Good morning, Randy. Welcome and thank you for being here today, Trinity Bible Church guests and family and visitors. We are in the latter portion of Romans chapter 13 today. But before we begin, in order to have complete transparency with the congregation that is usually here or longstanding visitors, does it seem ominous? Everyone's face is like, what's going on? Whenever we make some type of liturgical change, we like to maybe have more communication, liturgical change, meaning the order of things we do up here on Sunday from prayers and songs and sermon and benediction and Lord's Supper. And this is a big one, and so I thought that I might take a little time to explain it to you. And what it is is that we're going to add a song after the sermon. Is everybody okay? Some people are not, you know, change happens and people may lose it a little bit. So we've actually played with it a few times in the first year of the church. We did it often. So since we've extended about a year ago or about seven months ago, maybe we extended the time of corporate worship by 15 minutes. We do think that it's an appropriate way to and a worship time is that after hearing the truth of God's word, there'd be some type of outlet for praise for God's people. And so we'd like to have a song after the sermon, and the benediction will follow that. So now that I've scared you all sufficiently, and then you've had this big adrenaline dump, we can go into the time of the ministry of the word. If you're visiting, I have a very dry sense of humor. If you haven't caught on already, I apologize. So, we are in the book of Romans, chapter 13. Only a few chapters left. By the trajectory of how I've planned this out, it looks like we'll be finishing right around the beginning of summertime, sometime in May, perhaps. We'll be finishing the book of Romans. Although, listening to one of my favorite authors this week, comment on how it used to be a measure of how serious you were of a minister, of how long it took you to preach Romans, and mentioning heroes of mine taking seven and eight years, I feel maybe I haven't done that good of a job. But we'll be ending in May. The way we're doing things now is that I will read the word that we will be going through today. And I ask that after that time of hearing the word, you take the time to take a time of silent prayer to reflect on your own life and heart before God, confess to him unconfessed sins, ask for the Holy Spirit to open your mind and your heart to the truth of his word so that you might be transformed more into the image of Christ. Reading from verses 8 through verses 14 in chapter 13 of the book of Romans. Oh, no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Beside this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone, the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. Please pray. Heavenly Father, may Your covenant community, the Bride of Christ, the Church, always acknowledge Your holiness, and Your goodness, and Your beauty, and Your wrath, and Your justice. Lord, may we reflect this holiness in our pursuit of You in our lives, imperfect and as fallen, yet made new in Christ. May your word and the truth of your word and the testimony about the character of God given to us through the word be in our hearts and our minds and coming from our lips at all times. Lord, may we be a community that loves one another and proclaims your name to the nations Lord, take this time now to challenge and confront us with the truth of your word, and also comfort and edify and lift us up in the truth of your word. And may the unbeliever in our midst, may at this time, as you've determined, turn from their fallen ways, be given faith and new life. the testimony of your word and the power of God the Holy Spirit. We pray all this. May this time glorify your name and edify the church in Christ's name. Amen. We find ourselves in the middle of Paul kind of chaining together several thoughts. Beginning or ending in really in the book itself in chapter 11, which is the ending part of Paul's explanation of the Christian faith. He's now talking about the implications of that Christian faith being lived out. And as he's called the church to be living sacrifices, and in and out of that, he's dealt with how the church is to deal with each other throughout the entire book. And yet here, the marks of a true Christian, or some other heading that you might have in your Bible, beginning in 12.9, kind of really works itself out in these chaining together of living out the Christian life all the way to almost the end of the final chapter of 16. And so this love aspect that he what we began here in 13a today is actually coming from 12.9 where it says, let love be genuine, abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with brotherly affection, outdo one another in showing honor. goes on and on kind of and then going down to 14 bless those who persecute you bless and do not curse them rejoice with those who rejoice with those who weep what you have in here is an interplay with Paul not just dealing with now the church and how the church treats each other in terms of the Jewish and Gentile converts to Christianity that he's writing to in Rome but he's going to really kind of focus in on this idea of a neighbor at the beginning. And if there's one thing I think the text is pointing us to in 8 through 14, although they're really two exegetical units or two kind of textual units, you have 8 through 10, which is primarily dealing with this kind of