Speaking of unplugged toasters, we've had quite a time this morning with our electronics here in the sanctuary. We're having trouble with our live stream, so if you're watching online and it's all choppy, we don't know what in the world's going on. But we hope you'll keep watching anyway, and we've got this screen behind me turned off because it seems to have a mind of its own, too. But moving on, we're continuing today in our series on Esther called The Story of Esther. And so I want to go ahead and invite you to turn to Esther chapter 2. Esther chapter 2. just before Job, which is right before the Psalms, which is right in the middle of your Bible. So if you go to a little left, not politically speaking, but to a little left of middle, then you will find this little book of Esther, this fascinating story. While you're turning there, I knew somebody a long time ago who used to say that, well, everything just works out. Everything works out. That what happens, happens. And if you just kind of go with it, Everything just works out. That's a pretty deep theology there, isn't it? But this person's perspective was something like this. If you throw a handful of marbles up in the air, they're all going to come crashing down and bounce around and roll around and make a bunch of racket. But after a while, out of that chaos, it all just works out and everything comes to order somehow. But for those of us who follow Christ, of course, we have a very different perspective. As we know, because we know God, we know that the marbles of our lives are going to end up exactly where God wants them to be. And not only that, wherever those marbles are at present, either flying through the air or bouncing around or rolling around and bumping into things, or having come to rest quietly on the floor, every one of those marbles is exactly where God wants them to be. That's the Christian worldview. And, you know, then we might be discouraged and say, but there are evil people in this world. But here's where our encouragement comes. Those evil people cannot mess up God's plan. Everything not only will be, but actually is right now exactly the way God wants things to be. His sovereign hand ordains it. This is a pretty heavy subject, and it uses up a lot of brain cells to get our minds around it. But you know what? I don't think we're supposed to be able to comprehend it. The mind of God is unsearchable, the psalmist says. What we need to do is to trust God in his sovereignty. But you know, not only that, but God even uses evil people to accomplish his will. He uses evil people to accomplish his will. And you're sitting there thinking, well, hey, but what about me? I'm a Christian. Well, you know what? God doesn't have any choice but to use evil people, brothers and sisters, because we are sinners by nature. I mean, what other choice does God have? Is there anyone in this world who has ever lived besides Christ who is not evil? Ever since that famous bite of the apple, We've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And so we're going to take great comfort today in knowing that God uses us, no matter who we are or how immature or mature we are in our faith, that God uses even us to accomplish his good will. And so our passage this morning in Esther 2 forces us to recognize that whether God is using a pagan king like Ahasuerus or a God-fearing soul like you and me, either way, God is acting and working in the lives of inherently evil people, people who are sinners, who fall short of the glory of God every single day of their lives. Is that your understanding of yourself? Do you think that because you're a Christian, well, you're a good person and you deserve God's love, maybe? Well, here's what the late great British pastor Charles Spurgeon, who lived in the 19th century and whom we evangelicals love to quote, here's what he had to say about this. He said, our best performances are so stained with sin that it is hard to know whether they are good works or bad works. And he also asserted that my hope lives not because I am not a sinner, but because I am a sinner for whom Christ died. My trust is not that I am holy, but that being unholy, he is my righteousness. My faith rests not upon what I am or shall be or fear or know, but in what Christ is, in what he has done and in what he is now doing for me." And he ends that statement with a hearty hallelujah. So hallelujah indeed, Pastor Charles. You know, even though we are yet unholy in this life, until Christ comes again, he is our righteousness. And while we are yet unholy, God uses us, along with unbelievers, amazingly, to accomplish his will. That's how sovereign our God is. And this means that God's will cannot be overcome in any way, shape, or form, even by our sin or the sin of others. This is the very good news that we're going to begin to see and get a hold of in Esther chapter two today. Last week, we began the story of Esther with a look at King Ahasuerus in the year 483 BC, in the third year of his reign. He's the great monarch over Persia, this huge and prosperous kingdom of 127 provinces that stretches all the