has gone on, you know, we've gotten stronger and stronger microscopes, and we look at things more closely, right?

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And so, you know, as we get closer and closer, we're like, oh, well, there's, you know, back in Greek philosopher days, it was, there's earth, and there's wind, and there's fire, and then sometimes you put them together, you get music.

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That's for Steve. Anyway, the timing on this is going to be weird, because I only have like a half of a

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Sunday school's worth of notes, so I just got to make sure that I make everyone smile this morning. It's our first Sunday school in like a month. Anyway, no, but the thought was, you know, thousands of years ago that that was, that those were the irreducible parts, right?

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There's water, and there's fire, and that's it. As we've learned more and more, okay, well, now, no, there's molecules, and then there's elements, and then there's protons, and neutrons, and electrons, and then, well, what are those made of?

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And you get, you know, further, further down, and you start to look, and then you get to quarks, and electrons, and bosons. There's 17 different kinds of elementary particles, which is what they're called, and these are these fundamental things.

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In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle with no currently known substructure, i .e.,

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it is not composed of other particles. Why are we talking about quarks?

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So in the context of matter, the things that make up everything around us from the ground to the air, these are the foundational building blocks, right?

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These individual, indivisible pieces. You can't break them apart. They just are.

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They just are, right? They're there, and then we go to something else near and dear to my heart, which is pi, not p -i, p -i -e.

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Barrett talks about pi, and I like both. Is that, I have, I have a shirt with pi on it, and also a shirt with pi on it.

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So anyway, Barrett talks about apple pie. He's talking about the best pie. Bite me.

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No. He says, the perfections of God are not like a pie, as if we sliced up the pie into different pieces, with love being 10 percent, holiness being 15 percent, omnipotence being 7 percent, and so on.

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Such an approach is deeply problematic, turning God into a collection of attributes. And we talked before about super eminence, this idea of super eminence, which is that there is, no matter how good we get at whatever, whatever communicable attribute of God, there is a degree to which

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God is infinitely better, and completely unapproachable in the context of those given, those given attributes of God.

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We talked about asymptotes, and all this other, you know, other weird, heady stuff. But Charlie rightfully brought up the problem with the idea of super eminence, which is, well, if we have all of these categories in which we say, okay,

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God is super eminent in this, and God is super eminent in that, well, a category is still a limited collection, right?

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And we were talking about the unlimited nature of God. And so, when

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Barrett talks about this thing with 15 percent holiness, and 10 percent love, and all this other stuff, it's kind of the same idea.

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You can't just take all these categories, and kind of put them together. So, that's a problem with this analogy.

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So, number one, what is a satiety? Number two, what is the simplicity of God? That brings us to question number three, right?

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So, we've got our A -team, Aquinas, and Augustine, and who? Augustine, Augustine, I can't pronounce it.

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I can never pronounce it correctly. I'll trust Pastor Mike on that one. Anselm.

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Okay. So, Augustine, in describing the

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Trinity, talking about simplicity, right, reminds us that it cannot lose any attribute it possesses.

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Listen. Because there is no difference, question three, between what it is, the

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Trinity, what it is, and what it has. Okay.

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The Trinity cannot lose any attribute it possesses, because there is no difference between what it is, and what it has, right?

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This is our theological elementary particle, right? There is no substructure.

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It doesn't have parts, because it is one part, right? It being, in this case,

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God. Aquinas describes it by saying, God is in no way composite, right?

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Think of like a composite image. These pictures on Google, they're composite images where they've taken kind of the best parts of all of these different pictures and put them together to make, you know, a composite image, which is a kind of a more perfect one, right?

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So, that's what this word composite means. Aquinas, God is in no way composite, although Aquinas wasn't on Google.

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I'm pretty sure about that. Rather, he is entirely simple. But, we go back to aseity.

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It depends on whether you ask whatever. I don't know. Steve Lawson says it one way. He's right on most things.

