Matthew chapter 23, verses 25 through 28. Let us now hear God's word. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so, you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we know that these are hard words. These are words of judgment, and we can see a bit of the scribes and the Pharisees in ourselves. And so we ask, Father, that you would wound where we need to be wounded today, but that you would comfort and heal as well. We pray you bless the preaching of your word now, and we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. We once lived in a townhouse in Greensboro. And I had moved in there, I had bought the place, and I partially bought it because whoever had it before me fixed it up enough so that I noticed external things a little more than internal structural things. And so over the course of time, Dina and I went to sell the place. And you know how it goes when you go to sell something. You know how that works, right? Stuff starts going wrong. Why is that? Stuff starts going wrong. Anyway, one day I'm in the bedroom and there was a mirror, there was a big mirror that leaned up on the dresser, leaned up against the wall. For whatever reason, I move that mirror, we move that mirror, maybe we're getting ready to move it or what have you, and there's a big black wet spot on the wall. And if you know anything about anything, you know that ain't good. That's bad. And so, you ever have like a big problem and you're like, I don't even wanna think about it? I just don't wanna think about, I know what I'll do, I'll clean it. I'll clean it. So I went and got the cleaner, I sprayed the wall down and I scrubbed it. And my hope was that that would do the trick. Well, you know that didn't do the trick because the problem was not exterior, it was interior. The problem was inside the wall, not outside the wall. And it was just manifesting outside the wall, a deeper, more internal problem. Well, here in the passage before us, Jesus exposes one of the fundamental problems with the scribes of the Pharisees, and that is what we might call externalism. They were focused on the outside, but failed to give attention to the inside, to their hearts. They appeared from the outside to be righteous men, but inside they were full of sin. Well, previously this morning, We considered the fifth woe pronounced by Jesus upon the scribes and the Pharisees. There he denounced them for scrupulously attending to matters like tithing garden herbs while ignoring justice, mercy, and faith, the weightier matters of the law. We might say they majored on the minors and didn't even minor on the majors. They just neglected them all together. They should have practiced the most important matters contained in the law without neglecting the lesser matters. They should have done it all, but they didn't. This brings us now to woe number six and seven here in Matthew chapter 23. Now we're gonna take these two together because I hope you can see that they go together. There's a common theme in both of these and that's why we are considering them together. Well, just quickly, you're an expert by now on woes, right? You know what a woe is. A woe here is a denouncement. It is a statement of judgment, a pronouncement of judgment upon the scribes and the Pharisees, who are again here identified as hypocrites. Verse 25, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. And then you see the note of blindness again there in verse 26, blind Pharisee. as Jesus focuses in on and speaks, as it were, to a single Pharisee in order to exhort him to change. We'll come back to that in a little bit. But of course, the focus here is the object of the denouncement of the woe are the scribes and the Pharisees who are hypocritical and blind. Now, why the woe? What's the reason for it here? Well, first, again, let's summarize before we get into the details. The problem here is what we might call externalism. Focusing on external, formal, outward things while neglecting the heart, while neglecting the inner man. The scribes and Pharisees were guilty of ensuring that they looked a certain way out here while being the opposite of that in here, in their hearts. And Jesus gives us two illustrations to help us understand the problem with the Pharisees and the scribes. The first one concerns cups and dishes. Verse 25 again, for you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. What did the Pharisees do? What did the scribes do? They cleansed the exterior. They cleansed the outside. Now, when Jesus talks about cups and dishes, he's talking about them, right? He's speaking about these men and how they cleaned up the external appearance of things without dealing with the sin that is within. But we also know that they literally were all about ceremonial washings and cleansings, right? And that included stuff like cups and dishes. Mark 7 says, for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands in a special way, holding the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other things which they have received and hold like the washing of cups, pitchers, copper vessels, and couches. So there you see their preoccupation with ceremonial purity. with outward external cleanliness. Now this wasn't about hygiene. They weren't germophobes. This isn't about germophobia. This is about