way from India into Egypt. This is a huge area. It's bigger than the lower 48 of the United States. And we learned last week that human splendor is only skin deep. The king was showing off his splendor, but we found that it's only skin deep. And because the king's wife, Queen Vashti, with one single syllable shakes his kingdom to the core when she refuses the king's order to put herself on display for a crowd of lustful, drunken men. And that syllable was no, no. Well, our King's splendor is certainly not like that. Unlike the drunken whims of a lustful King Ahasuerus, our King's decrees reflect his holiness and his love, his care and his mercy for us. And the fact that all he commands and requires of us is designed for our benefit. And so we, the church, We are the church, a people set apart for Him. We are the bride whom Christ is preparing as He puts us on display to show the world His mercy and grace, not to put us to shame or to take away our dignity. And so today in Esther 2, we're gonna see King Ahasuerus set his plan in motion for a new bride. And at the same time, we're gonna see how God is working at the same time to accomplish his divine, truly sovereign will, and that is of working in the tiniest details of sinners' lives to bring about the salvation of his people from an impending doom that's on the horizon that the people don't even know about. And so this message in chapter two is one of great hope. And here is our great hope, that God is working in your life right now. Did you know that? It may not feel like it. You may not be able to identify anything in your life where God is at work. But the same is true in this story here. We're looking at it with hindsight, 2020 hindsight. But God is working in your life right now, even in surprising ways you can't even imagine. And so we're going to see this in three ways. First, in the King's plan in verses one through four. Then in verses 5, 18, we're going to see that the king's plan is realized, but at the same time, we're going to realize that our king's plan is also being realized. He's setting that into motion. And then in verses 19 through 23, we're going to find one more thing, one more thing that's very important. Well, Diane read a large portion of Esther chapter two for us a few minutes ago. to give us a taste of what's going on in this chapter. If you haven't read the whole chapter, you need to read it, read the whole thing, read the whole story of Esther, because then you'll understand what we're talking about here every Sunday when we talk about this. But let's start first with the king's plan in verses one through four. The king was in Chapter 1 kind of pushed into his decision to get rid of Vashti in Chapter 1. He's a pretty malleable king. He listens to his aides and does what they say oftentimes. And so now here at the beginning of Chapter 2, King Ahasuerus is perhaps having some regrets of that decision as he remembers the queen, Queen Vashti. But before we think he's a real romantic at heart or a sentimental guy, it's important to note what the Greek historian Herodotus reported about King Ahasuerus around this time. It seems that King Ahasuerus, well, he tries to have an adulterous affair with his own brother's wife. There's clue number one about his true character. Now, his brother, of course, refuses to give up his wife because King Ahasuerus, according to Herodotus, was really trying to get him to do this. He was ordering his brother to give up his wife so he could marry her. Of course, King Ahasuerus was already married himself. He already had his wife in addition to his harem. But at any rate, his brother refuses this. She refuses as well. She'll have nothing to do with this. And so, not being able to get what he really wants, he settles for their daughter, his own niece. Let that sink in for a moment. This is the kind of guy King Ahasuerus is. This is a man with no moral compass. He'll do almost anything to have what he wants, and what he wants seems to be driven by lust for women and wealth and power. And of course, this makes him a very dangerous man, just as it would in these days. And there are some other very brutal things that Herodotus reports in the wake of the king's indiscretions, including the maiming of his brother's wife, his brother's rebellion against him. And in the end, King Ahasuerus has his army go and hunt his brother down and murder him. So now everything's just fallen into place, hasn't it? Everything has just worked out, right? Well, this is a dysfunctional family at the very least. This is like a bad soap opera combined with an episode of true crime. Only the criminal here, like we would expect, the criminal isn't the king. We all can see that clearly because we're looking through the lens of the cross on his actions. But no, in his own mind, the king is certainly not the criminal. The criminals are the ones who oppose the king. And in his royal eyes, the punishment fits the crime. So all to say, these are all signs of the very messed up, corrupt, strange world that the Jews of Persia are living in. We live in a pretty strange and corrupt and messed