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God is self -sufficient. He depends on nothing. So, therefore, we conclude, God could not possibly be dependent on the parts of his own composition, even if he composed himself, which doesn't really make sense.

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I mean, the last part. Therefore, God is simple. He is without parts. That brings us to question four.

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We're surprisingly dangerously close to where we left off last time, because I'm not answering hands.

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Question four. True or false? God, as the supreme being, is composed of all things without limit.

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False. I tried to make it sound kind of good. I don't know if it sounds good, but it's false.

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It is false, right? Anselm tells us that one who is composite just is not supreme.

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He is not infinite. The composite one is not eternal. I agree, because the parts to compose the whole have to pre -exist the whole.

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You can't put something together with parts that aren't made yet.

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That's the chagrin of all of my clients at work. Any questions so far?

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Now, I will take questions. If there are questions, comments, thoughts, we'll talk about some.

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Corey kind of stole my thunder. I can't play you the St. Patrick's Bat Analogies video, but that's pretty much all

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Trinitarian heresy, and it's hysterical, and you should watch it. That's partialism,

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Patrick. Okay. No questions? Nothing? All right. This is

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Stephen Charnock, an excellent Puritan. I'm sure he believed something incorrectly, but I don't know what it is, but this quote is good.

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God is the most simple being, for that which is first in nature, having nothing beyond it, cannot by any means be thought to be compounded or composite, for whatsoever is so depends upon the parts whereof it is compounded.

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That's kind of what I was just saying. And so it is not the first being. If it is dependent on the parts that make it up, that make it a compound being, then it is not the first being.

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Now, God, being infinitely simple, hath nothing in himself which is not himself, and therefore cannot will any change in himself, he being his own essence and existence.

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Yes, sir. So that would be partialism, and we'll talk about that. What's that?

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It's literally in my notes. That's actually the one that I call it. So the appropriate theological answer to that is that there are three persons, one essence.

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And then I will get ahead of myself a little bit and say that,

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Pastor Steve, go. Right. Yeah. So this gets into the...

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Hold on. Let me get the words. There's words for this. So a big one is when you talk about the

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Trinity as parts, then you're implying that the essence is not the same, and they're not fully in one accord in all things.

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On page 85 of our textbook, Barrett talks about this.

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He says, as we saw in chapter four, these persons are distinguishable from one another by what the creeds and confessions of the church down through the ages called the eternal relations of origin or personal modes of subsistence.

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This deals with the paternity, affiliation, and spiration. I'm literally essentially also reading out of my own notes here, so it's going to get real interesting in 20 minutes.

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But the father eternally generates the son, paternity and affiliation, and the spirit eternally proceeds from the father and to the son, spiration.

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These three relations of origin have allowed the church to distinguish between the three without aborting the unity of the three as one essence.

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Does that help? It's a lot of big words, I know. So Turrington finishes by saying, simplicity in respect to essence, but Trinity in respect to persons.

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So when we talk about the simplicity of God, we're really talking about who God is, what makes up God, single essence.

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Steve, did you want to add? Yeah, and to be entirely transparent, which is why

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I plan on functionally deferring all of this to pastors Mike and Steve, who are both here, so I can pass it off to both of them.

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I kind of struggle a little bit with the word generation, because you have a generator. The generator precedes the electricity when you turn it on.

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It just does. And so, unsurprisingly, Steve is right that the key word there is eternal.

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God the Father is always and has always been in a state of generating the son. And that's kind of the way to think about that.

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And I've said in a theological context and otherwise that everything that we do and think about is by definition anecdotal.

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We experience the world through our own eyes. That's just how we live. And so when something is so foundationally unrelatable in the infinite personhood of God, it's hard for us to wrap our minds around that.

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I'm glad Corey handled the topic where we brought up baby talk during this, because then he had to babble like one and not me.

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So I don't know if that helps, Charlie. Yeah, Dave? I think that's fair. Right, right.