ritual purity. And that is what they were focused on. And so you heard it in the scripture reading, which Josh read for us this afternoon, right? So Jesus goes to somebody's house. He goes to a Pharisee's house to eat, right? And he sits down, he reclines, because they reclined back then to eat. And what is amazing to the Pharisee is Jesus has not washed. He's not gone through this ceremonial washing. that they would have done. If they're gonna sit down for a meal, if you're a Pharisee, you're gonna make sure that your hands are washed as well as other things in a special way. And we saw this back in Matthew chapter 15, when they came to Jesus and they confronted him about why his disciples were not washing prior to eating bread. prior to eating their meals. So they're going to wash their hands. They're going to wash with water up to their elbow. They're going to let their hand kind of hang down like this. So the water drips off their fingertips. Why were they doing all that? Because they were extremely concerned about ceremonial purity with outward cleanliness. Now, Americans aren't concerned about that, right? So we hear that and we're like, what's wrong with you guys? What is wrong with you people? What is wrong with them? Well, one of the things wrong with them is they misinterpreted the Old Testament. Now, when you read your Old Testament, you'll come to those parts where, you know, you do this and you're unclean. You do that and you're unclean and you've got to wash and seven days you'll be unclean and until the evening and all that sort of thing. And, you know, usually American Christians are hoping that they can get beyond this and get to the Psalms or something like that. Right. Well, these men read things like that in the Old Testament and they took it and they applied it to all of life as if External cleanliness or ritual purity were the main thing. Like this is the primary thing. What God really cares about is that we don't defile ourselves externally by touching a dead body or by coming in contact with a pig or whatever the case may be. But I'm telling you, the Old Testament was never primarily about that. What is the purpose of all those ceremonial regulations about not touching this or not touching that? It was to point to the greater reality of sin and holiness. Not that God was always merely concerned with don't touch this or don't touch that. It was involved, yes, because God was teaching His people. He was teaching his people important lessons. The law was a tutor. It was a schoolmaster to teach them about sin and righteousness and their need for the Savior, the Messiah. So the scribes and the Pharisees misinterpreted the Old Testament. That's a big part of their problem. But it's not just ancient Jews who end up falling into the externalism trap. Modern people do it, too, right? We can all fall into the trap of focusing on the outside rather than where God really wants you to focus, on the inside. You might think of the rituals and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, or other high church, what's called high church traditions, you know, smells and bells, that sort of thing. Now, in the worst forms of that, as long as you say your Hail Marys and finger the beads, And all that sort of thing, you're good, even though your life is sinful and wrong and you haven't repented. Now, it's not always that way, I understand that. It's not always that way in every high church tradition, if you will. But there is a danger there, right? There's a danger of the forms and the ceremonies becoming the main thing, becoming the thing. If you've ever had any interaction with the Greek Orthodox Church, and probably most of us haven't, but if you ever have any interaction with the Orthodox Church, so-called, the liturgy is the thing. The form of the liturgy and the things that are done and the ceremonies of worship and all that, that is the main thing. And so we can fall into these traps of thinking that the external is what matters most. Now, it is not that the external matters not at all. External outward matters have their place, but not to the exclusion of the internal. Now, I picked on the Roman Catholics, the high church Anglicans, and the Greek Orthodox, but we have to pick on the Protestants as well, right? We can do it too, right? We can dress up nicely for church. We can look a certain way in the church. And someone might look at you and say, well, you look like a good Christian. You look like someone who's living a righteous life. And that's not true at all. How many people have come through the doors in and out of the church and they looked good, but everything was wrong and just full of wickedness within. Unfortunately, too many times. Let's make sure that's not the case with us. God wants you to have a pure heart. He wants you to love him, to seek righteousness from the heart, to have an internal condition that matches the external condition. All right, so they cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but Jesus says, but inside they're full of extortion and self-indulgence. Inside, you scribes and Pharisees, are full of wickedness, you're full of sin. And Jesus specifies two things. First of all, extortion. That's how the New King James translates the Greek term here. Your translation may have robbery