up world too. But back to our story, King Ahasuerus is, well, he's summarily disposed of his unreliable Queen Vashti and so now, well, it's time to look for a newer model. It's time to look for a newer, more reliable model. And so his aide suggests a plan for the king to send out his officers all over the 127 provinces, thousands of square miles, as it says in verse three, to gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem in Susa, the citadel, under the custody of Hegai, the king's eunuch who is in charge of the women. And then in verse four, and let the young woman who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti. This pleased the king. And he did so. You know, here's where we really need to pause for a few moments and just consider what's going on here. We've just been transported back in time to a very different and cruel world. Now, our world is cruel as well in its own ways, but the customs and the ways of thinking are foreign to us as we go back to Persia in 483 BC. And so when we read Esther, chapter 2, about this nationally endorsed slavery in order to please the lust of a king, of one man, we, I hope, ratchet the idea of it. I mean, as the cruelly pagan world into which the Jews had assimilated becomes more apparent, I get kind of sick to my stomach. I think that's an appropriate response. But here's what we need to understand as Americans in the modern world as we read this. It may be difficult for us to understand that in a monarchy, the king is not an elected official. He's not there by our choice. The only reason that he's the king is that he inherited the role from his father. And if he didn't inherit the role, nine times out of 10, he stole it by force, by waging war against the former empire and winning. And so as such, the Persian king's power is absolute. What he decrees is law. Whatever he wants is provided. Everything in the kingdom exists for his pleasure. People to him are simply a commodity that the empire produces for his consumption. There's no government by the people and for the people in ancient Persia. There is only the king's will. All that matters is what the king wants. Now, this is the kind of perceived absolute power that one of our heroes of the faith, King David, at least for a moment, thought he had. King David saw another man's wife and he took her too. But he had her husband and he also had her husband killed to try to hide his mess. But unlike King Hasuerus, The turning point for King David is that when Nathan, the prophet of God, reveals his sin against the Almighty King, God himself, David repents. And while no earthly court ends up convicting David for his crimes, justice does come raining down from heaven as God declares to him in 2 Samuel 12, 10, therefore the sword shall never depart from your house. God says he's going to raise up evil in David's own household and that his child will die and all of these other bad things are going to happen in King David's life because of his sin. In other words, while King Ahasuerus believes that he answers to absolutely nobody, King David realizes that every earthly king answers to the one true sovereign who is God himself. And so as David is standing there before God, he's got a choice. He can either bow before the sovereign Lord or he can rebel against it. And so we know that he wisely chooses to bow, which is exactly what every one of us should be choosing to do as well. We all know that rebellion against God never works out. You see, As we look up in reverence and even fear and awe of our great king, we realize that our truly sovereign king never makes a bad decision that requires cleaning up a mess like King Ahasuerus. In fact, our king is constantly cleaning up the mess of our lives. This is part of his divine plan. He's planned it since before the foundations of the world. King Ahasuerus is clearly motivated by sinful desires, but the motivations and decisions and choices of our king always, always, always are good for us. And so our king is pleased when he pours out grace and mercy and goodness in life on us, the undeserving people he's chosen, as it restores us to a right relationship with him through Christ. King Ahasuerus, on the other hand, only takes and takes and takes and takes for his pleasure. And he destroys lives along the way. But our God, our king, our righteous Lord gives generously to us so that we can have life in him. To King Ahasuerus, people are like, well, maybe like unplugged toaster ovens who are no longer of use. But they're kind of like paper towels to King Ahasuerus. You use one and you throw it away. And if he doesn't like the job you did as a paper towel, he goes looking for a new brand and just gets rid of you. But our experience with God is just the opposite. He finds us broken in our sin. He finds us completely unpleasing to look at or to be around. Our souls are cesspools of vileness. Cesspools of evil and rebellion against him. But what does he do? Does he throw us away? No, no. He makes us entirely new and beautiful with the righteousness of Christ. And so back to our passage, King Ahasuerus, well, he needs a