So we've been through two lessons now on this new study that we've embarked on, sort of looking at our spiritual health. We sort of joked each week at the challenge of that. Nobody likes to go to the doctor. I don't even like to go to the dentist, frankly. But we don't like to be examined, right? It's very challenging to be examined, have our hearts probed into. But that's what we're gonna seek to do here in this class. We're following a book by Donald S. Whitney called 10 Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health. We'll try to hit. one of these questions sort of each week. Some of them may linger a bit, but we'll work through it together. And today, if time actually permits, we're going to actually get into the book. So I think the last couple of weeks, we've kind of been Going through an evaluation, a recalibration, if you will, of what discipleship is, what it means to be a disciple. This is the third week I've kind of touched on that. We're going to hit a little bit more on it today, and then we'll get into our book. But I'm not going to recap everything we've talked about. We've got those recorded if you want to go back and listen. And frankly, most of you have been here for those. But I do want to wrap up where we ended last week. Toward the back half of the lesson last week, we were looking at the gospel of Luke, chapter nine. If you want to flip there, you're welcome to. I'm probably not going to hit all those texts, but you can kind of scan them as we're talking. And we talked about in Luke's book that something happens in chapter nine. There's this shift that occurs where he moves from the first eight chapters sort of talking about who Jesus is And really from 9 forward, he focuses on what it means to follow Jesus, what it is to be his disciple. And it's no mistake, I don't think that that happens. What also happens in chapter 9 is that Peter declares that Jesus is the Christ when he's asked who other people say that he is. It's sort of like we put a placeholder in the sand. Who he is is he's the Messiah. We've settled who Jesus is, now what do we do with it? And it's sort of interesting when you look at that chapter, if you have time to go back and look at it this afternoon, I would commend you to do that. But Jesus is incredibly blunt. It's always fascinating when Jesus is talking about those who might follow him. If I were looking to gather followers. I'm not going to say if I were Christ. If I were looking to gather people to come along and follow me, I might be a little more gentle. I might encourage those who are struggling with putting me first. But Jesus is incredibly blunt. He says in chapter 9, if you're going to be my disciple, There's a way about it. I have to be first. As we talked about that last week, what it means for Christ to give us a new priority. If we're going to follow Him, He has to come first. At the end of that chapter, there are three men who come and seem interested in following Christ, and they all have some things that they want to do first. And He hits them with that boat paddle. Let the dead go bury their dead. leave your father and mother, I have to be first. Things that we would never think about. We'd never tell somebody to ignore their family or not take care of their obligations. Christ is not saying those are bad things. He's just saying in terms of priority, he has to be first. If we have ifs and buts in terms of following him, we've sort of misunderstood what it means to follow him. I gave you that illustration of he can't be Lord or Savior. He's absolutely both. It's like his first and last name. We do refer to him as Lord and Savior, right? He comes into the room, we don't say, I want you to be my Lord or I want you to be my Savior. He can't be one without the other. And that is an important distinction. Trying to run through this so we can get to the rest here. But he also gives us a new identity we talked about. We look in the middle of the chapter, he says this in verses 23 through 25, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. He goes on to say, for whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for me will save it. We mentioned last week that that word life there is not the Greek word for bios or our physical life. It's our inner life. It's our identity. You can't have Christ be your identity without in a sense losing yourself. Losing yourself through serving him. Instead of trying to gain the world by gaining things, we have to build everything in our lives on him. and who he is and what he's done. And then we will finally have a self that is stable because it's been built to know him. That's what we were created to do, to be centered upon Christ. Until we find him as our foundation, we're like that house built on the sand, constantly looking for identity somewhere else. And maybe you've been through that. I have certainly felt that in my own life through pursuing identity and career, or family, or all these other things closely tied to priority. If you don't put him first, if he's not the foundation, everything else is soil that shifts, I'll say. All right, so he's going to give us a new priority and a new identity when he calls us to come follow him. But how does that happen? What does it look like? How is it possible? How do I do these things, right? That's always the question. Here it is. You can't change your identity. You won't put him first without a radical experience of his mercy and love. We have a tendency to think we can just sort of fix these things ourselves. I hear it. I need