We turn to Psalm 95 for our Old Testament reading. Psalm 95. O come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms. For the Lord is the great God and the great King above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, when your fathers tested me, they tried me, though they saw my work. For 40 years I was grieved with that generation and said, it is a people who go astray in their hearts and they do not know my ways. So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. This is the word of the living God. Let us remain standing for prayer. Let's all pray. Oh Lord, our God, we look to You. We thank You for Your Holy Word that is living and powerful and able to pierce, to asunder the thoughts and intentions of our hearts, able to divide the joints and marrow and the soul and spirit. And Lord, we ask that Your Word would come in power to our hearts tonight. Lord, we look to You as our gracious and merciful King, abundant in Your generous grace toward us. We praise You for our Lord Jesus Christ. and for all that we have in Him. And Lord, we ask that our hearts would respond to You in joyful thanksgiving. Lord, give us ears to hear. Give us hearts to believe. Give us joy in thanksgiving. Lord, soften our hearts as well that we would not give way to that wicked sin of unbelief and ingratitude. And we ask all this for the glory and honor of Christ our Savior. Amen. You may be seated. We're turning in the scriptures tonight to Psalm 95. For an occasional sermon, it's fitting that at this time, particularly as no doubt many of you this week will enjoy a time of fellowship with your family or with other friends, a time of thanksgiving. And it is customary to take time this week, even this Thursday, to give thanks. It's fitting that we particularly tonight, meditate on the larger duty of our Christian gratitude. I'd remind you as well that this month, our church has been focusing not only our own individual congregation, but our entire church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, this expression of Christ's kingdom. We've taken these weeks to consider how we might give to the cause of Christ in the world, how we might express our gratitude for so great a salvation. So I would impress upon you here in the word and Psalm 95, our gospel duty of Thanksgiving. I would remind you as we begin of the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, words that many of us are familiar with. We, I would remind you, frequently use question one of the same catechism in our confession of faith corporately, that our only comfort in life and in death is that we belong to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. You're familiar with those words. But the very next question asks us profoundly, how many things must you know in order to live and die in the joy of this comfort, in the joy of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and belonging to Him? What things are vitally necessary? And the answer is this. Three, first, how great my sin and misery are. Second, how I am delivered from all my sins and misery. And third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance. You can summarize these three things as so many have done under the three simple words, all beginning with G. Guilt, the guilt of my sin and its attendant misery. The grace of God in delivering me from my sins and misery. And then lastly, gratitude. How I am then to order my life in thanksgiving and gratitude to God. What I want you all to understand tonight is that gratitude to God and thanksgiving to Him is not a practice for one day or one week during the year, but it's the air that we breathe. What other response would be fitting than a response of wholehearted and joyful gratitude to God? As we consider how lost we were in sins and miseries, who we were in Adam, what Christ has done to deliver us from that lost estate. What other response could we possibly give than one of joyful thanksgiving to God? Again, this is the air that we breathe. This is a vitally necessary duty. It's not optional for you and for me. It's to come freely from our hearts, worked in us by the Holy Spirit. We see this in Psalm 95. We'll see it in other scriptures as well. But Psalm 95 helps us here, helps set before us this gospel duty of thanksgiving, lifting up the need for joyful worship and gratitude to God and all of this. But it adds a careful urgency to this duty as well. Again, this is not an optional thing, this duty of thanksgiving and gratitude to God. Either you will be growing in thanksgiving and gratitude to God. Gratitude that issues forth in worship, that drives your obedience, that drives your service and all that you do in the Christian life. Or, on the other hand, your heart will become increasingly hard, and you'll commit, like Israel of old, the sin of unbelief. and in gratitude. And this psalm as it lifts up the joyful duty of Thanksgiving before us and sets before us many reasons for that Thanksgiving, it finally at the end of the psalm warns us against the dire consequences of ingratitude. Don't go that way. And I want you to, as we consider really these three things, a duty of joyful thanksgiving to God. This is the heartbeat, the throbbing heartbeat of the Christian life. That's the first thing. I want you secondly