this idea of love, and then 11 through 14 dealing with this idea of of kind of the time or an eschatological or because you know the end is near aspect, but they're tied together. just as they're tied together to the previous verse. So beginning here in verse 8, and it's really tied to verse 7, because in verse 7, as he's talking about how the Christian is to approach the idea of governing authorities and to respect those who respect, you'll see in verse 7, he uses this Greek phrase, pray to all what is owed, or give to who what is theirs. Pay it all to what is owed them, taxes. to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor, honor, you kind of, I don't have to say owed again. And so the idea is that someone, you have something that belongs to someone else. but it's in your possession currently. So your duty as a Christian is to give that back. And so when he's talking about honor and respect to governing authorities or officials and things like that, or also the taxation of the citizen, that's owed to the government. Don't think about mixing kingdoms. And then now he attaches that idea to love. And he says in verse eight, oh, no one, anything. except to love each other. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. Now this particular verse is really a play on when we start getting into this aspect of neighbor of Leviticus 19, 17, where it talks about the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus, of course, is the one who really opens up this aspect of the idea of loving your neighbor of yourself and including the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, There's someone who is a Samaritan who would have been seen as something as ethnically impure to the Jew, someone who is known as a mixed breed. And so as this Samaritan who is in need has seen, two members of the priestly class, the people who would have been the authorities of Israel and know the word or Torah more than the average citizen, see this Samaritan and do not help him. But then the idea of the foreign, I'm sorry, I'm mixing this up with two parallels, but then it's actually the Samaritan, the half breed or the one who would have been deemed ethnically impure, who actually helps the poor man. And then that is the idea of who is the person who actually loved their neighbor. It's not the person who knew the law. It wasn't the person who was a kind of over the religious life of Israel. It was a person who was considered ceremonially unclean. by most Jews. And so in that parable itself, it talks about who is your neighbor. And so there's a couple of questions here. Number one that we have to answer, particularly in our culture, is what does this mean? What does love mean? What's love got to do with it? You know, you can start all these terrible songs, want to know what love is. That's not an implicit of what I listen to on the radio, by the way. But I remember as a child growing up, when I used to like music, and I'd listen to the radio. And most radio stations or most songs, especially if you're looking into the, what is every rock band famous for? It's not generally the same song they play over and over again. It's what? It's their ballad. What's their love ballad? And what happened? And what's her name? And why do you want her back? And maybe you should have treated her better, whatever. Generally. I don't listen to music today, so I don't know what it is now. So you have to deal with what I'm going with here. But if you look at what our culture, or Western culture, has become in terms of how love is defined, you'll generally see it as what you could only call frivolous. Fleeting. It's kind of like, it's like any other emotion. It's something that could change with maybe you ate too much gassy food and you feel a little bit different and it doesn't feel quite right and maybe I'm not in love anymore. Love is essentially, and all you have to do is look at, one of my favorite authors would say that you can look at a society and look at the art and the artwork of the society and what they call art and you can see what the culture values. And so if you look at, say, music, and TV, and cinema, and artwork itself today. You can actually see the value of a society. And if you look at, say, TV, movies, and music, you can see that love is this thing that is not very easily defined. In fact, it can change in a heartbeat. You can love several different people. And here, the interesting thing is, This is not going to be a play on the different Greek uses of love because that's not a good argument in terms of you're saying like, oh, there's agape and there's phileo and there's eros. No, phileo and agape can be interchanged. The idea is, but love itself and the way that it's used is always an action. It's a verb. And so when God in his word is calling his people to love, you'll see that the parable that Jesus uses isn't that someone walked by the person in need and patted him on the shoulder and said, bless your heart and walked off. It's the idea that they took care of them, that they acted on something inwardly that was calling them to act on it. In here, Paul is kind of, taking this Levitical idea that Jesus kind of revolutionized in his teaching while he was here, in his humiliation, was the idea of this fulfilling of the law. And so, owe no one anything And he's using the idea of like, I've just told you, whoever you owe respect, honor, taxes, give all that. Owe no one anything. Now this is not a, let's stop here and talk about what it means to be in debt. That's