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Well, we went through Attributes of God by Pink in our remote home group this past year.

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And the way he breaks out, I think it was the patience of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God. Just the way he breaks them out,

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I really agree with it, to be entirely transparent. It seems, I mean, all the things that he's talking about are all 100 % true.

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But the way that he breaks them apart is weird. Like, it's a weird categorization. And every once in a while, you know, there's we'll run into that in scripture too, where we're like, yeah, we just got to remember this chapter break here.

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It's not there in the original language. And it just doesn't really make sense or something like that. Yeah, there's definitely some truth to that.

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I mean, even in just the language that's used, we're like, OK, there's clearly a difference between the way they write and the way they think and the way that we write and the way that we think.

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So, all right. Well, I'm glad that Corey's teaching next week.

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So, as we kind of come through this, we're like, OK, well, now we're great. We have an understanding of what simplicity is.

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What are the ramifications of that? Right. And ultimately, that's kind of where we need to get to it.

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This is like, OK, well, it's great to have this kind of ethereal, you know, abstract knowledge of something like what, how does that change our perspective or how does it help our perspective when we interpret scripture, when we understand what

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God is writing to us in baby talk, theological baby talk, right? The simplicity of God demands that God is his attributes completely.

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God's character cannot depend on love or depend on mercy or of grace. Those are component things, right?

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God's simplicity demands that he is all of his attributes completely and simultaneously. So, this should change the way that we understand scripture when we read passages like God is light, 1

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John 1, 5. God is love. God is spirit. That doesn't mean God is the complete and perfect manifestation of this thing, right?

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It's like, oh, you know, my grandma, like she basically, like she practically is, you know, warm chocolate chip cookies because they're so good.

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And it's just like the paragon of chocolate chip cookies is anything on grandma's table.

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You know, that's not what it is. It is something fundamentally different. It is who

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God is. God is the character of all of these things. And that brings us to question number five.

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This one, if you didn't read the book, I'm impressed if you didn't know the answer to this, but Augustine in describing

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God's undivided essence used what as an example to explain how

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God does this. Anybody know the answer? Because you were here last time.

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You read the chapter. All right, I'll take either one. Yeah, the light through a stained glass window.

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So, in looking at a stained glass window, he says, although this light, the sunlight, is of one kind, nevertheless, it suffuses the object with a luster that varies in accordance with their different qualities.

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And so the light doesn't change when you see it on the other side of the window. It is the same light that's hitting the side of the window that you're not on.

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But when you look, you're seeing the sunlight through all of these different pieces of glass, and it seems to change how they are expressed to you.

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All right, he called this, so the answer number five is a stained glass window. He called this simple multiplicity or manifold simplicity.

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These are the terms that they used. But like, what does that mean?

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Like, okay, great. Manifold simplicity. It's a kind of a cool sounding term. What does it actually mean? God's infinite essence flows out from him, but it's hard to understand and comprehend his essence as it is, right?

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But remember what we learned at the very beginning of this. God is only revealed to us through the lens of the method that he provides, right?

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And the vast majority of that is scripture. Okay, so as we seek to understand him, we're understanding him through that context.

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I think about Moses, right? When God passed by, instead of just blowing

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Moses away with his full, like, effulgent glory and essence, God hid him in the rock and allowed him to look at the back of himself, right?

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And even because of that, because of God, Moses communing with God in that way, when Moses went down the mountain, the

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Israelites could see the glow of God on his face. And so for us, in a much less direct way, instead of receiving the full weight of God's essence, it is made manifest to us through his attributes.

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And that's how we interpret him, because that's the only way in which we can interpret him. Going back to Dolezal, he says, in God's effects, the perfection of his undivided essence is shown forth in a vast array of creaturely perfections.

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Those are the attributes that we often talk about. Accordingly, what is a simple unity in God is presented to the human knower under the form of creaturely multiplicity.