or greed. But the idea here is that although they looked good externally, what was inside was this greed, this desire to take from others. This thieving kind of heart. Now, again, we've already heard about this in this chapter. Look at it one more time. Verse 14. Verse 14, Jesus says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you devour widows' houses. Why did they devour widows' houses? Why did they treat them wrong? Why did they try to take their stuff, their home, their property? It's because inside they were full of extortion. They were full of greed. Now, when I grew up, I grew up Pentecostal. And one of the features of Pentecostalism in the 20th century, at least in the circles that I grew up in, was prosperity preachers. And you had prosperity preachers. Now, in my circles where I grew up, they weren't denounced. They weren't seen as greedy men doing wrong or peddling the word of God. They were seen as men of God. who were doing what was right. We needed to listen to that. We needed to pay attention to that. But we now know that so many of them were fleecing the people of God, were getting rich off of the people of God by their message and by their methods. Well, here you have these men who look the part, but inside they're full of greed, full of covetousness. That's entirely possible. That you can look good religiously, externally, but inside be a greedy person. We're told elsewhere in the Gospel of Luke that the Pharisees were lovers of money. And when they heard Jesus teaching, they derided him. They scorned him. Why? Because they loved money. They loved their wealth. And this fits well with that. So it's possible to be outwardly religious, but inwardly greedy. Is that you? How many churchgoers today in America are like that? I don't know about you, but I've seen the greed in my own heart from time to time. And sometimes I didn't really expect to see it. But I feel like as I get older, there's something in my heart that wants to clutch at money and possessions and make sure I hang on to them. There's something wrong there. May God give us grace to repent of that. Any inward greed, love of money rather than God. Number two, Jesus says that inside is self-indulgence. Self-indulgence, interesting word there. It means a lack of self-control. Is that what you would typically associate with a scribe or a Pharisee? Probably not. You might think, wow, these men look very disciplined. If you look at their external appearance, you look how they carry themselves, things that they do, that sort of thing. But inside, Jesus says, the picture is very, very different. They are self-indulgent men. How easy is it to be self-indulgent? to pamper and comfort yourself with wealth and material possessions and things like that. That's a great danger for us. What is the issue with these men as well? Greed and self-indulgence. And obviously those two things go together, right? Greed and self-indulgence. Finally note that Jesus says that their hearts, their inside, In verse 25, they're full of these things. It's not just that there's a little bit of greed there that needs to be dealt with. There's just a little bit of self-indulgence there. No, they are full of these things. Now, what does Jesus say in verse 26? He gives an exhortation to the Pharisee, blind Pharisee. How blind do you have to be to cleanse your outside while leaving the inside filthy? That's blindness in the worst way. First, cleanse the inside of the cup and dish that the outside of them may be clean also. Make the priority getting this cleaned up, getting your heart cleaned up. In other words, repenting of your sin, sorrowing over your sin and turning away from it and doing what is right from the heart. Loving God, loving others from the heart. what would you say to the person, let's say you went over to somebody's house, right? And you just happened to walk by the kitchen sink, and in this kitchen sink, there were dishes that had been there for a really long time. And you just kind of peeked at it, and you weren't trying to, but you judged them. And your host took one of the cups out of the sink that you saw had mold in it and food from, I don't know, a week or so ago or something like that. And they're talking to you and they're chatting very nicely. And they take some Dawn and they rub it on the outside and they take some water and they very carefully wash the outside. And then they fill that thing with water and hand it to you. We've got a problem here, man. Something ain't right in your head. I'm not drinking out of that cup. It looks good on the outside. It might even smell good on the outside. But inside, man, that thing is full of nastiness. What do you do with that? Well, you don't take the cup and wash the outside. You wash the inside. You make sure the inside is clean. Now, you do the outside as well. But the inside's the priority, right? That's where the liquid goes that you're drinking. from the cup. So Jesus tells them first priority, verse 26, first cleanse the inside of the cup. That's number one. That's what you must do first. Clean the heart. You blind Pharisee. That's what we have to do as well, right? We have to deal with the inside. We have to deal with our heart. Do you do that? Do you deal with your heart before God? Don't go before God in prayer and