Book of Titus - Ch. 2, v. 13

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Pastor Ben Mitchell

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Okay, we'll just kind of jump into it and so today it'll be a little bit interesting.
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Kind of hate the way the timing worked out because we won't have the closure I was hoping we'd have for chapter two.
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Dave and I will be swapping next week so today will be our last lesson for about six or seven weeks or so in Titus.
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We will not be able to finish the chapter but we will be able to cover something that I've been excited to get to for a while so that'll be nice.
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Let's see here so we're at the end of chapter two of Titus and last week we were discussing or actually the last couple of weeks discussing this reality of the
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Apostle Paul kind of bringing everything back in. It's interesting he's been
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I was about to say bring everything back into focus. Here's the way I've been articulating it the past couple weeks.
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He has been kind of in the nitty -gritty details of Christian living for most of the epistle of Titus whether you're looking at the elders or whether you're looking at the congregation.
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He's been looking at the character, the behavior, the sin issues, the antidote to the sin issues, keeping first principles first kind of thing throughout the whole epistle and then he gets to verses 11 through 12 and well actually verse 11
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I'll pause there for a second and he zooms out where we get the big picture one more time and we're reminded hey this is why we're living right.
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This is why we are desiring to live right. This is why Paul is giving us these instructions in the first place. It's because we had a
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Savior come. His grace appeared and brought salvation to all men and then we it transitions right into verse 12 where we see that the same grace that saved us is the grace that continues to teach us day by day as Christians in this present world again teaching us to deny ungodliness worldly lusts rather that we should live soberly righteously and godly in the present world.
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So this is where we've been and as you get into these last verses from 12 down to 15
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Paul kind of zooms back in again to say all right now you are reminded of that foundation once more let's look again at the results of it.
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The effects of everything we've been talking about excuse me the cause of everything we've been talking about is this grace of God that brought salvation.
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The effects are everything else that we've talked about and are continuing to talk about now and then you get to verse 13 and this is all in fact okay the
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Paul would you know he had a tendency to write some very eloquent sentences that sometimes would span a number of verses so I like to be able to capture the whole thought and so of course that brings a sense of repetition often so start with me at verse 11 and I want to read all the way through until he finishes the sentence finishes the thought and then we'll hone back in kind of where we left off last week.
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For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts we should live soberly righteously and godly in this present world looking for that blessed hope in the glorious appearing of the great
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God and Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquities and purify it to himself a peculiar people zealous of good works.
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So from verses 11 through 14 that is all one sentence one thought and it's all interconnected so you have the grace of God that grace brought salvation salvation appeared through his grace that grace stays with us it teaches us it is what points us on the straight and narrow keeps us oriented
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Godward remember these these for these words to live righteously and godly both kind of carry the connotation of moving toward God all the time in the sanctification process in our lives so all that's in the thought and then a continuation of this one thought is in verse 13 look at it with me one more time looking for that blessed hope in the glorious appearing of the great
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God and our Savior Jesus Christ now so with all that in mind all of that review in mind we've rehashed a lot we will continue to do that because it is so important to remember the context with every single verse we dive into essentially word for word we have to remember that so within the context we've been talking about the last two weeks we're still there and we have verse 13 right in the middle of it and one of the reasons that Christians can run the good race that Paul talks about in 2nd
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Timothy when he talks about running the good course fighting the good fight he's at the end of his life he did this successfully when
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Paul talks about that one of the reasons why that is even possible for someone like him to be able to do that to run the course well to fight to fight the good fight and for us as Christians as well to also do that to persist through our trials and persevere through the various tribulations that will crop up over the span of a lifetime and at the same time while getting through all that getting through the trials getting through the tribulations at the same time we are conforming to the image of Jesus through this holy behavior that he's been talking about for the entire letter up to this point the reason we can do all of that the reason
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Paul could do it the reason we could do it is because of hope and it's because of this expectation that he is talking about in verse 13 of the glorious appearing of our