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God has all these different attributes, these multiple attributes. This refraction of his simple glory into so many beams of finite perfection does not mean that multifarious beams speak no truth about its simple nature.

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They just do not speak that truth under the incomprehensible simple form of that nature.

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So what is he saying here? God's full unlimited glory and essence is shown forth in its simplicity, but we are limited in our understanding of it, hence our limitations in our descriptions of his glory and of his power.

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It's just the glory of God. That's the simple explanation of who

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God is. But we can't understand and internalize that in a way that is going to help us get it.

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Get it is, I guess, the easiest way for me to put it. So we describe God's love. We describe God's patience, his mercy, his long suffering, all of these things.

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We describe those things, even though they're elements of that one simple thing, the glory of God.

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So I will recommend to you James Dolezal. It's on the bottom of the sheet. He wrote a book called

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God Without Parts, which is essentially this chapter, only 260 pages long, very academic.

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If you really, really are into this, that's probably the place to go. Super, super smart guy.

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He also wrote a book that I think is out there that is a little bit more approachable. I can see the picture.

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I don't know what it's called, but that's a loaded question. How would I define it? Well, gosh,

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Dave, I feel like we do that in our own way. I don't know how to answer that question standing up here talking to everyone, because I do think that there's a difference.

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I think that scripture would tell us ways in which we can do so, and I think that that's the appropriate place for me to stand and tell you that.

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Mike, did you have something? I like that. To keep it on brand, the simple answer is to submit to him, obey him, and honor him through submission and obedience.

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Just to lean on what Mike said, when we think about the aseity of God, God's self -sufficiency, he didn't need more glory from us.

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He is fully and entirely self -sufficient in and of himself, and so we are commanded to glorify him, but it's not because he's got an inferiority complex or anything, and he needs it.

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I like that. I think now we know what Charlie does on a Saturday night. We've talked about a lot of different things and how we define stuff and how insufficient our finite words are in a lot of ways.

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We're trying to reckon with this really, really big thing with our really small words. We would still do well to,

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I think, remember as we try to describe God and his glory and his simplicity and all of these things that our words do fall short.

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Barrett writes that whether scripture refers to his mercy or his righteousness, his jealousy or his love, such naming is a way of addressing the

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God who is one, the single undifferentiated divine reality. However we elect to categorize or stratify these things, it doesn't change the essence of who

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God is just because we've elected to put them in these certain columns or whatever it is. I have a couple of object lessons here.

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I don't actually have the objects, but I'm doing the best I can. If I hold up a banana, everyone's seen the minion stuff, right?

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Banana. If I hold up a banana and I say, what is it? What is it?

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It's a banana. But Brian sees things differently, so he says it's a fruit.

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And Becky, always the contrarian, says, no, it's just yellow. Maybe Jenny might say, oh, platano, right?

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That's the right word. No, that's not the right word? Google has failed me.

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All right, you get the point. All right, never mind, I'm done. It's just banana.

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It's close enough. They look similar. I could hold up a plantain and say, what is this? And not say, and I bet you some people would say banana, but they would be wrong, but that's not my object lesson, so I'm not going to do it.

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Anyway, here's the point. All of those descriptions, except for my description, is right.

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They're all describing the same thing. Without getting into kind of etymological studies about the word and where it came from and all this stuff, all of those words that we use, or I don't know what the,

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I should have looked up the official book definition of some fancy Latin word that describes a banana.

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I don't know. All of those things are attributes that we've applied to it. The name banana doesn't intrinsically make a banana.

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It's not the same thing. One describes the other, but they're not the same. This is a true story.

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I'm not even going to ask any questions. It's just a true story. Back in my unsaved days, before I met

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Anitra, my girlfriend at the time and I were driving to a party, and on the way we saw a car accident.

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These things happen. So we were late to the party. We get to the party, and I know it's hard to believe that I was chatting people up, but I was.