to consider in the Psalm many reasons for such thanksgiving and gratitude to God. And then lastly, the psalmist drives the point home with a warning against ingratitude. This is an urgent duty. To neglect it, to become hard-hearted and ungrateful, is to fall away, is to descend into the same judgment and condemnation that the people of Israel descended into long ago. And as we come to the psalm, as we come to understand this first thing of our duty of Thanksgiving, our glad-hearted duty of Thanksgiving, I want you to have A previous narrative, Old Testament narrative in your heart and mind. We read these words of this narrative in Exodus chapter 17, and I would summarize before you of what's happening, really what's setting the stage for Psalm 95, what Psalm 95 is going to point back to some several hundred years after this initial event. In Exodus 17, you'll remember that the children of Israel have been brought out of Egypt. They are a redeemed people. They're a free people brought out of the tyranny of Pharaoh and his hosts. They've seen Pharaoh and his hosts decimated in the waters, the judgment waters of the Red Sea. They've been redeemed. They've seen God's acts in history. They have lifted up their voices in triumphal song by the side of the sea. singing of the God who has triumphed gloriously over the horse and his rider. They are a people who have been given the ordinance of the Passover and the sacrificial lamp. They've received manna and bread from heaven. They are a privileged people. But what do these people do? They descend into complaining and unbelief. Exodus 17, verse 1. Therefore the people contended with Moses and said, give us water that we may drink. So Moses said to them, why do you contend with me? Why do you tempt the Lord? And the people thirsted there for water and the people complained against Moses and said, why is it you have brought us up out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? So Moses cried out to the Lord saying, what shall I do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me. And the Lord said to Moses, go on before the people and take with you some of the elders of Israel. Also take in your hand your rod with which you struck the river and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock in Horeb and you shall strike the rock. and water will come out of it that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. So he called the name of the place Massa and Meribah because of the contention of the children of Israel and because they tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among us or not? A people here in Exodus 17 who had given way to unbelief and particularly an attendant sin of ingratitude. As we read Romans 1, we were reminded that characteristic of fallen man is that although he had some knowledge of God, he failed to glorify God and neither was thankful. And this is the sin that the children of Israel committed in Exodus 17. And we need to understand this as we come into the words of Psalm 95. Psalm 95, we can put it this way, is going to trigger memories in the collective memory of the people of God, of Exodus 17, and the unbelief some several hundred years before, and ingratitude of that previous generation. And it's poignantly going to drive home this gospel duty of Thanksgiving. We see this right away in verse 1, O come, let us sing to the Lord, let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. The Lord there uses that expression, the object of our thanksgiving, the object of our praise is the rock of our salvation. The rock of old to whom that physical rock there, the Lord's provision of water out of the rock, pointed the children of Israel to the Lord, their rock and their redeemer, the object of their thanksgiving and praise. And right away, again, the memory of the children of Israel ought to be going back to Exodus 17 and another passage, Deuteronomy 32, that speaks of God as the rock of His people, the one who is great, the one who could be counted on, The imagery of the rock speaks to us, doesn't it? Of the immutability of God. His unchangeable character. His dependability. His promises that do not fail. But the people of Israel left their rock. And they ran headlong into the quicksand of idolatry and unbelief. And what the psalmist is at pains to do in Psalm 95 is to call the people back to the rock. Back to God. Back to the one who can be depended on and Him alone. O come, let us sing to the Lord. Six times here in these verses. Let us sing to the Lord. This corporate expression of joyful thanksgiving and worship to God. Verse 1, let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. Verse 6, so come, let us worship and bow down, and let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. A refrain, a drumbeat of praise and honor and worship that ought to be given to God, the one who is so worthy of our worship. This is worship that is loud, this is worship that is joyful, this is worship that is to be engaged in not only individually, in our homes or on our own, but corporate worship. O come, let us come together as the people of God. This is a call to corporate worship, thanksgiving and praise. This is worship that calls for all of us, all that we are and all that we have. Our mind is engaged as we are thinking