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God that blessed hope that he says in that phrase at the very beginning of the verse and it's that that blessed hope that has given
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Christianity the backbone that it has had for 2 ,000 years to withstand millennia of brutal persecution and we've been able to withstand that Christianity has been able to withstand that without even a hint of relenting from its faith in Christ why is that well there's a lot of reasons but if there was one summary statement that any
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Christian that you asked for 2 ,000 years of history if there was one summary statement that they might say that might come to their mind first and foremost it's that blessed hope and what is that blessed hope it's that glorious appearing of the great
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God and Savior Jesus Christ again it's why we can fight sin in this present world remember how verse 12 ended we have to keep all of this in mind it it's it's both fun to go very slowly phrase for phrase word for word through these studies but it's also kind of there's a frustration in it because you don't want to forget any of the preceding context and so you find yourself constantly going back and remind remember what verse 12 ended with remember what he said in the first 10 verses remember this thought this argument that he's making but it's so important verse 12 again ends talking about salvation and deliverance from this present world not just future hell but sin and persecution and in the things that can bear down on us in this present world we have salvation from it through the same grace that saved us in the first place and having a future hope at the same time it's what can get us through it it's why we can fight sin in the present world that he talked about in verse 12 because we know that we do win in the end no matter how hard the battles get the captain of our faith that Hebrews talks about Jesus will come in a glorious appearing in this is foundational to striving for that godly self -controlled conduct it has been the emphasis of the whole letter so we're just going back and forth from these practical realities to these sweeping glorious miraculous just it bigger than we can even comprehend bigger than the mind can comprehend going back and forth seamlessly they're interconnected this self -control this godly conduct we've been talking about is directly linked to the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our
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God and Savior Jesus Christ and so again part of the whole thought one of the things that can bring us through it one of the things that Paul doesn't want us to forget about is yes we were saved by grace initially a justification but we're continued to be taught by this same grace throughout our lives while we're being sanctified and we have a future hope as well and that is the glorious appearing of our guard of our
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God and Savior Jesus Christ it's all one package it's all part of the same thing there's a past present and future aspect of all of it it's what keeps us grounded and it's what gives us the desire and the burning in our hearts in the zeal to live godly like he's been talking about the entire epistle it's just amazing now one of the things that's fun about going verse by verse through books of the
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Bible and dad does this well anybody I mean just reading through books you'll get a taste of this but certainly when you're teaching through it but when you teach verse by verse what's amazing about it is that you get to stumble upon some of the greatest topics that you anyone could study and sometimes it falls within a context that might surprise you you might forget you may remember that there's a particular
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I'll just use this for lack of a better term a particular proof text for a great doctrine a great theme something like that and you remember the text the single verse or maybe it's a couple of verses and you you remember that and you go to it often you recall it to mind when you're thinking about that particular topic but sometimes you can forget about the context it's in it's not that the proof text is incorrect it's just it's like oh yeah that's that's when that was discussed that sort of thing and in one such case we have one here and it's in the context of this again super practical book super practical chapter the context of godly peaceful living in the church in that context we find one of the greatest proofs of the deity of Jesus in all of Scripture the entire
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Bible one of the greatest proofs that Jesus is God in the entire
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Bible right here in Titus 2 13 and I want to start by giving you a little bit of history that I think you guys will be edified by and this will get a little bit dense sorta but again
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I wouldn't be sharing it if I didn't think y 'all would be edified by it would enjoy it and would be encouraged by it near the end of the 18th century there was an
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English abolitionist by the name of Granville Sharp and he left a massive legacy predominantly for his work as an abolitionist in Britain at that time but he was also a renowned grammarian and he was a solidly
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Orthodox biblical Christian I say Orthodox meaning biblical not like Eastern Orthodox he he was adamant about biblical truth in that above all else and he was also again a renowned grammarian in multiple languages
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Greek being one of them and in 1778 he articulated what is now referred to as the
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Granville Sharp construction and I'm gonna give you all the definition you don't have to memorize the definition
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I'm not again we you can get in the weeds big -time with this kind of stuff don't worry about memorizing or anything but I want to share it with you just so that you have a point of reference even in part in your mind so in 1778
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I'm gonna give you guys kind of a basic version of his definition which is really technical and really lengthy but here it is basically the