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And we were kind of talking about, oh, why we're late, whatever. And my story was something to the effect of, so, you know, we're driving along, and this

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Honda Civic was just kind of like plowing ahead, and then this guy in a Toyota Tercel, that's how you know this is an old story, just pulled out right in front of him, bam, car accident.

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Well, later on, my girlfriend at the time is describing the same accident to some other people and says, there was a guy in a red car driving along, and this blue car pulled out, and they hit each other.

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Well, which one of us is telling the right story? We're both telling the right story.

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But these descriptions are not arbitrary. Neither one of them was wrong, but neither was a complete description.

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The police officer's description was probably a fair bit more complete. I don't know if he used colors. I don't really know. Steve would know the answer to that, probably, actually.

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Always going back to Steve. But when we talk about the attributes of God, it's a similar idea.

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All of God's attributes are always fully expressed infinitely in everything that he does, but not because they are his separate attributes, because that's the essence of God being fully expressed limitlessly.

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We come to understand his expression in certain ways, but our understanding do not make his expression what it is.

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Those ways are manifest and described by things like mercy and righteousness and jealousy and love, but these descriptions are by definition a limited view of a particular slice of the fullness of God, not the wholeness of his essence, merely our understanding of it.

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So when we talk about the simplicity of God, it's hard for us to reckon with because every way in which we interact with God by definition is kind of breaking apart that single thing into pieces that we can understand.

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So that's really the point that I'm trying to drive to. So we have like 10 minutes, less than 10 minutes.

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So here we go. The Trinity. I think at BBC we have a pretty good understanding of the ontological trinity, how the trinity is properly understood in its essence.

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We talked about St. Patrick's bad analogies, which if you don't know what St. Patrick's bad analogies is, I recommend you go to YouTube and look it up and laugh for 10 minutes.

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It's great. It's an entire skit from Lutheran satire about bad analogies regarding the

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Trinity. So we go to question number six.

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The Trinity is not made up of three parts called Father, Son, and Spirit, but the Trinity is three what? Persons.

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And obviously this is, again, helping us with our understanding. I don't want to get into a big semantic thing.

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As long as we understand it theologically correctly, that's the goal here. You know, we watch that every year on St.

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Patrick's Day. That's pretty much our tradition. It is really funny.

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Have you watched their other stuff? A lot of their other stuff is pretty funny as well. Anyway, getting back to the Trinity. When we talk about the

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Trinity, we are still talking about the simplicity of God. This is where things get a little hairy. This is probably the place where we focus the most on the simplicity of God, because there are so many heresies wrapped around a misunderstanding of the

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Trinity, as we have discussed. So, if we were to talk about the

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Trinity, we would say that each person is not one -third of the divine, which is, which heresy is that?

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Anybody remember? Partialism revisited. Okay. I've watched that video a lot.

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Instead, each person equally and fully shares the one undivided essence, and the one divine essence wholly subsists in each of the three persons.

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And, says Barrett, since God's essence and attributes are identical, i .e.,

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God is his attributes, each person of the Trinity wholly shares every attribute. Holy cow.

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Okay. Any questions about that, or comments? I think that when we look at simplicity in a theological context, the way that it's kind of been defined as we talked about it throughout all this, personally,

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I think it's a more clear term. But, that's kind of semantic.

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You know, the goal here is theological accuracy, not the best word for the job. Corey? But, in those contexts, pure is talking about, like, iron, pure iron, right?

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But iron is composed of parts, right? So, pure, in the context of something simple, still meets it at some non -elementary level.

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Does that make sense? So, I'm going to skip stuff. Luckily, the next section talks about the paternity affiliation and inspirations of the

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Spirit. So, please chat with Pastor Mike or Pastor Steve about that. And, consequently, I will close with the topic of the

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Economic Trinity. Who knows what the Economic Trinity is?

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Oh, sorry. Steve says no. Okay.

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The Economic Trinity deals with the idea that each person of the Trinity has their specific roles in the context of redemptive work.