not what this passage is about. There's other passages we can talk about debt about, but this passage is not to stop and talk about, hey, you should own property, you should own, that's not what this is. Owe no one to anything, because it's connected to this, except to love each other. And it's played off the other ones. You've given your honor, you've given your respect, you've given your taxes. That's expected of you as a good Christian who is a citizen of Rome. And owe no one anything except this one thing. This one thing, as I gave the definition of owe in the Greek before, that someone needs something that is theirs that you possess. And so guess what? As he's saying, love each other for each other, for the one who has, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. He's saying each of us, each person who is in Christ has something, love, that belongs to other people. And it's not something to be hoarded and held onto, and it's not a feeling, it's an action that's based on this inner work that Paul has talked about for 11 chapters. Because you, broken and fallen sinner, Gentile, Greek, barbarian, Jew, are all now in union with Christ, and that's your true identity, and you've been clothed in his righteousness, You've been justified before the Father. You've been given the Holy Spirit who guides you and leads you in life. And God has the entirety of your existence planned out to eternity in the hope of the return of Jesus Christ. And now for this vaporous quick time that you're here, you've also been given the love of God that doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the other people who you see in life. Because the neighbor, the word itself means, what we've translated a neighbor is almost a direct transliteration of the Greek. It means the one who is near to you. So here he's not talking about the church, just as he hasn't been talking about since the middle of 12. He's talking about how the church, the Christian man or woman, interacts with everyone, the world around them, the government, those who are around them, those who are near to you. It's not just going, okay, I love this person who's across the street and with a yee-haw at 3.30 in the morning set off fireworks. You know, like, I got to love that person. I'm going to go lay hands on them real quick and then we'll see. It's the yee-haw, the preamble of the yee-haws that would really Okay, so, but we're called to love those near to us. And then it comes into this really difficult aspect of the law. So if you want to look at, as I've said, the way I wanted to look at Romans from the beginning was, here Paul has two groups that don't like each other. Before they were believers. Christians, I'm sorry, Jews and Gentiles. Gentiles being every other nationality that wasn't Jewish. And then now the gospel has come and in the very heart of the empire of Rome, there's these churches And they have majority Gentile, although Jewish believers as well. And they bring with them this baggage that comes with them. The Jews' monotheism and ethical superiority because of the trying to adhere to the law. The Gentiles bring this freedom of kind of being a blank slate and coming to Christianity and just kind of taking it in. and they have all these detestable practices that the Jews don't like, and they're coming together, and these things are butting heads and causing division in the church. And so Paul, the beginning parts of the book, is pointing out to them, no, you're all equally, think of the argument, you're all equally no good. But now you are all equally, extremely valuable because of Christ. You are literally offspring in God's family. You're now brothers and sisters. You can't get away from that fact. Everything else you have is way below that which you have in common, which is communion and union with Christ. And then he's going to tell this group of people, Now this is how you live out the faith. And what he takes here is this very Jewish argument of the law. And you can also look at this whole book, as I was saying, as Paul's exposition of the application of the law. How does a Christian live? Can't fulfill the law. Not on their own. We need the Spirit. You could sit down and take the first commandment. And you could try to look at it from maybe a hundred different ways. and you will never be able to fulfill it. You'll fail every time. But it isn't our endurance in being able to fulfill the law, it's Christ already fulfilling it. And so when he says, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you should not murder, you should not steal, you should not covet, any other commandment are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. So he uses what's called The second table of the law. These are the heavy ones. Because he's not dealing with the dietary restrictions. He's not dealing with do not wear clothes that are interweaved and all these other ones you read and you're like, oh, what? It's this idea of these big ones, these universal kind of big things at the second table. Committing adultery does harm to the one near to you. Murder does harm to the one near to you. stealing, coveting, and then he just lumps in. And any other commandment, any other commandment of God is summed up in this idea. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And it's the same thing from the Leviticus 19. It's the same thing Jesus taught. It's not as easy as it sounds. Because if you think about yourself, And you may struggle with different things. You may struggle with self-esteem issues. But you love yourself functionally more than you love anyone else. Meaning our thoughts are innately selfish to begin with. Think of your day. Whatever it might be, there's going to be thoughts of what I have to do today, and I've got to get it done, and I hope nobody gets in my way, and then that kind of thing. Innately, we think of ourselves and love ourselves in that aspect, in action. And so when it says, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, it's not adding that progression that Jesus, the idea that it is adding that progression of the idea that the one near us that we're loving is the same way as the golden rule of treat others as you want them to treat you and so on and so on. But as an application point for the Christian life, this is just the precursor. It's an understanding of what you're called to. Love, principally as an action from God, has been poured out in an overflowing aspect to you as a recipient of God's Spirit. and God's grace. You, who in this same book in chapter three, Paul will say, cannot do any good, have never done any good, a rebel by nature, and God has still adopted you into his family. You've been the recipient of divine love from the Father, from the Son, from the Holy Spirit, and it's what you live in and are clothed in every moment. until either you go to be with Him or Christ returns in His glory. Every moment. Christian man and woman who has the Holy Spirit and is regenerate lives a life of overflowing abundant as a recipient of love And then so now Paul is saying just as Jesus said just as James says in his Apostle also quoting Leviticus 19 It's also also mentioned in the Gospels especially in Matthew As a recipient of that it now no longer belongs to you it's for those near to you. That's what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. Not as you yourself in your flesh or in your own humanity would seek to love somebody, which would be self-serving more than likely or not. As God has loved you, you are to sacrificially love those around you. This is the idea of the world around us and the church making an impact. When you talk about things like, See, it makes me, I almost have an allergic reaction to it. The word missional, that has become so popular in like the last 15 years. People just throw it out and say, oh, you live a missional age? Are you a missional church? Sorry. The idea that all of the Christian life is a sacrificial on what's been done to us. We're mimicking Christ. We're called little Christ. So the sacrifice and the love that's poured on us by Christ to us, to the Christian man and woman, we're supposed to attempt to imitate that in our life. And the imitation of that looks like those that we see around us we consider greater than ourselves. And Paul's not gonna end there. So think of this as a law sandwich. fulfilled the law and then he has the the commandments in there and at the bottom underneath it it says love doesn't run to a neighbor therefore love is fulfilling the law so as he's going to attach this to the latter part of 14 about how we do this by being clothed in Christ who has already fulfilled the law on our behalf of playing out and loving those near you through your works through your actions is fulfilling the law, not because you're working to salvation, not because your works are in any way building you merit. It's an outpouring of the affection you have for God, for what he's done. The challenge, of course, is not to do it just because it says so. Reading several things this week, and I can tell in my preaching right now that maybe I read too much this week. But the idea is that imagine a kind of, no, I'm not going to use that one. OK, moving on. Read too much this week. As he moves into verse 11, keeping this idea, the context of the idea, do we understand what love is? And please don't add any of the cheesy songs to it that I said in the beginning. Do we understand what love is? Love is this outpouring of what we see in divine love, divine action. There is no greater action of love in the history of everything than the second person of the Trinity coming in his humiliation, taking on flesh, living a life, and pursuing God's holiness, fulfilling the law by never breaking it, and then willingly becoming the sacrificial lamb for those who had been given to him by the Father, and then pouring out his life for his people's sin. No greater act of love. And that outpouring of that divine love is the model, a model we can never fully grasp or even fully imitate, obviously, but we are to love those around us. Verse 11. Continuing on, beside this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed. The night is far gone, the day is at hand, so then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness and sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ to make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. This is connected to the idea with that first clause of besides this. Meaning that as I want you to understand love, and as he spelled it out here in chapter 12 by going from grace to the marks of a Christian being the way that we love one another and honor one another and all these things, and now loving those around us. Exampling the idea of Christ's holiness by pursuing a holy life. And this is given an example of that by contrasts, four contrasts. If you look at them, this will go much quicker than the first section. The night is gone, the day is at hand, night and day. Cast off darkness, put on light. So again, darkness