to put Jesus first. I want him to be my life. You can't do that in and of yourself. God has to do it in you. The spirit has to work in you. You can't change your identity just by deciding. It's not an act of the will. There's only one way that the root of your personality can be changed. And that's through an experience of love. His spirit has to come into us and show us the beauty and the wonder of Christ. And as our hearts long for that, He begins to change us. And we see Him as the most beautiful thing that there is, the pearl of great price, all those illustrations He gives in the Gospels. We can't help but want more of Him. And it's then that we'll be able to put him first. It's then that he will give us a new identity. So we have to experience his love. We have to know his mercy. We have to see him for all that he is. There's a great Scottish preacher, Thomas Chalmers, I think Logan may have referenced him in a few sermons back, but he has this famous sermon called The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. He's talking about how do we, how do we, how do our hearts change the order of our loves? How do we put Christ first? And I'm going to read this a little bit. Just kind of hang with me. And if you've got questions or comments, certainly let me know. Raising your hand or something. But here's what Chalmers says, seldom do any of our habits or flaws disappear by a process of extinction through reasoning or by the mere force of mental determination by a sheer act of our will. Reason and willpower are not enough. But what cannot be destroyed may be dispossessed. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is the expulsive power of a new one. A young man, for example, may cease to idolize pleasure, but only because the idol of wealth has become the stronger and gotten the ascendancy. He is able to replace this desire of pleasure with a desire for wealth and maybe power that comes with it. which is enabling him to discipline himself for prosperous business to be successful. Even the love of money ceases to have mastery over the heart if it is drawn into another world of ideology and possibly politics. And he is now lorded over by the love of power. But there's not one of these transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered but its desire for having some one object of absolute love is unconquerable. It is only when admitted into the number of God's children through faith that is in Christ that the spirit of adoption is poured out upon us. It is then that the heart brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires in the only way that deliverance is possible. So it isn't enough to hold out a mirror of our imperfections to our soul. It's not enough to lecture our conscience. Rather, we must try every legitimate method of finding access to our hearts for the love of him who is greater than the world. So the quest to be more like Jesus is to love Jesus. It's only when He becomes the chief affection of our hearts that these other things lose the power that they have over us. Because we were created, we were designed to love things. We can't be neutral. We're going to love something. Our hearts are going to be ruled by something. Something's going to have its master over us. Is it gonna be all these other things that are in the world that frankly in and of themselves are not necessarily bad? Or is it gonna be Christ who is greater than the world? Until you're melted by the amazing sight, knowledge, and sense of Jesus taking your much deserved punishment for you, you cannot have that transformation of identity. You can't just decide I'm gonna be different. It has to be an experience of love. And as I said earlier, the spirit works that in us. So, wrapping up here on disciple, let's close with a couple of practical things. Just want you to remember these as we work through the rest of our study here. First, discipleship is not an option. Jesus says that if anyone would come after me, he must follow me. If you want to come after Him, if you want to have any experience of Him, any relationship with Him, you have to be a disciple. We're not going to be able to follow Him. We're not going to be able to pursue Him, have relationship with Him unless we commit to being His disciple. There are not two kinds of Christians. Regular Christians who are not really disciples and then other people who want this second degree and decide to go be disciples. All Christians are disciples. To have anything to do with him is to follow him in the way that he defines it. Setting a new priority, finding a new identity, experiencing living out of the mercy that we have in the gospel. Second, We establish it's not an option. Hopefully you agree with that. But I would also submit to you it's a journey. We have here in this chapter nine, Jesus, at the end of that chapter, he's starting this mission, if you will, on the way to the cross in Jerusalem. And it's almost as if Luke is setting that imagery up for us, that discipleship is a journey. It is a process. It is a journey. Just as Jesus sets his face to the mission before him, we have to set our face to pursuing him. What I want to say here, that there is a decisiveness to it. You have to leave. certain things in order to decide to pursue him. I'm often challenged when I think about this. Once heard a minister say this and it's so convicting. When was the last thing you gave up something for Jesus? Do you ever think about that? And I don't mean, I'm not asking about pornography or some heinous, sinful thing. When was