God's thoughts after Him. Our wills are being inclined toward Him and toward grateful thanksgiving and away from ingratitude. Our affections are being lifted to Him. This is joyful worship. This is a glad-hearted expression of delight in God, of singing His praise loudly. And thanksgiving isn't thanksgiving the fuel for this kind of worship. Let us come. Verse two, let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. This is the great fuel of gospel worship. This is at the heart, this expression of gratitude to God. What precisely is thanksgiving? We throw this word around a lot, don't we? But how ought we to define thanksgiving? One of the Puritans, Thomas Goodwin, is very helpful as he wrote a discourse entitled, A Discourse on Thankfulness Which is Due to God for His Benefits and Blessings. And he's very helpful here in defining thanksgiving or thankfulness to God. He says that thankfulness is a free rendering to God the glory of His goodness, principally to the end that we glorify it, that we glorify God's goodness and testify our love to Him. It's a free rendering to God. It's not compulsory. It's not something where our arms, as it were, need to be twisted. It's the grace of the Spirit working in our hearts, moving our minds and wills and affections toward God as we survey His glorious mercies toward us. It is a free rendering to God. In view here particularly is God's goodness to us, remembering. all the ways, the countless ways in which God indeed has been good. The promises of His Word, and we'll see this more in a few moments, but the glory of His creation, the way that He's loaded our table with benefits and given us food and drink. the way that he has protected us physically and temporally, the provision that he's given us, the privilege of worship, the saints with whom he has bound us in Christian love, the glory of our salvation, particularly in the Lord Jesus Christ, the right that we have as Adoption into the family of God, His sons and daughters, the hope of eternal life, all of these things move us in joyful thanksgiving to God. A free rendering to God the glory of His goodness, principally to the end that we glorify that goodness and testify our love back to Him for His love toward us. This is what Thanksgiving truly is, a glad-hearted, free rendering to God the glory due to His name. This is the fuel of worship. Perhaps to make this more concrete, you parents and children know what this is about, don't you? So many of you parents, like me, are instructing your children to remember to say thank you when they receive kindness, perhaps after a meal, pushing their chair in, getting up from the table, and remembering a simple thank you after the meal. And how much more significant isn't it? It's good to be reminded and then to comply with giving of thanks, but how much more, how much more significant is it when children, you remember to express your thanks to your parents and to others who have shown you kindness. And when it comes, not by compulsion or by command, but as it comes just freely for the goodness and the kindness that you've received. And this is the way that our thanksgiving is to be to God. joyful, flowing from our hearts, shouting joyfully to God, driving us in such gratitude to God. And Psalm 95 is not alone. We could multiply references. Psalm 100, verse 4. Again, familiar words that we often remember. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Be thankful to him and bless his name. Psalm 105, verse 1. O give thanks to the Lord. Psalm 106, verse 1, O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever. Psalm 107, O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever. The same language. And the New Testament impresses the same duty upon us. Philippians 4, verse 6, that we, by prayer and supplication, make our requests known to God and offer them up with thanksgiving as well. Colossians 2, that we are to abound in this duty Thanksgiving, walking worthy of the Lord, and perhaps best known of all, 1 Thessalonians 5.18. This is the will of God in Christ. In everything give thanks. Why? This is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. The Scriptures are abundantly clear. This is our duty. This is at the hearts of our response to God for His grace. We can go further in our psalm. We have here multiplied reasons, multiplied reasons for our gratitude to God, for this free rendering to God, the glory of his goodness. Perhaps three reasons to summarize here, these wonderful words of Psalm 95. A threefold confirmation of God's goodness. First, he is exalted above all gods as king. Second, he's exalted above all things as creator. And finally, he's exalted above his people as their shepherd and as their leader. He's exalted above all gods as king alone. Verse three, for the Lord is the great God and the great king above all gods. Just a psalm over, Psalm 96, reminds us that all the gods of the peoples are idols. But the Lord made the heavens. Our God is the true God. Again, He is the rock of our salvation. He is the one who can be depended upon. He is the glorious King of the universe. All that we are and all that we have comes from Him. He is glorious in holiness, and He's also steadfast in His love. If you're looking for reasons to give thanks to God, Begin here with who our triune God is, in all of his perfections, in all of his glory, in his person, in his persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in his majesty, in his love and faithfulness. Meditate on this, on the glorious character of our God. But there's more. We meditate on His works of creation and providence. Secondly, that He's exalted above all things as the Creator. Verses 4 and 5, "...and His hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are His also. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land." I remind you of God's works. Not only of who He is, but the majesty of what He's done. Recall that God has created all things. A simple truth, but one that calls out from us thanksgiving and praise. Our God is the creator and he's the sustainer of all that he has made. In his hand he holds the deep places of the earth, the deepest trench in the Pacific Ocean, the highest of the hills, the Mount Everest. They are His also. The sea is His, for He made it, particularly here. Again, the collective memory of the children of Israel is they're remembering God's works in history. They're remembering that God spoke through Moses and the waters of the Red Sea rolled back so the people could pass through on dry land. We are also to think, as we read of God's wondrous works of creation and providence, we're to think of the majesty of the God-man himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who commands the winds and the waves. Peace be still. And there was a great calm. Our God is the one who speaks the word, and the seas and the creation, all of it obeys immediately at His hand. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. He upholds all things, He made all things, He sustains all things. And particularly here, We meditate on God's kindness to us in His providence. in his steadfast care and sustaining of all things. Again, I would remind you of the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, of God's work of providence, upholding and sustaining all that he's made, holding his creation in the palm of his hands and directing all of it. Providence is the, the Heidelberg Catechism reminds us, providence is the almighty and ever-present power of God by which God upholds us with his hand heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty. All things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but by His fatherly hand. We'll come back to this in just a few moments. But we all do well to meditate, even now, on God's works of providence. that health and sickness, lean years, and a time of greater blessing, prosperity and poverty, all these things come to us from God's fatherly hands. For some of you, you've enjoyed prosperity and health and God's blessing this year. For others, you are weeping. You're in the, as it were, the valley of the shadow, great suffering. But we all do well to recall to mind that God, as our Heavenly Father, orders it all, that He sits on His throne in complete sovereignty and majesty. And I remind you of the words of the Apostle Paul, in everything, in pain and in prosperity, in health and in sickness, in difficulty or in prosperity, in all of it, in everything give thanks. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. But even to move further, not only considering God's glorious majesty and his sovereignty over all things, his works of creation and providence, we can go even further. We give thanks to God as our covenant. as the One who has condescended and dwelt with us and redeemed us as His people. Verse 7. We are to come into His presence to sing joyfully to Him, to render to Him the thanksgiving due to His name, particularly, verse 7, for His covenant. He is our God. Not just the great King above all gods, but our God. And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. God is our shepherd and our leader, the one who has entered into covenant with us, who takes us in, who shepherds his people. And the scriptures are full of such language. God is the shepherd of his people. the one who tends and cares for us, who rules over us, who is the mighty king, the mighty God who shepherds his people, who even gathers the lambs into his arms and gently leads those who are with young, in the words of Isaiah 40. who even in the face of false shepherds, as Dr. McGraw preached to us a few months ago, even in the face of false shepherds who want to feed themselves and who care not for the flock but for themselves, God promises Himself to come to His flock and shepherd them, to drive out false shepherds, and to come and bind up the weak, to strengthen His people and to shepherd His sheep. to take us in. We think of those beautiful words of Psalm 23, that the Lord is my shepherd and therefore I will not want. And all of this comes into full light and glory, doesn't it? And the new covenant as our Lord Jesus himself proclaims, I am the good shepherd, the one who takes us in, the one who holds us in his hands as our good shepherd who died for our redemption. The good shepherd is the one who lays down his life for the sheep, who comes in close, the incarnate word, the one who is the I am and who as the great I am is our tender and powerful shepherd who loves us and laid down his life for us. He is that great shepherd of the sheep who