and light. Walk properly in the daytime, not in what comes with walking in the darkness. And then finally, put on the Lord Jesus Christ. And so besides, you know, what time it is, the hour has come. That's an eschatological phrase. I know I say that a lot. And one time Bo was up here and what was it? The good band name? Someone said it. Still someone's band name, good band, Eschological Hope. Someone will see you make a love ballad. Sorry, I couldn't help it. But this is a looking forward to that blessed hope of Christ's return. You know what time it is. By that he means Christ has come in his incarnation, in his humiliation. He has died for our sins, was buried, rose again, ascended to the Father. The Father and the Son have sent God, the Holy Spirit, indwelling the church. We're living in that age right now. And so you know all that we're waiting for is for Christ's return. So as Paul is telling them this, this imminence of the idea of you know what hour it is, he's saying you know that God's only got one more thing in his economy that he's doing. And so this time right here and now is the time to wake up. Time for you to wake from sleep. Salvation is nearer to us now than we first believed. And when he's talking here now, he's talking to the church, not as people who are thinking they have salvation, but maybe they don't think. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the culmination of salvation, meaning while you're saved and you're being saved, when Christ returns and you're giving your immortal body paired with your immortal spirit, and there's no sin, the fullness of your salvation and it's near now than it was when we first believed. Now this is unfortunately um a big deal these days in terms of when's it coming once he lets the timing and you have the the prophecy peddlers who pick the day and the time and the unfortunate aspect of that and for those of you going to Tim's class in first Thessalonians you'll see that come up later as well is that this has led for Christians all over the place from since the first century and onward as they attempt to see when this will happen they miss out that Paul's not telling us here to try to figure out when this is going to happen he's telling us how to live and how to live in the reality that we know that God's plan is coming to culmination. And as God's called out people in a fallen world, we're to wake up. And you know that the things he lists, what I'm trying not to say too often, because I know there's younger kids in here and I'm, you know, the parents are not going to have to have discussions, but it's the Bible. I didn't, I didn't say it. So when he's talking about wake up, the contrast is being asleep or being, being asleep during all of this that's going on. And the night is gone, the night is representing, the night is gone and day is hand, meaning that time of darkness before Christ in your life is gone and the day is at hand, then let us cast off. If that's gone, if the night is gone, then the works that come with that also need to be gone from your life. Let us walk properly in the daytime. That's this idea of honor. of walking in the daytime, in the light of God, not in the acts that come with, which would have in the Roman sense, and in every age's sense, is at nighttime, in the city, these are the things that are going on. Drunkenness, sexual immorality, quarreling, jealousy. And yet Paul here is telling the saints Stop doing this. Now it might open your eyes a little bit that know that he's writing this letter from Corinth. And if you have any indication of what's going on in the Corinthian letters that he writes, you know that there are people who are attributed as saints, one in particular, a man who is cast out of the church, or at least Paul tells them to cast him out of the church for some acts like this. He's telling the believers or the saints that receive this letter, you are no longer in the dark. You are no longer asleep. You are no longer in this kingdom of darkness. You are in the light of Christ. And it calls you to action, to throw off these old works of darkness. And how does he do it? All the way back to chapter 3. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. One of the things that you could kind of take out of all of this text is the idea of what's listed here is not just these immoral, physically immoral aspects. Look what's tied in with it. Sexual immorality, drunkenness, and all that comes with those things go together. Quarreling, jealousy. These are things that if you look up, Just a few. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. And you shall not covet. So how is the Christian man and woman able to fulfill the law through love? And then Paul here in this next section will say, remember what time it is. The fullness of all things is closer at this second than it was a second ago. Now it's closer. And it's closer. And so wake up in the results of not fulfilling this or not loving well. Sexual immorality, sensuality, those things are fulfilled in kind of the idea of committing adultery. Drunkenness leads to and kind of all of these things. sexual immorality and quarrel, I'm sorry, quarreling and jealousy fall under covetousness. And these things are not to be what defines people who are marked by the Savior. All of those things were to cast off, were to cast off because the love, the divine love of Christ has overflowed in us. And while we may be at war, with our sin nature, although indwelled by the Spirit. It's a war in which God has