the last time you gave up something good for Jesus? When was the last time you said, you know, I'm not going to spend this on myself. I'm going to give it to Christ. I'm not going to use my time over here in something that I want to enjoy or that's going to bring me pleasure. I'm going to pursue Him. We should be thinking that way on a regular basis. Think about it. How do you show your spouse you love them? You give up something meaningful. You give up something you want to do to show them that they're more important than that thing. Don't mishear me. I'm not saying this is how we become saved, okay? We don't become saved because we give up things for Jesus. He's done the saving. We follow him by showing him our love for him. We're able to follow him because we know his love. His love comes first. Our following is the natural progression of that. We really do have to drop our conditions, drop the ifs and buts. Not until you say that you've begun the journey. After your decisive beginning, the fact remains that it is a journey, a process that takes time. You're not going to have it all together. It's very important to keep that in mind, because if you think that discipleship is the way you're saved, then you've got things out of order. He doesn't say, if you follow me, I will save you, or I'll go to the cross for you. He says, I'm going to the cross for you, so follow me. We're not saved because we're a disciple, we're a disciple if and only when we realize what he's done to save us. So I think that's clear, but trust me, your heart will get that mixed up often. It's natural for us to want to earn what he's done for us. We're not earning, we're merely demonstrating our love for him. So discipleship, hard stuff, right? We're gonna move into the easy thing now, just diagnosing your spiritual health, all right? Any questions on that before we keep rolling? Or thoughts? Richard, I just thought it was, you see the correlation and just the wisdom in it, and you know, you began with talking about replacing. Love. Essentially our, you know, what did it, you know, the need for our love for Christ to be primary in everything, You gave the example of a husband and wife giving up something. It's not like, hey, honey, you should love me. I gave up pornography for you. But I gave up something good to spend more time with you. But the ultimate goal is that that time with your spouse would be what's more desirable and that your heart longs for that. you know, in the same way our relationship with the Lord. And it's interesting how God works. Those things that we're giving up that we think we want more oftentimes turn out to be the things that we don't really need as much. And that thing that should be our priority starts becoming the priority, not out of, you did the checklist, but God just works and you're a part of that. Jesus might say, if you lose your life, you find it. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The very thing that I think I'm giving up, that feels heart-wrenching, I'm going to find is replaced by something that's so much more. So much more fulfilling, so much more satisfying, so much more rewarding. That sounds like hedonism, John Piper might say, but I would just suggest to you, our hearts are going to pursue something. Are we choosing a better thing to love? That's the question Chalmers would ask us. Replace something weak with something strong. What were you gonna add? Yes, I just wanted to make sure I covered the two points. You said discipleship is not an option. What was the follow-up? It's also a journey, that it is an ongoing process. And we're gonna talk a lot about that in the next several weeks as we work through spiritual health. The point being that there's not a light switch that gets flipped or that we had this one experience and now all of discipleship is easy. Peter didn't say, you are the Christ. Who else would I follow? And simply life got easy. It's only a short period later he denies Christ. We still struggle. There's still ups and downs. There's still challenging things. It is a journey and yet he is calling us to follow him. Okay, spiritual diagnosis. The way this book is ordered, you probably got it in the title, there are 10 questions, that we ask ourselves, if you will, to sort of evaluate our spiritual health. And the first one, this first chapter, is, I think I may have said it wrong, but Do You Thirst for God? I wrote Do You Thirst for the Living God? I'm not sure why I changed it. You know, I would elaborate on that to say, do you long for him? Do you want to know more of him? You know, Paul talks about, I think, well, I know he does it in Philippians. He says it elsewhere that he wants to know more of Christ. And you're thinking, how does Paul need to know more of Christ? Or he says somewhere else that I might know him. that he might know him. How does he not already know him? But his point is that I might have more of him, this longing for continual growth, having more of Christ, hungering and thirsting for God. And in this chapter, this opening chapter of the book, as he talks about what it is to hunger for God or thirst for God. Whitney gives this example of an old pastor he had come and preach at his church. And I'm not going to rehash that illustration to you, but it did make me think of one. I can still remember this so vividly. I wish I could remember the exact sermon. I don't remember the details of the sermon. The church I grew up in, Southern Baptist Church, we had this older gentleman come and preach and he was delivering a really powerful sermon about following Christ. I do remember that. But toward the end of the sermon, this joker actually broke out in song. I was like, I've never seen this. And he started to sing, you may know this song, I think the Gaithers, are the ones who wrote it, but there's something about that name. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, just something about that name. Total a cappella, older gentleman, but just what made it so powerful was as he was singing, you're thinking, he's just singing to God. And it struck me, this guy has a hunger and a thirst. It made me thirsty. It made me think of other passages in Scripture. It was incredibly powerful. Listen to Psalm 42, 1 and 2. As the deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before Him? Really powerful text. I give you that illustration really just to say you can probably think of illustrations in your life where you encountered someone that you really sensed a hunger for God, a thirst for God, and it made you thirsty. Wouldn't it be great if we were that kind of people that made other people thirsty for the living God? Really good stuff. The thirst of our soul is a sign of growth of our soul. and a true sign of spiritual health, which is why I think Dr. Whitney here focuses on it first. Now, he describes three kinds of spiritual thirst. I'm just trying to keep an eye on time here. There's certainly a sense in which there's a thirst in every soul. You may have heard me mention that in our prayer, that we all have this, when I open the lesson here, we all have this longing within us, this vacuum within us. We feel this hole that needs to be filled. You know, I would describe it as deep down we all know that things are not as they should be. You know, that beautiful concept in Judaism of shalom. Yes, shalom is peace, but what is peace? Everything is as it should be. It's a beautiful picture of the garden. When things were as they should be. When man walked with his God. When there was no sin. When he sought to please his God. When all of creation worked in harmony with man. Can you even imagine, right? When the garden didn't fight against you. We all know deep down things aren't as they should be. All we have to do is watch the news for like 30 seconds and we realize things aren't as they should be. But even more we know they aren't as they should be with me. I know in my own heart I'm not who I'm meant to be. I know there's more. I know I was created for more. And if I don't believe in the God of the universe, I still know my life is not what I want it to be. Every human knows that. We all have a longing. We want more. We all know that there must be more to this than what we're currently experiencing. So that natural thirst is in all of man. And Whitney describes three different thirsts and he kind of puts it in three different categories of people. The first is the thirst of the empty soul. The natural man has an empty soul and is longing for their emptiness to be filled. So the man without the Spirit of God, the person who has not found their satisfaction in Christ, has this empty longing, this longing that we all have post the fall. We know there must be more. And what do we do? We run around trying to fill it with all sorts of things. Could be success in business or our careers. Could be families. Could be sheer pleasure. Could be money and possessions. could be acceptance of other people. There are all kind of things that we make idols out of, quite frankly, that we seek to fill that longing with. If I could just have this, some smarter men than I have said, if you want to know what those things are in your own heart, all you have to do is watch your emotions when they're taken away, you know? When your career starts to stumble, Things don't go as they should, and you become disproportionately rocked in your world, that is a red flag that your career has become that thing that you're trying to fill that hole with. Maybe it's relationships with other people, or your family, or your spouse. When those things don't go as planned, and you have a disproportionate reaction, it should be a red flag to us. I've made too much of this. This is not what I was meant to satisfy my longing with. It's an endless list, quite frankly. John Calvin said, we are idle factories. Our hearts will make an idol out of anything. But if you want to see where those things are, all you have to do is look for those things that if you thought, if I could only have this, if this, here's a great one. If my kids would just do what I tell them to, Life would be so much easier. It's an indication that I've made an idol out of that. So anyway, keep rolling here. Augustine said, you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you. That is the state of natural man. And the one who has an empty soul, a soul without the Spirit of God, has a longing and it can't be fulfilled. Now, sometimes we see people who are seeking after God or a religious experience, and we have a tendency to think, well, there's that person longing for Christ to be their satisfaction. But the reality is, apart from the Spirit of God, we can never long for Him, all right? Paul makes that clear in Romans 3.11. He tells us that no one seeks after God. So how do we reconcile that with people who seem to be seeking God or seeking a religious experience? Dr. Whitney here clarifies that just because someone is longing for something that can only be found in God doesn't mean they're looking for Him. They're not searching for God as He has revealed Himself in His