SERMON: Proverbs 8:34 (Justice and Mercy)

Two weeks ago, we began with an important lesson on how to wage effective warfare. And that is that an army can have the sharpest swords, the finest strategy, and the fiercest resolve, but if we're not told where to fight, or if it's directed to waste its bullets in the wrong theater of operations, it will inevitably lose.

It may win a few victories along the way in the wrong front, but the triumphs will not be long-lived because the real enemy will be preparing the most devastating attack while the army is distracted in other places.

The point that we've been making is very simple. To know how to fight without knowing where to fight is a guarantee that you will lose the fight. And history is a graveyard of men and examples who've learned that lesson far too late.

Last week, we talked about the Roman Empire, which was an ancient example. This week, let's talk about World War II. Take Germany in 1941. They possessed unmatched infrastructure in Europe. They had cutting-edge technology for the time.

They had an army that was conquering the continent with terrifying efficiency under their patented blitzkrieg method, rolling through Europe like a storm. And nations were falling in weeks. I think it was France that fell within a week or two weeks after German forces came through.

It was becoming an unstoppable tidal wave until, in her arrogance, paranoia, or maybe a little of both, she opened up a northern front against Russia, turning her guns towards that nation, which consequently led to her own demise.

Germany knew how to fight, but in that moment, they didn't discern where to fight and where they shouldn't be fighting, and there was dire consequences. The military brilliance turned into a burial. Her march towards dominion ended up in a slow march towards death.

And that exactly, I think, brothers and sisters, is what has happened to the modern church. We know how to fight. We know the word. We know prayer. We know sacraments. We know repentance and worship. And, you know, in the last 100 years, we've had some victories, but we've lost the map, and we've lost understanding where it is that we should be pouring our energy, our effort, our prayers, our war to see this world won to Christ.

And not only that, we've done the unthinkable in modern times of aiming our swords at each other, debating among ourselves, dividing over non-essential issues of preference, defending and battling on the wrong hills while the enemy grows stronger every day, while the enemy has infiltrated the gates of justice and education and media and medicine and government.

And where has the church been in all of this? Far too many pastors have been cowards. And then there've been others who've puffed out their chest in bravado and engaged in brother wars that are both foolish, stupid, and useless.

And this is what I mean. When it comes to where we should be fighting, the exact last place on earth is that we should be aiming our barrels at one another. It's interesting to me, Matt Walsh, who's a Catholic commentator, simply called for the right, and he's just talking politically, to stop fighting each other, and guess what happened?

The right, the conservatives, pounded him for days about how we should be fighting each other. It's unbelievable. With all of the enemies, enemies of God that need to be subdued, with all the gates that still need to be knocked down that are purely evil, it's utterly appalling that division still exists at the level that it does in the church of Jesus Christ.

Instead of uniting together and locking shields, we rip each other apart, and we wonder why we get so little accomplished. We're like the Romans standing on the Mount of Olives watching the Jews kill themselves inside the city and thinking, this is gonna be pretty easy.

Instead of splitting over minutia points of doctrine and dogma, why, and whole denominations being suspicious of one another, why can't the church today unite? Don't we have enough firepower in order to take our country back?

Now, I'm not talking about physical. If you're listening to this in your first sermon in this series, go back and listen to the ones before. We're talking about a spiritual war. We're talking about a war for seeing Christ named among this country again, this country no longer bowing down to idols like they are, that Jesus Christ would be at the head of this nation again, and I think the church is going through a little moment where it looks like we're invading Russia.

We're in the wrong place, wrong time, and we're freezing to death because we haven't fought in a way that actually makes sense. We have been fighting in the sanctuary while the world burns at the gates.

We've been fighting for purity culture over who is the most pure. Is it Presbyterians or Baptists? Is it Charismatics or the cessationists? And you can go down the line with all of these different little inner mural battles that have been fought while the enemy grows larger and more powerful at our gates.

We've refused to take the front lines where righteousness is mocked because we would rather draw lines among each other. And that's what this whole series has been about, learning not only how to fight, but where we should be fighting as Christians to see this country and see the world won to Jesus Christ.

My hope is that in this, you will find at least some battlefield or some beachhead on which you can get involved. Because if our Christianity lives and dies in this room, then there is gonna be no reformation.

There is gonna be no revival. There is gonna be no Christendom again. If all we do is live out our Christian life in our prayer closets and in our churches, and we cover the light, which Jesus told us not to do, with a bushel, instead of letting it so shine that the world would see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven.