purchased our redemption through the blood of the everlasting covenant. He's the chief shepherd who promises to appear again on the clouds from glory to bring us to himself and to give us that crown of unfading glory all through his blood and his righteousness. Yes, we give thanks to God, particularly in view of redemption, of God's grace to us and calling us his own, bringing us back from our wandering, forgiving our sins and restoring us in our communion with him. And as we survey the glories of God in his majesty and his works of creation and province, particularly here, particularly here in God's work of redemption, we have so much reason for praise. thanksgiving to him, meditate. And out of that meditation of God's glory and his works and his redemption scene, praise God to him, recount his tender mercies and his loving kindness. And may the spirit work in your heart to bring forth this crescendo, this again, good one, the free rendering to God, the glory of his goodness and testifying your love to him. And all this comes with a warning. with a note of urgency to you. This is a glad duty. This is what we love to do as the people of God, to sing praise to God, to give him the glory to his name out of thankful and grateful hearts. But it comes with a note of urgency here in Psalm 95, because to neglect such, there's no middle ground here, to neglect your duty A glad-hearted and grateful duty is to descend into that hard-hearted sin of ingratitude and unbelief. There's a line in the sand that the psalm draws for us. It's remarkable, isn't it, that in verse 7, the psalmist has just been recounting God's shepherding care of his people, that we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. And then these words, today, if you will hear his voice. And immediately our minds ought to run to John chapter 10, where the Lord Jesus, what did the Lord Jesus as our good shepherd, what did he say? My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. In other words, those who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, regardless of circumstances, hear His voice, respond in worship and faith and thanksgiving and follow Him. And give heed to this warning. Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. As in that time at Meribah, literally translating rebellion, and Massah, the day of trial in the wilderness, going back to Exodus 17, that day that privileged people of Old Covenant Israel, that day that the people who had come out of Egypt, who had been privileged in so many ways, who had seen God's works in history and his goodness and grace to them, that they had come to the waters of the Red Sea, had seen the open before them, they had been given manna from heaven, privileged in so many ways, and yet in Exodus 17, they murmur and whine and complain against the Lord. and they give way to this wicked sin of unbelief and ingratitude. So all this comes with a warning. Give heed. Hear the voice of your good shepherd. Do not harden your hearts like Israel, like ungrateful Israel of old in the rebellion." In Exodus 17. Don't be like your fathers, verse 9, who tested me. They tried me, though they saw my work. They had been given abundant testimony and evidence that God their rock, would keep his promises that even in the hour of trial, that he would bring them through, that he would prosper them and save them, that he had not brought them out of the land of Egypt, to abandon them in the wilderness. But yet though they had seen his work, they tried him. They put him to the test. And then for, verse 10, for 40 years I was grieved with that generation and said, it is a people who go astray in their hearts and they do not know my ways. Though they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful. And it did not end well, did it? for the children of Israel in that hour of test and that hour of trial. They failed to enter the promised land for 40 years. And this is graphic language that the book of Hebrews and first Corinthians both pick up on that for 40 years, that literally the carcasses of the bodies of that generation fell in the wilderness and were buried. Every time that the children of Israel broke camp, there were fresh graves as this entire generation perished in the wilderness and failed to enter the promised land. Don't be like them. Don't give way to unbelief and ingratitude. Take up this glad duty of thanksgiving to God. You see the point of the matter here. The point of the matter is really not when things are going abundantly well. It's in the hour of trial. It's in the hour of trial that our hearts are sifted and sorted. That the question is going to be, are we going to respond in thankful Gratitude to God, or are we going to respond in bitter unbelief and ingratitude? It's not particularly when things are all well and rosy. It's in the hour of difficulty, as the children of Israel found themselves without water in Exodus 17. And this is where some of you find yourselves, in the hour of trial. Even now, as you're being reminded of your duty of thanksgiving, And perhaps your heart recoils, recoils against this command to give praise to God, to respond in thanksgiving and gratitude to Him. And you survey your circumstances, and you think of the hard relationships, you think of the way that people have