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Okay. One commentator said, it was not the

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Son who sent the Father. The Father was not sent to do the will of the Son. The Son did not give the

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Father, nor was the Father called the only begotten. The Father did not perform the redemptive work.

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The Holy Spirit did not send the Father and the Son. It is not said that the Father or the Holy Spirit chose us, predestined us, and gave us to the

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Father. All of that is true. And so, when we talk about the

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Economy of the Trinity or the Economic Trinity, we're talking about these different roles that the members of the

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Trinity take all in the context of the simplicity of God being of the same essence.

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These descriptions are not commutative. We deal with arithmetic. Addition is a commutative property, which means that you can swap numbers back and forth.

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1 plus 2 is the same as 2 plus 1, these kinds of things. These are not commutative things. You cannot swap the persons like you can swap the numbers in an addition problem and still have them be true.

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And it also means, this is actually kind of why I brought it up, because this is also true, the works of the persons of the

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Trinity line up with each other's works. They are of the same essence. They have different responsibilities.

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To put it the way Barrett does, when we refer to the three persons bringing about our redemption, we should always be careful to add that they do so inseparably from one another.

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One commentator said, to be overly simplistic, we could say that the Ontological Trinity deals with what

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God is, and the Economic Trinity deals with what God does.

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The actions of God. If indeed all three persons of the Trinity are of the same essence, which they are, then everything the persons of the

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Trinity do as they relate to the world, or in general, is perfectly in lockstep with what the other persons of the

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Trinity are doing, or do. It deals with the roles of each of the three persons in the Trinity.

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So this gets into things like limited atonement. Why would

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Jesus die for everyone if the Father has only given him a certain number? These kinds of things. John 5 .36,

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But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing bear witness about me that the

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Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. John 6 .37,

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All the Father gives to me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. These are statements that reflect this.

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You can almost think of it like a transaction. When you have a privileged transaction, there's no other outside forces that can add to or take away from that transaction.

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And so the Father and the Son and the Spirit, everything that they do is essentially coordinated and of the same essence.

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And so it would be wrong of us to expect that, for example, has more power to save more people than the

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Father would elect to be saved. Conceptually, there's a thought experiment there, but the exertion of that doesn't make any sense in the context of the economic trinity and the essence of God's simplicity.

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I think I'm going to stop because I can get into a whole other thing, but it's already five of. Does anybody have any questions before we close in prayer?

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I blasted that one out, and so in 10 minutes someone will recover. Thank you, Corey. I think they say they.

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There are three persons. That's okay. Royal they. That's all right. I mean, when we think, you know,

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Scripture says there is one intercessor between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, right? So despite our anecdotal experience of our sons attempting to convince us to do something, you know, pulling on here,

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Dad, can we... One more, Dad, you know, please, one more. That's not what intercession means in a theological context, right?

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It wasn't supposed to be funny, but no, Corey, you're 100 % right about that, and that really is what

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I think is so important about understanding the economic trinity in the context of God's simplicity. Thank you for that,

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Mike. Stay tuned. We're currently in deep negotiations about Simply Trinity, which is his other book, for next summer.

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No promises. Just, you know, keep your ears open, I guess. Let's close in prayer.

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Heavenly Father, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you that we can finally come together again and talk about you and your attributes and just these hopefully better ways that we can understand what you've done for us.

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We think of your son, Jesus Christ, his sacrifice for us, something we never really will truly fully understand, even as we stand in glory and are able to to be with him and with you.

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I just pray for this morning. I pray for all of those in our congregation that are still recovering from the events of this last month.

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I think especially of Pastor Bob and the Pru family and the Dearborn family, Lord. I just pray that you'd be with them, that you would help us to come alongside them and love on them.

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And I also pray, Father, that you'd be with Mike this morning, that you would give his words a special meaning to those of us who truly love you and desire to glorify you in everything we do.