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Granville Sharp construction can be defined like this Granville Sharp's rule states that when you have two nouns which are not proper names which are describing a person and two nouns and excuse me and the two nouns are connected by the word and in the first noun has the article the while the second does not both nouns are referring to the same person again you don't need to remember all that but just know that this is him articulating what he
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I'm gonna use the term discovered around this time not simply as a
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Greek grammarian but as an English grammarian kind of on on this search if you will for articulate and can what's the right word precise not necessarily concise but precise translation of the
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Greek that sort of thing so there's the definition now
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I want to start by saying this really quick so there's this rule that was again
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I'll say discovered in 1778 it wasn't created in 1778 and then before that this the
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Greek of this passage was read differently for all of church history and then it changed in 1778 that's not what happened the rule again was discovered as it applies to the proper translation of the
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Greek into another language like English so nothing changed with the Greek at all what changed was a recognition of this grammatical structure so that we could better and more precisely translate that Greek into other languages
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English being one of them so in other words Paul wrote these words with a very specific intent 2 ,000 years ago and that intent has not changed since he wrote them it's been the same it's never changed and so that is obviously reality what has changed is our understanding of how to properly translate the
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Greek in the most accurate word -for -word fashion okay so now considering you know the definition we've laid out in this case in Titus 2 13 we have a couple nouns that are not proper names and they're both in the singular and that's important too the first one is
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God if you just look at your Bible with me the first one is God and the second noun is
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Savior so you have your two nouns there is in a Greek article at the beginning of the first noun
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God the two nouns are connected by the copulative word and in the
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Greek it's the Greek word Chi but the English equivalent of that is and so you have the article noun and the word and in between a second noun according to this rule according to this construction what that means is that there's not two people in mind here there is a single person that is being described by the two preceding nouns okay so again we've got
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God we've got we have Savior there's our two nouns God has the article it's followed by the word and or the Greek word
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Chi the word Savior however does not have the article only only the first noun
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God therefore both nouns are being applied to the same person
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Jesus Christ now as a brief side note one thing that I've learned while listening to some of the best
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Greek scholars and reading some of the older best Greek scholars that are no longer with us as they talk about the process the arduous process of learning the language is that it's usually a foolish thing to ever apply the term always to a rule so in other words this word always means this or you know that rule always means that typically you can't you can't really do that and if you do maybe it's because you're in the early earlier stages of learning the language or something because inevitably you'll go over and you'll find at least one or a couple of exceptions to the rule that doesn't mean the rule doesn't stand it just means there are a few exceptions and therefore when you use the term always exhaustively that could trip you up later but there's something unique about this particular rule the
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Granville Sharpe rule the Granville Sharpe construction when you look at every single passage in the
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New Testament where this rule is found in its true original form as it was articulated by the man himself
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Granville Sharpe and you can go back online you can read his original work you can read his original papers when you apply the rule in every single passage that it appears the rule is exceptionless there is never once an exception in the entire
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New Testament when you find this construction in its pure form arise and there are dozens and dozens of them but why is this so important what is the point in getting into the weeds in all of this the reason it's important is because Granville Sharpe's rule is found in two particular verses that attest to Jesus being
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God and one of them is right here in Titus 2 13 now while faithful Trinitarians like we are we affirm the
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Trinity we affirm the existence of one God existing in three distinct persons we don't need grammatical proof to have faith or to believe that Jesus is
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God okay we don't need the Granville Sharpe construction for us to affirm that Jesus is
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God but it is quite nice having passages like this when you're discussing this issue with those that don't believe that Jesus is
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God because God in his grace gave us things you know in Acts chapter 1 of the very beginning of it it's talking about the resurrection of Jesus and what's one of the very first things that Luke says in writing the