If that's all we do, then we may as well just surrender the greatest Christian nation that has ever existed to the pagans and say, we're the generation that squandered it. But if we will have a plan and actually think strategically, there are places where we can pray over.

There are places where we can join. There are beachheads where we can fight. There are places where we can bring Christ that would reverse the rot in this nation. And if it doesn't work, what would you wanna be known by?

Would you wanna be known as a quitter or as one who went down fighting? That is what I hope this series has been pointing out, this little mini-series on Proverbs 8 .34. Today, we're gonna be talking about justice and mercy.

Last week, we talked about education and the economy. So today, we're gonna be talking about justice and mercy and how do we get involved to see Christ named in those spheres. And if you will turn with me as we do that to Proverbs 8 .34, as we read that passage once more and we prepare ourselves for how to do this in justice and mercy.

Proverbs 8 .34, it says this. Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates and waiting at my doorpost. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that you so clearly delineated in your word that there are gates and that there are places that we must be watching daily at.

Lord, the assumption in this passage is that the believers, the people of Israel at that time owned the gates and their only responsibility was to watch the gates. Today, we've lost the gates. So our goal would be to not only retake them, but to maintain them, to stand watch at them and to see the blessings of God come back to our country again, as you promised in this passage.

Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates and waiting at my doorpost. Lord, let that be our men and let it be the story of our men and Lord, let our women be blessed by that. Let our children flourish in that and Lord, let our country come back to Christ again.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Now, some of you may be wondering why I'm loading so much onto this passage. I do think that I've broken my own personal record of how much preaching that I can do in one verse.

So we're in sermon five now on one verse. Maybe you're asking why am I reading so much into this one verse that watching daily is at wisdom's gates? That's what Proverbs 8, 34 is about. And it's about the accrual of wisdom.

It's about how to implement wisdom. It's about how to chase down wisdom and have wisdom. Why am I loading so much culturally into a passage that's talking about standing watch at the gates of wisdom? Well, because the text itself allows for that.

In chapter eight, the surrounding context of the entire chapter is talking about things that are public, not private. It's talking about things in the civil sphere where the gates of culture are. For instance, look at how the chapter begins.

Does not wisdom call and understanding lift up her voice on top of the heights beside the way where the paths meet, she takes her stand. Beside the gates at the entrance of the city at the doorway, she cries out.

So the chapter begins using gates in this sort of civic public way. In other words, wisdom is not just about the knowledge that we get in private, but it's about how wisdom then translates in the marketplace and in the markets and in the public square.

And in the city gates and in every sphere of human life. And this is because lady wisdom in Proverbs, she does not retreat from the world, she rules over it. She doesn't hide from culture, she governs it.

She doesn't just beg for an audience, she summons it. The entire setting of Proverbs eight is one of civic, political, cultural and communal reformation. To retake the gates of a city and of a culture and of a nation and eventually of the world is what she's speaking of.

We can't pick up our weapons of warfare like the pagans do, but we pick up wisdom in order to rule the courthouses, the marketplaces, the Congress, the Senate, the halls of government. And to do that, we have to demand that the true wisdom of God, who is Christ Jesus, the Lord, the wisdom of God, that his order would be brought to all things.

That Christ's truth would be abounding in all things. That Christ's righteousness would be honored in every domain. To stand daily at the gates, therefore, as Solomon tells us, is not to hide in pietistic religious seclusion, but it's to take one's stand where righteousness has been disregarded and to see it reestablished once more.

The man who watches daily at wisdom's gates is the man who shows up. It's the man who governs his home with wisdom and righteousness. It's the man who conducts his business with justice. It's the man who votes righteously.

It's the man who speaks truth where other people are remaining silent. He's the one who believes the word of God. He's the one who not only belongs to the prayer closet, but also he participates in the courts.

Not only in the church, but in the local legislature. Not only in the pews, but in public policy. And that's not conjecture. That's a plain reading of Proverbs 8, where in verse 15 and 16, it says, by me, by wisdom, kings reign.

By me, rulers decree justice. By me, princes rule. By me, nobles rule. All who judge rightly. Do you see how wisdom has infiltrated even the halls of power? Kings and princes and magistrates. That means wisdom has a word for every sphere of life.

And we're right to assume if we have biblical wisdom that we would want that wisdom to infiltrate our halls of power as well. If wisdom were merely a private exercise, this verse would be meaningless.