just repeat a bunch of stock prayers. There's a place for form in prayer. I'm not entirely against that, but you need to get with God and be honest. Talk to Him. He knows the condition of your heart. Bear that before Him. And that is like step one to cleansing the inside. is go before God and say, God, you know what's in my heart. You know, the sin that lies within. Please forgive me. Please cleanse me. Please help me. That's what the Pharisee should have done. But he was blind, terribly blind. All right, so that's the first illustration, cups and dishes. Second illustration is tombs and bones. Verse 27, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs. which indeed appear beautiful outwardly." What's a whitewashed tomb? Well, you know what a whitewash is. It's a kind of a paint, right? And so apparently, right before Passover, What the Jews would do is they would go through the land and they would put a coat of whitewash on the tombs so that everybody who's coming into Jerusalem for Passover can very clearly see where the tombs are. So they don't stumble into them and do what? Contract defilement, right? By touching a dead body. Now this whitewash could be beautiful. It could make the tomb look better. could make it look good. And so you might have tombs maybe of the rich or the wealthy in those days whose tombs were beautiful outwardly. And they might've been adorned and decorated in certain ways, painted in a certain manner to make it beautiful. Well, that's what Jesus compares these men to, to whitewashed tombs. Now, do you think they would have been pleased with that comparison? I don't think so. They were all about ceremonial purity and contact with a dead body is a big no-no. All right, so that's the external of the tomb. It looks beautiful outwardly, end of verse 27, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. You know, you can have a beautiful grave, You can have a beautiful tomb, but that's only covering up the uncleanness, the death that is on the inside. You know, we do that too, right? We have our cemeteries that have beautiful headstones and decorations and all of those things. But guess what? If you open those up, it's just death in there. It's bones and all uncleanness. Now, you know from reading your Old Testament that there were laws concerning contact with the dead. You were not to make contact with the dead or you were unclean. For example, Numbers 19, he who touches the dead body of anyone shall be unclean seven days. He shall purify himself with the water on the third day and on the seventh day, then he will be clean. But if he does not purify himself on the third day and on the seventh day, he will not be clean. Whoever touches the body of anyone who has died and does not purify himself defiles the tabernacle of the Lord. So the ancient Jew is going to do all he can to make sure he avoids this external defilement by coming in contact with a corpse, with a dead body. What's the point? Verse 28. Even so, you also outwardly appear righteous to men. You're like those tombs. You look good on the outside. You have a certain beauty externally. You've got an outward kind of righteousness. They appear to be righteous, but are not really so. There's the fundamental problem. Now, we're familiar with that are beyond a coat of paint, right? There are some things that you can put a coat of paint on and it works wonders. And you're like, okay, that's good, we're done. But there are other things that are in such bad shape, no coat of paint is gonna fix it. And you know that. And when you see something that is beyond it and it's been coated with paint, you realize that didn't work. They tried, but that didn't work. Well, these men are like that, with this outward display of righteousness. Now, we can do that too, right? That's ever a danger for us, in looking a certain way outside, externally, and being content with that. Why? Because we can fool people. We can fool others at church, or on the job, or in our family, that we really are good people, or we're really righteous, or what have you. But the goal is not to look righteous. The goal is to be righteous, right? Now, if you believe in Christ, you have the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. You have righteous standing before God. What does God want you to do in light of that? He wants you to live righteously. He wants you to do deeds and acts of righteousness, not to earn his favor, not to merit his salvation. You already have it. but because that's how God calls upon each and every one of us to live and to actually be righteous in our conduct, not just look that way. I hope I'm not speaking to anybody here today, but you never know. It's pointless to strive for simply appearing righteous on the outside. God knows what's within. He knows what's in my heart. He knows what's in your heart. There's no trying to fool him. And what he wants is he wants inner purity. Remember the beatitude. Blessed are the pure in heart. That is what is needed. Purity of heart. Or as the psalmist puts it, David puts it in Psalm 51. Behold, you desire truth. Where? In the inward parts. And in the hidden part, you will make me to know wisdom. Well, of course, the scribes and the Pharisees, they appear righteous. But again, Jesus says end of verse 28 