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Acts of the Apostles he says by these infallible proofs we have evidence of the resurrection of God we don't need evidence in order to have faith that the resurrection happened and yet God in his grace gave us infallible proofs and historical evidence so that we can go out there and talk about these things with secular historians and actually keep the rules of history while also approaching something like the resurrection the greatest miracle of all time in in faith and this is another one of them we again we don't need grammatical rules in order to have faith and to believe that Jesus is
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God but we have them anyway why because God is a and he gave them to us so that we could have them so we have the grammar on our side the grammar is irrefutable and if you know again you can take my word for it you can also go listen to some fabulous debates between Trinitarians and Unitarians which
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Unitarians of course believe that or let me put it this way I'll put in the negative they don't believe that Jesus is
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God they don't believe that the Holy Spirit is God they they deny
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Jesus as deity and they have issue with this grammatical reality regardless of the fact that they deny
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Jesus as deity they still have to deal with this and it's quite fun listening to those types of debates when these things come up it's very technical stuff again it's it's nothing you have to remember it's more of a thing just to know that it's there and to be edified by so we have the grammar on our side via the
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Granville Sharp construction Titus 2 13 the other one by the way if you want to know that second passage it's 2nd
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Peter 1 1 so those are the two passages where the rule or the construction appears with specific regard to the deity of Christ again there's dozens of them but those two refer to Jesus as God yes well yes and no if you go if you go read
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Unitarian literature they have some very tricky ways of pointing out exceptions quote -unquote to this rule if you hear them in debate it doesn't hold up and the reason is because this is a little bit of a rabbit trail but this answers your question
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Katie and this is helpful for everybody to know because this is by the way again this isn't just getting in the weeds for the sake of it being cool and fun which it is but this is a terrific apologetic verse because with this verse you can have discussions with Muslims Jehovah's Witnesses Mormons Unitarians Jews Orthodox Jews anybody that would deny the deity of our
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Lord this is a very strong place to go among many others it's not just here but it's a very strong place to go so this is a good apologetic tool to have okay so Oh since 1778 over the last 200 some odd years there have been multiple variations crop up of the
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Granville Sharp rule and it's kind of frustrating because it's been done by people and grammarians that are that are on our side in other words they are they're
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Trinitarian they're godly scholars that are you know that believe in the fidelity of Scripture or holding fidelity to Scripture and all of these things and but what they do is they over time they've kind of paraphrase the rule they've paraphrased what
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Granville Sharp originally articulated and in doing so they left open the window or they left room for people to go out non
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Trinitarians to go through the New Testament and find examples of the paraphrased rule okay you're tracking me the paraphrased rule and they find exceptions where they say oh see that you know here's four or five or maybe 15 exceptions to the rule and so you're just this is just a stretch to say that this applies to Titus 213 okay so that will be where Unitarians that are well read will take you but here's what's important to remember while those paraphrases of those of the rule have come and gone through good men you have to go back to the original sources you have to go back to Granville Sharp himself and when you read it here's what you'll find you'll actually find six rules but really what it is is it's one rule with five corollaries one rule with five corollaries and they're very exhaustive they are very precise he was unbelievably articulate when he laid this out again this was this is by God's grace we have stuff like this and when you look at his rule as he articulated in 1778 and apply that in its pure form every time it pops up and by the way we've had 200 years worth of some of the greatest godly conservative
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God -fearing Greek scholars and grammarians scrutinizing this rule we're making it like trying to shoot it down you know trying to disprove the hypothesis kind of thing and so it is held the test of time and again in its purest form it's exceptionless if you go back to the way
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Granville Sharp said here is how the rule should be applied there's no exceptions to it including the two verses that I mentioned second excuse me
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Titus 2 13 2nd Peter 1 1 so if y 'all know if you know a little bit of the history of it and you're ready for that rebuttal of well there's 15 exceptions of it over here and you're like well hold on a second there may be 15 exceptions based upon I don't know
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A .T. Robertson's articulation of the rule later but if we go back to Granville Sharp and I mean you may pull it up on your phone it's out there for free it's a little bit of a lengthy read but you could pull it up and you could talk about it's like it doesn't apply to plurals it only applies to singulars it doesn't apply to proper names it only applies to improper names this is this is how it's supposed to be viewed and when you know go find me an exception based upon this and they won't be able to and again when it's held when they tried to refute this in debate scholarly debate they can't do it and so it's an amazing thing that the
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Lord gave us yes ma 'am Isn't it also likely that since that rule has been corrupted that the following translations and there are multiple of them have been read but those translations then get corrupted the translation of true scripture gets corrupted in order to fit a corrupted rule?