But if wisdom is the power of God by which kings reign and rulers decree their justice, if she is the divine order by which the city and the nation are going to be judged by, then the gates of verse 34 are not imaginary doorways into the soul, but they are the actual entry point of how we ought to think about government, commerce, culture, and all of the rest.

Wisdom is not content in the book of Proverbs to make men smarter. She makes them sovereigns. She shapes magistrates. She instructs craftsmen. She steadies the hands of kings. She takes fools and fashions them into fathers, rulers into reformers.

To stand with wisdom is to stand where God and his world is being ordered and to join her in the work of revitalization. And that is the heartbeat of Proverbs 8. It's not to call us just to a mere intellectual curiosity, not merely to living a Christian life in Christian spaces.

You'll remember Jesus said that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to me, which means there are no such thing as secular spaces in our world today. Every space under heaven belongs to Christ, which means every space under heaven must conform to Christ.

In the middle of the chapter, Solomon makes this cosmically clear. Verse 22 through 30, he says, the Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work before his deeds of old where he established the heavens, I was there.

He marked out the foundations of the earth and I was beside him like a master worker. The wisdom of God is for the world, not just for Christians. The wisdom of God is that the world would be ordered and governed in a particular way so that the nations would come unto Christ as we read in Revelation 22, that they would come to him for their healing.

And maybe you say, well, that's imperialistic. Well, I didn't write it. Maybe you say, well, that's not very tolerant.

So what?

I don't care. Listen, tolerance is accepting that the majority of people on earth today are gonna go to hell and being okay with it. That's what tolerance is. I want that view to go to hell. And I wanna love people enough to actually tell them to repent and turn to Jesus Christ because that is the only way to life.

There is no other way. So with that, I want us to talk about two today, gates of wisdom that Christians need to bring Christ into. Last week, again, we talked about the economy and education. This week, we're gonna talk about justice and mercy.

And I wanna begin with justice. If we're gonna reestablish Christendom, we need to reinvigorate and revitalize justice. If the economy is the bloodstream of the nation, justice is its spine. And when that spine is straightened by righteousness, then the people stand tall.

But unfortunately, our justice system has moral scoliosis and a few slipped discs that are causing her to munch over into every kind of perversion. This is why the psalmist says it like this, righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

Psalm 89, 14. Because when righteousness collapses, justice is perverted. And when justice is perverted, no Republic can stand. When justice is mocked, the courts become synagogues of Satan. The gavels become hammers of tyranny.

And the people groan beneath the weight of perverted laws and justices. Proverbs 29, two. Massachusetts, our Commonwealth, has become a tragic emblem of this festering decay. The legislature has legalized the murder of children under specific circumstances all the way up until the moment of birth.

Public schools funded by our tax dollars, if you live here, if you're in New Hampshire, well, you have your own set of problems. But they've begun grooming children into gender confusion, reading pornography to them in the name of inclusion, hiding medical transitions from parents and abortions from parents, something the Massachusetts Family Institute, who just had their annual banquet, has been fighting tirelessly to expose.

Courts have forced Catholic adoption agencies to close because they would not hand babies over to two men pretending to be a family. The attorney general's office has threatened crisis pregnancy centers with closure because they speak the truth about life and when it was created.

Boston hospitals performed double mastectomies on confused girls, children not even old enough to vote or have a drink, and yet they're somehow old enough to irreparably mutilate their own body. That's not justice.

That's the machinations of hell running on taxpayer-funded insanity. It's the blood-lusting golden statue that everyone in this state, not everyone, but many are bowing down to instead of the Lord God.

And like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, when the state tells us to worship anything other than God, we must not bow down. When the state demands your worship, your resistance becomes your virtue. That's why Amos said, "'They have turned justice into wormwood "'and they've cast righteousness to the ground.'".

Amos 5, 7. When God spoke through Amos, he was rebuking a nation that kept all of the outward trappings of their religion while trampling the poor, perverting justice, silencing the prophets. Does that sound familiar?

A nation with all the trappings of religion and yet their hearts are far from God? Same spirit prowls down our streets today. We live in an age where thieves are excused, the police are vilified, murderers are coddled and released so that they can murder more people on subways.