Word, but rather they want a God that they want Him to be, or a God that will simply give them what they want. We have lots of ways of manipulating things, but only the Spirit of God can make us long for the God that reveals Himself in the Scriptures, a God that gives the kind of instruction Jesus says, if you're not willing to make me first, don't bother following. You realize how many hard things God tells us when we choose to follow him? It's only the spirit of God who can open our hearts to the beauty and wonder of the God of the scriptures that can make us long for him. One last point he made I loved in this section is that the real tragedy of the soul that is empty, that never properly finds its thirst on earth, is that it will thirst forever in hell. We have all this imagery in the scriptures about what hell is going to be like. Hellfire, thirst, longing, all these things. And I'm not even gonna begin to say exactly what hell will be like or how much of that imagery is explicit or what, but I can tell you this, the soul in hell will have a longing that cannot be filled. You had that picture of the rich man and Lazarus. And the rich man is so thirsty. He just wants someone to dip their moist finger on the tip of his tongue. but Jesus says his thirst cannot be quenched. He has a longing that cannot be fulfilled. Could there be a greater hell than that? So, thirst of the empty soul. There's also a thirst of the dry soul. The distinction in dry and empty is that the dry soul would be a Christian, someone who has tasted and seen that the Lord is good, but for whatever reason, and we're gonna go through a few of those reasons, They have this sense that God's presence is not near, and their soul is dry. The thirst is not what it should be. There's a dryness, no other better way to say it. Now, this is an interesting distinction, and I'm glad he made this, because he talks about how do we reconcile that a Christian can have a dry soul with what Jesus says in John chapter four. You remember where Jesus, in John chapter four, it's at one of the feast days. I should know this. I should have done better preparation. But he talks about, come unto me, for I am the fountain of living water, and I'll give you water that you will never thirst again for. I'm paraphrasing. I should read this properly. Whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never be thirsty again. How do we reconcile that with this concept of a dry soul? And he pulled some stuff from John Piper. I don't know if I can even find it here in the book, but I found it very helpful. But essentially what Piper was saying in his quote was, if you go back to the context of John 4, Jesus is telling his listeners that the water he gives is a spring of water welling within. Guys, it's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, when we belong to Christ, resides within us. We now have this resource within us, a well of springing water, a spring of water, if you will. So the supply is within us to quench our thirst, but we continue to thirst. We thirst. but the resources within us. Does that make sense? And when our souls are dry, we've, for whatever reason, forgotten that supply is there. We tend to become arid. And he gives us three reasons that our souls tend to become dry. The most common is drinking from too much of the fountains of the world. and too little from the river of God. This imagery is throughout the scriptures. Isaiah talks about this. There's lots of other places that talk about this. When we partake, if you will, of the idols of the world, the false gods of this world, we find that our thirst is not quenched. In fact, they make us more thirsty. It's almost that imagery of the drug addict who just proceeds to have to have more drugs, the addiction cycle that is out there. I thought of just salt water. Think about drinking salt water. It just makes you more thirsty. It seems like it's going to quench your thirst, and maybe it even does momentarily, but it's not long. It's even worse. So when our hearts are turned to the things of this world to quench their thirst instead of communion with God, we become dry and our souls shrivel. So that's one caution to us when our souls are dry, that perhaps we're seeking satisfaction from the things of this world. He also makes reference to what the Puritans called God's desertions, those times in our lives when we struggle to sense God's presence. If we belong to Christ, we have to know those times when we feel deserted, those dark nights of the soul, if you will, are really our perception because Jesus has told us the reality is that he will never forsake us. He will never leave us. But in those valleys, we feel as if God has withdrawn from us. So many pictures of this in the Psalms. You see the various writers of the Psalms struggling with this, this dark period where God seems so distant, and they long to be in communion with him. He gave a nice little quote here from one of the Puritans, William Gurnall, Gurnall, Gurnall, I don't know if I got that right, but he said, the Christian must trust in a withdrawing God. When the sun goes behind a cloud, it is not less near than when it's raised or felt. So even though something has come between us, God is ever present. He is right there. It's not he that's left us. We have slid from him. But I also would encourage you when you have that sense that God is not near, when you have a longing and you want that restoration of communion, That's actually a sign of spiritual health. While it may not feel like it in that dark