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Well that would that would be the case with you know cult translations like the
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Jehovah's Witnesses the new world translation which is translation in quotes however
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Mimi what's interesting about it is there had because again God in his grace because the all of the major Bible translations from the
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KJV on were actually before that from Tyndale and the Bishops Bible and all that all of that forward all of the major English Bible translations throughout all of time have been made by Trinitarians and and most of the time there's a few exceptions where there's some liberal people on the committees and we ignore those but most of the time they're you know the translations are done by godly conservative translators and so what's interesting is
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KJV translation comes out in 1611 we get an update in the mid 1700s the
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Granville Sharp appears in 1778 now remember what I said before it's not that he created any new thing and that the
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Greek was just read differently for 1778 years and then all of a sudden oh no this is actually it is no what he did was he discovered a particular rule for a more defined translation so it didn't change anything with the
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Greek what it did was it changed translation philosophy so the reason why you don't necessarily see it as clear in the
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KJV is because they translated in 1611 prior to Granville Sharp making this discovery and the reason they translated it like they did is because what they're doing is they you know they see a couple of nouns here and they're you got to remember the order of words in Greek is different from in English so you have your these and your ands in weird places sometimes the word our is in kind of a weird place as well in this verse and so they're trying to you know do their best to make it flow and make it read well in English which is the goal of a good translation they didn't do anything wrong but they did not have this particular knowledge of Greek you know syntax among other things to get the clearest translation so let me read it one more time in the
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KJV it says looking for that blessed hope in the glorious appearing of the great
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God and our Savior Jesus Christ so a Unitarian might look at that and say oh see there's a distinction there it's a
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God meaning the Father and our Lord Jesus our Savior Jesus Christ but when you look at the
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Greek you will find that both nouns are referring to Jesus the
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Father is not in view here it's only Jesus so here's one way you could read it you could read it this way looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great
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God and Savior our great God and Savior Jesus Christ that would be a good kind of modern translation of it if you wanted to translate it the most literally and again
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I'm talking about the same Greek that the KJV comes from you could read it something like this looking for that blessed hope in the glorious appearing of the great
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God and Savior our Jesus Christ in the Greek the word our appears right before Jesus Christ so again in its most literal form it would be read the glorious appearing of the great
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God and Savior our Jesus Christ and that amazing and that cool okay now we have the grammar on our side but we have more than that too that'll have to listen the recording of this later because this he would enjoy this part that's okay we also have the context on our side we have the context that proves that Paul is talking about a single person and not two he's not talking about the
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Father and the Son he's talking about Jesus only let's look at it one more time together look at verse 13 we're gonna read right into verse 14 looking for that blessed hope in the glorious appearing of the great
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God and Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works now if you just read that again as one thought and you're not zooming in and trying to mess with grammar rules and all these things like Unitarians will try to do to get around this rule if you just read it in in the form that it was given the whole argument you clearly see here that there is a particular person in view who did some things in history number one or and I should say this and we'll do some things in history let's look at this first the term appearing still in verse 13 the glorious appearing that Greek term
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Apophaneia I believe is how you pronounce it is never used of the Father in the entire
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New Testament it's used multiple times but it's never taught in in view of the
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Father why well think about it we're talking about the appearing of someone we're talking about a future event in which someone will appear that Greek term is never used of the
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Father anywhere in the New Testament and you don't have to turn there but just listen to this for a second I want to give you just one example there's about six or seven verses throughout the
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New Testament where this term appearing shows up the Greek term underneath it shows up and it's always talking about Jesus let me give you one example 2nd
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Thessalonians 2 8 says this and then shall that wicked to be revealed that's the