We're told to keep the gospel out of the courtroom and we expect that justice will prevail. Proverbs 8, 15 says, "'By me, kings reign and rulers decree justice, "'by nothing else.'". That means no court, no Congress, no Commonwealth can ever claim moral neutrality because justice flows downhill from the throne of Jesus Christ.

And when his people abandon the gate of justice, the serpent slithers in. So Christian men and women, what are we gonna do? We have to take back the gate of justice because if the only way justice happens is downstream of Christ, then the only way justice will come to this nation is if Christians enter the justice system.

We've gotta repent of this sacred secular divide. We've gotta repent of this kind of quietism and pietism. We have to stand up and take back the gate of justice if we wanna see justice because only through Christ and through his word can justice actually flow down like a river to the people.

And there's several ways we can do that. Number one, we have to rebuild justice at home. The first court that you'll ever preside over men is the one of your home. Fathers, you are magistrates of your household.

Mothers, you are the ministers of mercy in your household. Teach your sons to fear the Lord more than they fear government. Teach your daughters to love truth more than social media. Let your dinner table be the first court of heaven that they ever see where sin is confessed, where grace is granted, where worship is heralded and magnified, where the praise of God emanates from your table like it does from the court of heaven.

Justice that's never taught in the living room never leaves the living room. Deuteronomy 6, five through nine. That's the first thing we have to bring justice, true biblical justice back to the home. The second is we need to rebuild it in the church.

If the pulpit is too cowardly to call out the blasphemers, then how do we expect that the world will actually repent? The church has to, once again, be the conscience and the one who's pointing to the truth in this commonwealth.

Pastors have to preach on abortion. They have to preach on tyrannical laws and physician-assisted suicide. We have to preach God's law until the righteous are emboldened to leave their seats as the hands and feet of Christ to bring His justice back to this land.

If pastors are too afraid to offend the devil, they're already on his payroll. The church that fears donors more than they fear God will never reform a nation. The church that fears God more than its backlash is gonna be the one who will disciple the state.

And that's what we must see in the church. Number three, we have to rebuild justice in the courts. We need Daniels and Josephs in government again, in the courthouses, in the legislators. We need Deborahs on the bench.

We need men and women who fear God and hate bribes. Exodus 18, 21. We need men who will become righteous lawyers, righteous judges, righteous paralegals, defending the innocent, filing briefs for the unborn, representing parents whose rights are being trampled, refusing to prosecute righteous men for preaching Christ.

And if God has given you legal training or a heart for it, don't sit on it. You're a weapon in the hand of God. Every Christian lawyer who refuses to lie under oath, every judge who will not bow to the latest woke agenda, every clerk who will not falsify records are all holy acts of war in bringing justice under the rule of Christ.

Number four, we need to rebuild justice in our law enforcement. Romans 13 calls the hand of the state, the minister of God. Same word used for pastor. And it's a minister to bring righteousness, to reward righteousness and to punish wickedness.

Police officers, corrections officers, first responders, it's your duty to be a minister of God in this society, to refuse orders that contradict scripture, to protect the weak, to uphold the innocent, to arrest the wicked without partiality, Deuteronomy 16, 19.

When the commonwealth tells you that your first allegiance is man, you must remember who made the sword. The holiest officer is not the one who obeys every command, but the one who kneels only to Jesus Christ and Christ alone.

Number five, I think we're on number five. We need to rebuild justice in the legislation. We must flood Beacon Hill with believers, not geriatric white liberals singing and screaming and dancing and doing yoga stretches for no King's Day.

We need men who realize that there already is a King and his name is Jesus, and we're not in a nation where he is not on his throne,.

But he reigns.

We need those kind of men to legislate, to write laws according to the King's will and demand. We need men who will write laws that protect families, not dismantle them. We need men who will overturn statutes that glorify perversion, that defund wicked curricula and organizations that murder people.

We need to murder children. We need to outlaw many things in this society that are repulsive and repugnant to God. We are playing with fire as a society, thinking that God does not notice our abominations.

Read the book of Judges. Read the book of Kings and Chronicles. God notices. And the time stamp is upon us if we do not repent. And you don't need to be a politician just to change policy. You can testify at your local town hearings.

You can write your legislators. You can support MFI and other defenders of truth. You can go to your city council meetings. You can go to the education board. You're like, well, I have homeschool children.

Okay, but not everybody does. Not every child yet and their parents understand the wickedness of the public school education system, so be involved for them. Advocate righteousness for them. As Proverbs 31, eight says, open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute, not just you, not just your family.