inside, you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Another twin set of sins that matches what we saw there at the end of verse 25, and we won't spend too much time on hypocrisy because we've already talked quite a bit about it, but this is what's inside of them. You pull back. and see what's really in the Pharisee's heart, what's really in the scribe's inner man and it's hypocrisy, it's pretense. It's a pretending to righteousness, but not the real thing. That last one is interesting, lawlessness. Now here's your Greek lesson for this afternoon. This is anomia, anomia. Now in Greek, the word for law is namos. Okay, so remember that. Namas is law. Now what you want to do if you want to negate it is you put an alpha on the front of it. Anamia, that's against law or without law or no law. Okay, so that's the idea here. These are lawless men. These are men without law. Now Jesus, Or this word has previously been used to describe those who will not be a part of the kingdom of heaven. Remember way back in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, then will I declare to them, I never knew you depart from me, you who practice what lawlessness, anomia, being without law. Now to the first century Jew, this is a shock. This is a very surprising way to describe these men. Jesus just described the scribes and the Pharisees as lawless men, as men without law. You say, wow, that's confusing. I thought these were the most devout scrupulous of those who sought to obey the law. There's another popular misconception about scribes and Pharisees, right? Oh, those are those people who were all about the law of God. They were so zealous to obey the law of God. And we all know that's wrong. That's the idea many people have in their heads. And it's wrong. They were not zealous for the law of God. How do we know that? Go back to verse 23. You have neglected the weightier matters of what? Of the law. justice and mercy and faith. The problem was again, not that they were too punctilious, too specific, too devoted to obeying the law in all of its detail. No, no. The problem was they were lawless men. in their heart, externally. Now, internally. Externally, it looked like, man, these guys are the zenith of law keeping. They've got all these rules and laws they're following, and they're following them down to tithing their garden herbs. But inside, Jesus says, there is a very, very different reality. And it is lawlessness. Shocking. But it's not just scribes and Pharisees who have lawlessness in their hearts. That's you and that's me. We come into the world lawless. We don't want God's law. We don't want to obey God. We don't want to do what God says. We want to be free from God's law. We want to stand apart from it and be autonomous, independent from the law of God and be lawless. Isn't that what the serpent tempted Eve to? I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on in Genesis chapter three in the temptation. But one of the things that's going on there is a temptation to throw off God's law and you decide on your own what you're going to do. To be autonomous, which literally means self-law, to be a law unto yourself, to decide for yourself what's right and wrong, what you will and will not do. And ever since that time, being a sinner has meant that we desire to be without law. In fact, did you know that's how the Bible itself defines sin? It defines it as lawlessness. 1 John 3, 4, whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness and sin is lawlessness. Anamia, without law. That's what it means to be a sinner. If we're honest with ourselves, this is how we've lived outside of Christ, prior to knowing Christ. We lived a lawless life. But here's the good news, and you need some good news, right? All this scribe and Pharisee woe stuff is heavy. All right. Here's the good news. The good news is Jesus came to save you from that. He came to rescue you from your lawlessness. And He has, if you are in Christ, you are forgiven and redeemed from your lawlessness. Titus 2.14, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from every what? Lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works. Finally, notice again that Jesus tells us the extent of their inward corruption, end of verse 28, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Notice how all this matches. What was the condition of the cup and dish? They're clean outside, but inside they are full. What was the condition of the tombs? You are like whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are what? Full. of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. You see the theme there. Their interior is full of wickedness and sin. If you are an unbeliever here today, this is your condition. You are full of sin within. It's not just that you're a generally a good person and you've done a few bad things that can be excused and that are understandable. That's how most people see themselves. It's not true. No, outside of Christ, you are full of wickedness and sin. Now, once you see it that way, that changes your view of yourself, right? That changes your perception of yourself. And that means there's only one solution for you, and that's Jesus. That is to turn from sin, to believe in Jesus Christ, trust him for salvation, and what he will do is he will cleanse you, he will make you clean, and he will start here. He will start in your heart, in your inner man. What a beautiful verse in Psalm, excuse me, Isaiah 118. Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. No matter how much wickedness is within, Jesus can cleanse you and save you from it. Come to him today. But most of us here today are believers. How are we to deal with the sin that we find within us with inward corruption and wickedness? Perhaps as we've gone through this passage of scripture, and I have sought to apply this to you and to me, you've been a bit discouraged. because you do recognize that what Jesus denounces the scribes and Pharisees for, you can see some of it in here, in your own heart, can you not? Now, this is equal opportunity. I see it in my heart, too. I have to preach it, which means I have to face it, too, whenever I see a scribe or Pharisee tendency in me, and I see them in me. What do we do with that? He said, well, pastor, I'm discouraged, and I wish you'd preach something different next week. Can't we do the Psalms? Proverbs. Yeah, we could do the Psalms and Proverbs, yes, but we need to do Matthew 23 too, right? Okay, so number one, don't forget what Jesus has done for you. He's cleansed you. He saved you. If you belong to Him, you're forgiven. So don't despair. That's what I did when I was a teenager. I saw my sinfulness, and it brought me to the point of despair, because I couldn't beat it. I couldn't overcome it. How am I going to overcome these sinful thoughts and attitudes and feelings? I'll just wipe my knuckles and work harder. Do better. And I just kept failing over and over again. What did I need? I needed to be reminded of the gospel. The gospel is good news, and it's not, hey, there's good news. If you work hard enough, you'll get saved. That's not the good news. The good news is Jesus has died for your sins. He's been buried and risen again for your justification. You're forgiven. You're cleansed. Your inward part has been washed. in the blood of the Lamb. Don't forget that. Secondly, we must also realize that indwelling sin is still there with us. You say, but why is it still there? If I'm saved, if I'm forgiven, why do I still see these things in my heart? It's because you're not yet glorified. It's because the resurrection of the just hasn't happened yet. That is yet future, and thus we must still wrestle with and deal with sin. And not just sin out here, but sin in here. That's why you still have to deal with it. You say, oh, well, I'd prefer not to deal with it anymore. Well, you're either gonna have to die or Jesus is gonna come back in order to rectify that. But in the meantime, you gotta fight the good fight of faith. And part of the good fight of faith is listening to what Jesus says, honestly evaluating yourself in light of it, and if you see it there, deal with it. Don't despair. Take yourself back to Christ, back to God, confess that sin, confess that sinfulness. I've done that a time or two recently. Oh, God, forgive me. Not just for acts of sin, but for the sinfulness that's in there. Please forgive me for that. Please help me. One of the prayers I've been praying lately is, God, please purify me. I see it, Lord, I see what you're showing me. I see it there. Please forgive me and please continue your work to purge my heart of this poison that's there and needs to come out. You do that, too, brethren, go to him in prayer, confess. Seek his help. And walk away from being in his presence, not condemned, but free. joyful, knowing that if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And that's inside out. Don't lose heart. Continue to fight the good fight of faith, even when you see. A bit of a scribe, a bit of a Pharisee in your own heart. Ask the Lord to continue to work in you. so that your inner and outer life are more and more characterized by true righteousness. Let's pray. Oh Lord, it is sobering to see the Lord Jesus denouncing these men for their wickedness. And we realize we are no better. We realize at times that we've been religious hypocrites, that the inside didn't match the outside. And yet, Lord, today we rejoice that we are forgiven in Christ, that we have been washed, and that we have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. Our garments have been made clean, not through our own efforts, but through the death of Jesus in our place. Oh, we thank you for that today. But we pray on the other side of the ledger, Lord, that when we see the remaining sin in us, that we not excuse it, tolerate it, but that we repent of it. And we seek your help to have an inner man that is characterized by true righteousness. Help us, Lord, not to just appear righteous, but to be righteous in the way we think and speak and act. Father, we thank you for this day that you've given us. This is your day. It is the Lord's day. And we ask that our worship today and all that we've done would be acceptable to you through the merits of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for all that you have taught us. Please help us to hide your word in our heart. that we might not sin against you. We ask your blessing as we leave this place, in Jesus' name, amen. As you leave today, brethren, please receive the Lord's blessing, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all, amen.