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Antichrist the man of lawlessness whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth and shall destroy with the brightness
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Epiphania and his coming so the word brightness in English there is the same
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Greek word that we find in Titus 2 13 which is translated appearing so you could read it this way and he shall destroy with the appearing of his coming the
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Greek term for coming is Parousia we've heard you you may have heard that before that it it's often that term is discussed you know the
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Parousia it's just a reference to his second coming when he comes back in the glory the the blessed hope that we're all waiting on that we started with in the first place there's 1st
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Timothy 6 14 2nd Timothy 1 10 2nd Timothy 4 1 2nd Thessalonians 2 8 these are all different contexts in which this
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Greek term Epiphania appearing is used in every single time it's used with reference to the
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Sun why because it's the Sun that's coming back he came once incarnate he's coming back again still incarnate this time to conquer his enemies not as a humble servant but as the conquering
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King of Kings Lord of Lords okay so there's that so the glorious appearing of the great
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God and our Savior Jesus Christ the father's not appearing in that way zero biblical prophecy with regard to that he is transcendent he is outside of time how many times have we talked about this reality that is where the father resides it is the
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Sun that is appearing and by the way again going back to our apologetic argument for a second
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Unitarians Mormons Jehovah's Witnesses all these people they talk about Jesus they want you to believe they're
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Christian Glenn Beck you know just yesterday he's a Mormon or a couple days ago tweeted this prayer on behalf of Israel or something and ended it in Jesus's name you see stuff like that and you can think oh well maybe they're on our side well no they're not because they deny that Jesus is
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God Jesus said that if you do not believe I am you will die in your sin and so we have to take this stuff seriously when they argue about let's just say say
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Titus 2 13 and they want to make all these arguments you got to remember something while they don't affirm the deity of Jesus they believe he is you know well the
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Jehovah's Witnesses believe he's Michael the Archangel Mormons just believe he's one of many gods in their pantheon
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Unitarians believe he is the instrument used by the one
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God the father to bring salvation they all affirm a second coming so even they will believe you know even they will pay lip service to this reality of Jesus coming back again they don't believe he's coming back as God which he is but they do believe he's coming back and so if you go to this and say who who is the one that's going to appear it's
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Jesus okay so there's number one the appearing of the great God and Savior Jesus Christ so we have the context on our side but there's a second thing as well look at the sentence in verse 14 one more time who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity purify himself a peculiar people zealous of good works
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Paul is obviously referencing the cross who died on the cross it was
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Jesus it was not the father one God three distinct persons the father did not die on the cross
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Jesus did the spirit did not die on the cross Jesus incarnate humbled himself to the point of obedience unto death he died on the cross and Paul is obviously referencing this and of course he is the one that gave himself for us on the cross not the father like I said a second ago so when it says who gave himself for us it's only talking about one person here when you look at the whole thought phrase for phrase from verse 13 all the way through together there is no hint of a plural reference for who the who is in verse 14 in other words there's no way grammatically to link any sort of plural connection to who in verse 14 the who there is not talking about two people it's talking about one person and it's in the same flowing thought of verse 13 our great
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God and Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us so again we have the grammar on our side we have the context on our side and if that wasn't enough we'll have to end with this
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Paul does something else this is just incredible in this passage in the context directly speaking about Jesus Christ Paul paraphrases
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Old Testament scriptures that are directly speaking of Jehovah or Yahweh same thing we don't know how to pronounce the divine name of God in the
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Old Testament so we've come up with a couple of different guesses over time so whether you say
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Jehovah or Yahweh it's the same name that we're talking about the name that Jesus mentions at the end of Matthew baptizing them in the name of the
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Father Son and Holy Spirit Jehovah Yahweh there are a couple of Old Testament passages that are directly talking about Jehovah and Paul paraphrases these passages and applies them to Jesus let's look at a couple of them y 'all can turn there with me if you want