Number six, we need to rebuild justice and culture. Whatever people celebrate is what they end up legislating. Sort of an immutable law. If you celebrate it, you'll legislate it. Our society laughs at sin.

And over the course of years, they've legalized it, celebrated it, promoted it. The TV shows that we binge today as a culture are the statutes that we will lament tomorrow. Christians must be a part of regaining the arts, journalism, film, education, as beachheads of righteousness.

And to do that, we need to stop funding filth. We've become so comfortable with our devices and with our subscriptions. And we say, what can I do? Cancel your Netflix. Cancel companies that hate Christ.

Don't pay them. If every Christian in America would just put their money where their mouth is, we would have entire industry shrivel up. But we don't, because they've peddled us like in the book, Brave New World, with a bunch of comforts that have made us docile and made us participate in our own destruction.

Rebel.

You don't need to live that way. Finally, in this section, justice is not going to be restored by cowards or complainers. If you are willing to complain about it, do something about it. I remember I was rebuked once for this by a pastor friend.

We were on the phone talking and I was talking about how our public library was going to have a drag queen person come and do what they were going to do, and I was complaining. And he said, well, if you have enough energy to complain about it, then why don't you do something about it?

And that's what birthed Pastor Story Hour when we did that, because he was right. If I'm going to have enough energy to complain about it, I might as well have enough energy to do something about it. That's what I'm saying.

Don't complain about it. Do something. In this decrepit society that doesn't know its left hand from its right hand, do not be caught like Jonah grumbling on the outside of the city when God has given you plenty by his spirit.

You know, the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. You're more powerful with Christ than you've ever realized. Go do something to bring Christ to this sinking ship before it sinks.

The next thing I want to talk about is the medicine and the mercy gate. This is the one we'll close on today. Mercy and medicine, I think, kind of go together. Psalm 147, three, he heals the brokenhearted and binds their wounds.

If justice is the backbone of a nation, then mercy is its heartbeat. And when the heart ceases to beat, the body dies. And the medicine and mercy gate is where compassion becomes culture, where a people prove whether they truly love their neighbor or they've just created systems to monetize their pain.

Christ is the great physician. That means he's about the ministry of healing. He touched lepers, he embraced the disease, he healed them without sending them a bill. What a novel concept that would be.

He didn't build an empire on forever patients or medical subscription plans that keep people sick enough and alive enough to continue paying the bills. He built a kingdom of mercy, one purchased not with premiums, but with his own blood.

And if we belong to him, then we ought to think that medicine and mercy ought to imitate him, ought to look like him, ought to be like him. And our hospitals, again, must hum with the gospel, echoes of how they started.

Christians are the ones who invented hospitals, if you did not know that. How did we squander our legacy so deeply that we've surrendered them over to the pagans so quickly and so easily? It's not a coincidence that hospitals are named like Baptist Hospital, where I grew up, down the street from me, Presbyterian Hospital, Beth Israel.

Hospitals were started predominantly by Christians, and yet we've squandered them and we've abandoned them, and we've let everyone else take over them so that now that they're financial making enterprises mostly and if they get around to it, they'll make you better.

The pharmaceutical empire is one of the places where we need to confront this idol the most. It has become a golden calf in Western civilization, gleaming, expensive, and demanding allegiance. It promises health and wellness and healing, salvation-type words, in a pill, and redemption through prescription.

And I'm not saying that there's not a legitimate use for medicine. I believe there is, and praise God that there've been people who've invented different treatment options that have extended life, that have literally allowed pregnancies to happen that should not have happened or could not have happened even 100 years ago, I'm thankful for that.

And praise God for that. But I want more Christians in that industry so that Christian ethics will proliferate that industry instead of the ethics of men and women who do not know God. The same companies today that claim to mend the body are the ones who are profiting tremendously on breaking them.

This is why I've said many times, I don't think cancer under its current model will actually be cured because too many people are making too much money on cancer being a thing. If you cure cancer, all those fundraisers go away.

I believe that because Christians left the health, the medical, and the mercy ministries. When the body becomes a balance sheet, healing turns into a hustle. Laboratories morph into lobbies. Research is written with the bottom line in mind.

Christians, we have to be the generation that says no more. We need doctors who will prioritize integrity above tenure. Nurses who will treat people instead of quotas. Pharmacists who refuse to traffic and deceit.