sinned against you, you think of the prayers that seemingly have gone unanswered, and you wonder, how possibly can I give thanks in these circumstances? But there's one more thing, better, one more person that we ought to consider here. As we consider Israel's failure long ago in the wilderness and her failure of wicked unbelief and ingratitude, we ought to think of the one who is the new Israel, the better than Israel, the better Moses, the one who is the fulfillment and the greater. And we look to the new covenant, and we look to our Lord Jesus Christ. And as Israel wandered, and as Israel murmured, and as Israel complained and committed the sin of ingratitude and unbelief in the wilderness, we look ahead to our Lord Jesus Christ. the new Israel, who went out into the wilderness and there for 40 days had nothing to eat, there in the hour of his own trial, refused to put God to the test, but walked in obedience, and in obedience that was not compulsory, but who walked in this free rendering to God the glory due to his name. The one who said that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The one who obeyed in every way where Israel failed and where you and I so often fail. And it is the active obedience of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is His learning of obedience through suffering and in the hour of trial that you and I need to remember. That we have a Savior who has gone through the ordeal. We have One who has been tempted and tried in every way, yet without sin, and whose heart yet overflowed in gratitude and joy to God, whose food was to do the will of the Heavenly Father, and we stand in His righteousness. Our sins of ingratitude and complaining and murmuring at every point are washed away in His blood, the blood shed on the cross of Calvary. And through Him we enter not the physical land of Israel, but through Him we look forward to eternal rest, the rest of the new heavens and new earth, purchased by His blood, bought by His righteousness. And you tonight, believer, battered as you are in trial, in difficult circumstances, lift your eyes to the Lord Jesus Christ. the one who has gone before, the one who knows what it is to encounter trial and temptation, and yet, in the valley of the shadow of death, promises to be with you, to shepherd your soul, and to bring you through. And it is the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is His perfection. It is His tender dealings with you, of which you need a fresh sight. through the scriptures, by the Spirit. Lift your eyes to the Lord Jesus Christ and hear his voice. One more, one more application for you. Perhaps some of you tonight have never responded in true gratitude and thanksgiving to God. Your heart is increasingly hard. Three times that command in verse 7 here in our psalm, Psalm 95, that command, today if you will hear his voice, that sobering warning, today if you will hear his voice, three times these words are picked up in Hebrews chapter 3 and chapter 4 with a sober warning. Sober chorus refrain up three times in the text setting before the new covenant people of God, the urgency of hearing the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ. So I call you again tonight. You've heard the calls of Christ through his word, but I call you again tonight. Do not neglect his voice. By and with the word. Don't harden your heart. Pray for the work of the Spirit. May the Spirit soften and tenderize your heart, even in the midst of difficult circumstances. Don't push the Lord Jesus Christ away. Hear His voice in the Word. Follow Him. Believe His holy gospel. Run to Him, to His cross work, His perfect obedience on the behalf of sinners. Cry out to Him. He will forgive you. He will wash away your sins of ingratitude and bitterness and complaining. And He will give you, by His Word and Spirit, abundant cause for thanksgiving. He will redeem you from the guilt of your sin by His matchless grace. And He will give you Countless reasons for gratitude, gratitude now and gratitude and thanksgiving forever world without end run to Christ. Let us pray. Our blessed and everlasting God, we praise you for your holy word. We praise you for your kindness to us, your tender mercies. Lord, you are good to all and your tender mercy is over all that you have made. You are the great king. You are God alone, exalted above all gods. All the gods of the nations are idols. You have made us, you've made all things and formed us by your hand and you superintend all the affairs of our lives. All that we are and all that we have comes from You. And You've sent us a Savior who is Christ the Lord. Oh God, we ask that all of us together would hear the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ. Soften our hearts. Lord, help us to heed Your warning tonight. We ask for any who are yet outside of Christ that they would hear Your voice, that they would run to You, that You would draw Your sheep after You. Lord, give us all that we need. And by your Holy Spirit, cause a crescendo of thanksgiving and praise to flow forth from our hearts. And these things we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. And now lift up your heads and receive the blessing of our shining God. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you his peace.