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Psalm 130 Psalm 130 7 through 8 and if you want to if you want to really just you know be kind of amazed hold your place in all of these areas if you can because you want to kind of flip back and forth and you want to see the connections here and of course you can write these down and you can look at them side -by -side later okay
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Psalm 130 start in verse 7 I'm gonna read 7 through 8 listen to this let
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Israel hope in Jehovah for Jehovah there is mercy and with him is plenteous redemption and he who's the he
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Jehovah he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities remember what
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Titus 2 14 said who gave himself for us that he would redeem us from all iniquity you see the parallel you got to keep in mind the audiences that Paul is writing to in the first century the
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Jews that were just saved on the day of Pentecost who knew their scriptures from the time they were old enough to read and one other important thing you got to keep in mind the
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Bible in the first century was the Old Testament but there's one specific nuance it was the
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Old Testament in Greek was not in Hebrew it's called the Septuagint sometimes we reference that if you ever if you're ever doing a
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Bible study and you see LXX in parentheses or something that's a reference to the Septuagint they had the
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Old Testament in Greek that was the Bible that was the Christian Bible of the first century until the letters of the
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New Testament started circulating the Greek words that are used in that Old Testament for this passage
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Psalm 130 verses 7 through 8 in the Septuagint are the same Greek terms for redemption and purification and holiness and all these types of things that are found in Titus chapter 2
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Paul knows exactly what he's doing he is specifically linking Jesus as fulfillment of these passages about Jehovah okay let's look okay so again he shall redeem
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Israel from his iniquities Titus 2 14 he will redeem us from our iniquities it's unbelievable now look at Deuteronomy 7 6 there's one more example and by the way there's several
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Ezekiel we can look in Ezekiel we can look at other Psalms we can look at other places in the books of Moses where this language is used of Jehovah redeeming his people from all their iniquities and Paul is paraphrasing that here in Titus and applying it to Jesus Jesus is
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Jehovah in other words there's more to it than that but we'll put a pin in it for just a second because Jehovah Yahweh it is a name it's a divine name with regard to the essence in the character in the being of God it's not a name like Jesus it is a name that is reference to deity and therefore it is used throughout the
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Old Testament for the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit all three of them are referred to as Jehovah in different contexts but again it's a testament to the deity of all three distinct persons all right
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Deuteronomy 7 6 for thou art a holy people unto Jehovah thy
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God Jehovah thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself above all people that are upon the face of the earth again if you're flipping back and forth you see allusions to this you see a little bit of a paraphrase in Titus 2 14 he gave himself for us that he might redeem us from our iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works in Deuteronomy 7 6 he hath chosen thee a special people unto himself above all people man
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I guess I left that one out there was one other one I wanted to look at I left out of my notes but that's okay you get the point there are references here to Jehovah to Yahweh in the
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Old Testament in his work of redemption and Paul is linking it all to Jesus as a testament as an attestation to the deity of Jesus our
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Lord he is God in full the Apostles never shy away from attributing the divine name of the
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Old Testament Yahweh or Jehovah to Jesus they never shy away from it they do it just with ease with not even a second thought and by the way without any qualifications they don't go in there and describe okay here's why
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I'm doing this here is you know a few paragraphs on why I can do this they didn't care about any of that they didn't need to do any of that number one they knew that the people they were writing to Christians that were immersed in their scriptures the
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Old Testament and again the fact that it was in Greek is is worth noting because the
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New Testament's in Greek so a lot of the language that they use linking to the Old Testament they did referencing the
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Greek Old Testament so they're doing all this they know their people know their scriptures and and they of course experienced
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Jesus in the flesh and knew that he was God from their personal experience with him they didn't need to throw out all these elaborate qualifications and explanations they just did it they just did they just they took the language of the
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Old Testament referring to Jehovah and said here he is in the flesh we were with him and he's coming back they did it with ease and as one example is one of my favorite examples in John 12 41 the