given us strength in His Spirit, in His Word. and then put on the Lord and make no provision. No provision makes no ability. Make no inroads to the flesh to gratify its desires. It's a preemptive idea. If by putting on the Lord Jesus Christ, not just in salvation, but as earlier using when Augustine is paraphrasing this when we're going through chapter 3, the idea of reminding yourself of being clothed, being clothed in Christ's righteousness, being clothed in the justice that has been wrought on your behalf, the sacrifice that he's done for the purpose of your salvation, ultimately God's glory, and a life well lived, And that is radically different than what we see in the world today. You can take the list here of the most, if you look at any professional athlete or movie star or famous person, you can look through this list that I just read and go, that's just Tuesday. But we're not supposed to reflect that. We're not supposed to be conformed to this age. Remember when Paul brought that up? We're not supposed to be pressed into the mold of everything else we see around us. Through this divine love and this overflowing work of Christ in our life, we're supposed to be transformed by the inner working of the Spirit and being in the word and being in covenant community, confessing our sins to one another, making sure there's no provision for the flesh by allowing yourself to fall into these old ways of darkness. We all know what they are. Anyone who has been a believer or an unbeliever, just so you know, if you're a believer now, there was a time when you were an unbeliever. Right? Math major. No, I don't even take math. I think my last math class was in ninth grade. So the point being that we all have this aspect of the list that's made here, and we can all clearly in our mind go, I struggle with that. I make provision in my flesh for this, and I do it often. And the reality is that that's not how God put us to live. Stop making provision for the flesh. Whether it's any of these things or more that's listed in other books, drunkenness, immorality, sensuality, quarreling, jealousy, Not only do I struggle with these, I do them all the time. If that's you, you need someone to talk to. You need to reach out to someone else in the covenant community if you trust that you can confess those things to and pray about and help you get over those. Because you know why? Because you need to be clothed in the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to remember the truth of what He's done. His love that overflows to you. If you're constantly making provision to the flesh, guess who you are? You're the person. You can't love your neighbor because you've ceased to love yourself. I pray more than anything. for a church that we're all a part of. We're the reality of who we are, the starkness of our own sinful struggles. that we would put them away. These are acts that I no longer need. These are things I no longer need to take or eat or drink or no things I no longer need to look at. These are nothing than anything that keeps me away from my clear and clean fellowship with God because my vaporous life that goes like this is coming to an ending. I am here to glorify God. I turned 45 this year. And I was sharing with Christina, and I don't mention Christina very often because she scares me. And so you've never seen her angry. So what I told her as the last several years getting older, still trying to exercise, and it's just constant injury no matter what I do. And so in my mind, I told her, I figured out what the problem was. When I'm exercising, in my mind, I'm still like 21-year-old Ken exercising. I'm like, oh, I used to do that. I used to run 10 miles a day. I can run 10 miles a day, snap, snap, snap. And you're reminded of the vaporous nature of your life in all kinds of ways, even when you're younger. but the Christian man and woman are here yet for a moment and you have been taking out and all those things that we make provision for are slowly killing you. And that is not the life we're called to live. We're called to live a life of struggle and fighting against sin and in community with one another. And why, and how do we do it? It's not through striving, it's not through our own efforts, it's through this constant reminding of, but Christ, be clothed in Christ, the one who, and the true author of your salvation, the true example of sacrificial love and loving, the one who's near to him. and putting off the works of darkness and walking in the light, like this is the way God intended us to live. And one day the shadow of it that we live now while still fighting our sin nature will be a reality of the fullness of it in Christ. So church, live pursuing Christ, putting to death sin in your life through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. so that we might be ready. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. The challenge of the Christian life, it's not over when you call us out of darkness into light. You save us from God's wrath. And dwelled by God the Holy Spirit. Lord, may we see this life as one to be pursued out of our undying love and affection for the one who has called us out of the darkness and into light. Lord, may you be glorified in the prayer, the song, the ministry of your word. May the church be edified and lifted up and God be glorified in Christ's name, amen. Now may the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may, with one voice, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. You are dismissed.