time in that valley, if you've never tasted him, you wouldn't know what his absence was actually like. So it's actually an element of assurance that you recognize this distance and have this longing for his presence again. So I'd encourage you with that. The empty soul could not know such a longing. And then the third cause he gives is mental or physical fatigue. And we've all experienced this. But when you find yourself overwhelmed, either physically or mentally, by the demands of this world, you often find yourself in a dark place. And God does seem distant. And we need to have that rest, if you will, where we can be drawn back into communion with Him. Wendy didn't draw this parallel, but I would just tell you that's what the Sabbath has given us for. And we so neglect it. But God has designed us in such a way that we need rest to be reminded of who He is to us. We need the wonder of the Sabbath to be called back into communion with Him. So that is just an encouragement to you of one of the antidotes, if you will, for that aspect of the dry soul. The third The thirst that he describes is the thirst of the satisfied soul. We're not gonna make it through all this stuff, but we're gonna do our best. I'm only down to a couple pages. How does the satisfied soul still have a longing for God? That seems counterintuitive. But the reality is, the more we taste of Him, the more that we see how good He is, the more we long for Him. We see this with Paul in Philippians 3. I'll just read this text to you. Philippians 3, 7-10, Paul says, But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ. I'm going to skip verse 9, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. Paul describes this beautiful imagery of knowing Christ, this thing that is beyond all other things, more valuable, more worth, surpassing worth. Think back to Chalmers' illustration of those loves. And this picture of he wants more of Christ, to know him, to share in his sufferings. I described it in my own head after reading this as we're like that little child, I'm thinking about my grandson who experiences some new thing for the first time. The other day we went down the slide and he's like, whee, and there's just this exhilaration. It's like, wow. Could there be any greater satisfaction? Now, did he get to the bottom of the slide and say, boom, check box. I've done that. It was awesome. Let's go find a new experience. No. What did he do? He said, more. That's his sign for more. Let's do that again. And after about 25 times, he's still saying more. That is our heart. We taste it. There's a sense of satisfaction, but we want more. We hunger. We long. We thirst for more of Christ. That's how He has made us. He has designed us so that it's not just one experience that's going to satiate our souls. We want more. What a beautiful thing. This future desire for Him. We're out of time. We'll come back and wrap this up next week. But what would I leave you with? Yeah, we really should because there's some good stuff here from Jonathan Edwards we should dabble into. But I really just want to encourage you as you think about and evaluate your own soul, do a hunger and thirst for God. We'll talk next week about some practical ways to think about how to stir that in our hearts. First of all, we need to be dependent upon the Spirit of God. He alone can draw us into that desire. But I would tell you that the Lord has given us disciplines, means of grace, if you will, that draw us into his presence. And if we're just neglecting those and we're hoping for some lightning rod to hit us, we're not really thinking about how He's designed us to follow Him. He really does call us to submit ourselves to His Word, to study His Word, to meditate upon it, to seek communion with Him, spend time in solitude with Him, to look for those times of rest when we might be called back into communion with Him. to fellowship with other believers that we might see their hunger and thirst and have a hunger and thirst renewed in our own hearts, to partake in the sacraments as we're gonna do today, that we might be reminded of what Christ has done for us, see His beauty and wonder and hunger and thirst for Him. So it's really not rocket science, but It's not an option. He's called us to follow Him. How are we reordering our lives to put ourselves in those places where we might hunger and thirst for Him? I would maybe end it that way. So, any other thoughts before I pray for us? I'm sorry I keep doing a poor job of laying out my notes where we can finish one thought before moving to the next. It's really just my strategy to keep you from asking questions. Okay. Well, let's pray together and we'll wrap up. Father, we thank you just for your incredible pursuit of us. We thank you for the wonder of what you've done for us in Christ. that you did not wait for us to get all cleaned up and to make ourselves better to send your son to die for us. But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. May that simple phrase and thought wash over us this morning as we go to worship. May we be renewed again in the wonder of your gospel. Would your spirit so effectuated in our hearts, may we have a hunger and a thirst and a longing for the great Christ that is ours. We thank you, Father, for the new life that you've wrought in us. We pray that we would be faithful and that, Father, we would live lives that would bring honor to him. Would you be with us now as we go to worship? And we pray that Christ would be glorified in all that we do. It's in His great name we pray. Amen.