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Apostle says these things said Isaiah when he saw his glory and spake of him now we don't have time to do it but if you look at the context of John chapter 12 the whole chapter is talking about Jesus at the end of his earthly ministry right before he kind of goes into solitude with his disciples in his final days prior to his crucifixion so John chapter 12 it's summarizing in referring to Jesus's earthly ministry talking about Jesus and John says these things said
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Isaiah who's Isaiah he's the prophet from the Old Testament when he saw his glory who is the his well in context of Jesus and spake of him who is the him it's
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Jesus again he was quoting Isaiah but he was quoting a very specific passage in Isaiah it was
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Isaiah chapter 6 where you have the Prophet go into the heavenly throne room and is commissioned by Yahweh sitting on his throne when
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Isaiah says I'm undone I am a man of unclean lips how can I bear to be in the presence of my
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God and an angel takes some tongs this call had to be hot because an angel had to use tongs to pick it up and he flies over to Isaiah and he places that coal on his mouth which is a picture of his purification so that he could be in the presence of holiness now what should have happened is he should have been obliterated he should have been undone and he felt like that should have happened but rather God is gracious he's long -suffering he's merciful but he did require purification he did require
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Isaiah to be purified and to be holy in this in this moment so he had the cherubim bring the hot coal using tongs put it on the lips of Isaiah and then
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Isaiah gets really bold all of a sudden he says here I am send me this is the scene that John is talking about in John chapter 12 and he is linking it to Jesus he says again these things said
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Isaiah when he saw his glory in spake of him talking about Jesus so if you were to ask
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Isaiah who he saw sitting on the throne in this heavenly throne room he would have said
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Yahweh or however they would have pronounced it we the name has been lost but he would have said
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Yahweh if you ask the Apostle John who did Isaiah see John would have said
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Jesus and so the Apostles time and time again throughout the New Testament attribute deity to Jesus in a number of ways but one of the most beautiful ways they do it is by showing how
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Jesus this man this person Jesus that we walked with in the flesh was the same one filling all of these scenes in the
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Old Testament as Jehovah as Yahweh the one God of Israel isn't that amazing so the single verse in Titus 2 13 is nothing more than the continuation of the
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Apostles theme of attributing deity to Jesus Christ but here so it's not it's not isolated they do it in many places but here in this verse
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Titus 2 13 Paul does so in such a specific way that even
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Unitarians can't avoid getting into what they can't avoid it without getting into a lot of trouble when they attempt to debate the issue and again
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God gave us these things in his grace we didn't we didn't have to he didn't have to give us the grammar he could he could have said you're gonna do it all by faith without any infallible proofs without any evidence at all you could have done it that way and in many there are many respects where we are living by faith all the time that is how it was meant to be in the first place but in his grace he gave us the proofs he gave us the evidence he gave us the grammar he gave us the context he gave us the
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Apostles to make all these connections for us and it boosts our faith and it gives us a little bit of ammunition at the same time so that we can have a ready defense when those out there want to question why we have the hope that is within us isn't it amazing so we'll have to in there today and that concludes our study for this six -week period so in seven weeks from now
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I'll come back and we will finish up verses 14 because we have a couple of things to look at there verse 15 chapter 2 will be done and then we will only have 15 verses left and we'll probably get those done before the next presidential election so we'll go ahead and pray and then we'll dismiss
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Heavenly Father thank you so much for this wonderful day for bringing us together once again and just giving us the opportunity to humbly approach your throne of grace in a number of ways through prayer through your word in the written form and through just the harmonious weaving of the entire story of redemption the entire history of redemption all one story told in so many different ways through so many different angles by so many different earthly pinmen and in different contexts and in different geographical locations with varying audiences and yet they all tell the same story and they all talk about you we're thankful for that and we're thankful for the opportunity for us to get together and get to be on this very amazing elaborate journey together of learning more and more about your word in real time being edified by it growing by it and becoming more like you in the process as well we ask for that we ask for you to give us the grace and the guidance and the mercy to continue striving for holiness to continue striving against our sin so that we can be as pleasing in your sight in time as possible and be more like you and more like your apostles we thank you for all these things