Scientists who tremble before God more than they do before grants. It's a huge issue. Look at how the research goes. You have to follow the money. Medicine must return again to being a ministry of mercy from Christians to broken people again, and we will see the whole industry healed if that's the case.

We have to begin to reject death as a treatment also. That's number two. Our age is addicted to death. They use death as a therapy, as an escape from consequences and also from pain. Look at both sides of the spectrum of life.

You had a pregnancy you don't want. Don't worry, we'll kill it. You have a grandma you can't take care of. Don't worry, we'll kill her. Body mutilation in the middle so that you bring death to that person so that they can never reproduce.

All of that now marches under the banner of health. We butcher children and we call it affirmation. We starve the elderly and we call it dignity. That's not medicine. That's murder with hospital paperwork.

The church must confront that as evil with precision, with even pugnacity, persistence. Christian legislators must end physician-assisted suicide. It is an absolute moral evil. Christian doctors must refuse to live in a world where the unborn are ripped apart in the womb.

Christian citizens must defend every aspect of life. Do you know that Christians were the ones who healed the Roman Empire in many ways? Do you know that? In the old Roman Empire days, a man could decide whether or not he kept a child based off of its usefulness to the family.

And what ended up happening is that if that man had a farm and needed boys and men to work on that farm, little girls were getting dumped outside of the city in trash heaps to cry and to die alone. Do you know who it was who came along and adopted those little girls and raised them as their own?

It's Christians.

Christians have always been about the ministry of mercy and of life. And while we're, thankfully, thank God, we're not seeing that in our society on a large scale. We do see isolated cases of things like that.

But Christians, how can we be involved so that less people get murdered next year, so that less abortions happen, so that more righteousness comes to the healthcare industry? How can we be involved? If you're a doctor, work so that you can bring Christ into your field.

Be ambitious.

Work so that you could become the CEO of the hospital. Work like no one else so that you can bring Christ like no one else. We need to rebuild the hospitals. The hospitals, did you know, used to be planted right beside the cathedrals because there was this idea that at the center of all life and health and reality.

Was faith.

Now hospitals are planted in the center of secular cities because no longer are they connected to our God, but they're connected to the God of mammon and money making. Open prayer inside hospitals has been replaced by profit.

Hospital chapels are now idols of an unknown God. Go inside of them. It's time for us to build hospitals again where hymns are echoing down the hallways as well as the best research ever done because Christians can do that.

We need to staff them with believers who see patients as image bearers and not policy holders. We need a hospital system that's holy again, with a great physician over it again, where every heartbeat is valued again.

And in that sense, I would encourage everyone to find some way to be involved, whether it be in your home. We had a prayer request earlier to reject an unrighteous vaccine, praise God. I'm not against vaccines.

I'm against the weaponization of them. As Christians, if we start in our home by discipling our children in the things of God, and I'm not talking about weak discipleship, I'm not talking about easy believism.

I'm not talking about we show up once a week on Sunday and then we go home and then we pretend like that that was enough. I'm talking about a parent actually, rigorously, effectively, passionately disciple their children, catechize their children, sing hymns and psalms and spiritual songs with their children, prepare their children to be the salt and light of the next generation, raising them up to believe that they have a place.

We've got to get to a point where the most passionate Christians in church aren't automatically shipped off to a seminary to become a pastor, but they're sent out into the workforce to bring Christ into all of life.

We've got to understand that this battle is gonna be a 20, 40, 60 year battle, and many of us are gonna die before we see the great progress that we're praying for. But we have to remember that if we will start in our homes, herald it in our churches, eventually our communities will come under the Lordship of Christ, and we will see health and justice in our nation again.

Amen?

Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that you speak about everything in your word, from justice and government to mercy, medicine. Lord, help us as believers to not be the ones who know how to fight, but not where to fight.

Help us in our lifetimes to bring Christ into all of life as much as we humanly can. Help us to remember that we're not here and we don't exist to build up our little castle. We don't exist to collect a paycheck and collect a 401k and then blow it in our retirement age on cruise ships and Mai Tais.

Everything that we have is from you, for you, and for the life of the world. Lord, let us live with an all-consuming passion to see this world bow down to the will of Jesus Christ for the life of the world.

Let us train our children in that way. Let us live our lives in that way. And Lord, when we lay down the plow and lay down the hammer and hand it off to the next generation, may you find our hands weathered and worn and hands that have been working.

Let us work.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Will you join me by standing as we respond to the word of God through song?