new brand of paper towels. And so the only requirements for his future new bride are stunning beauty and, very important, a compliant and cooperative spirit, unlike Queen Vashti. So here's the king's plan to solve his Vashti problem. It'll involve the whole kingdom. and the sudden lifelong separation of perhaps hundreds of daughters from their families. Just like that. They may never see their families again. And so while the officials in his kingdom search for a new model wife for him, King Ahasuerus is going to be going off to war. He's constricted a few hundred thousand young men to fight and die for him in a war of revenge against the Greeks since they had defeated his father, King Darius. This is a selfish war on his part that kills many, many thousands. But you see, this is the way of the world in that time. This is the reality that every subject of the Persian Empire faces on a daily basis. And it goes even further to that. As the young virgins are added to the king's collection of beautiful women, they're going to be watched over by eunuchs. And these are men who have been selected for very special service to the king as their masculinity is physically taken from them. And they did this so that they could be trusted to watch over the king's business and his possessions, namely the women. This is a very, very cruel world. And so that's the king's plan. Next in verses five through 18, we see how the king's plan is realized and realized at the same time that our God is bringing about his own plan. So in verses five through seven, the Jews Mordecai and his cousin Esther are introduced for the first time. We find out that Mordecai is a Benjaminite and ultimately a descendant of Saul when you trace everything back. And he's raising his cousin, Hadassah. Hadassah in Hebrew means myrtle, but she also has a Persian name, Esther, which is probably derived from the goddess Ishtar. So Esther is the daughter of Mordecai's uncle. Her parents had died, and that's why he's taking care of her. And so their ancestors had been taken away from Jerusalem into Babylonian captivity a few generations ago, just as God had declared that they would be because of the sins of Judah. And we will see how important this is in a few moments. All of this is also going to come into play in the coming chapters in Mordecai's ongoing conflict with Haman, the king's right-hand man. But that's a story for another Sunday. In the meantime, we meet Esther. The author describes her as a young woman, and this means that she's of marrying age. And again, this is where we've got to shift our cultural gears a little bit and realize that she could have been as young as 14. And he describes her as also having a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at. And this perhaps is her most important quality in the Persian world at this moment when the king is looking for a newer model bride. And so immediately we start to see where this is all going to go. God had made Esther to be beautiful, of course. And while beauty is indeed a gift from God, in a world full of lustful men that can be a source of difficulty. especially when you're dealing with people like the king. But you see, it sounds almost as if she matches exactly what the king is looking for in his new wife, good looks and young enough to be compliant. And so in verses 8 through 11, Esther becomes part of the harem. This is, again, part of the passage that Diane read a few minutes ago. In verse 9, Esther pleases the eunuch Haggai and wins his favor and puts her on the top spot of the harem. And notice the phrasing here. She wins Haggai's favor. There's effort involved here. This isn't a passive winning. This is something that she's striving for. And so doesn't something just sound a little off to you as you hear this, in this situation, in this circumstance? Esther and her cousin Mordecai are Jews. Would they really be okay with this? Well, Esther and her cousin had lived all their lives in Persia, generations removed from the old days in Jerusalem of temple worship and all of those things. So maybe they had allowed themselves to be assimilated into a pagan culture in a way that compromises their faith. But at the very least, it would seem that she and Mordecai would at least be familiar with their own scriptures. For instance, Deuteronomy 7, verses three and four. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. Why? For they would turn away your sons from following me, the one true and living God, to serve other gods. And then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you and he would destroy you quickly. This is exactly the sin that constantly crops up over and over and over in the history of the Jews, especially in the hundreds of years of the Jewish kings before the Babylonian exile. Even Solomon worshipped idols. King after king did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. One of the reasons that God had banished the Jews to slavery in Babylon is simply because the Jews had given their daughters to pagan sons and taken pagan daughters as their sons' wives, and they ended up worshiping idols. But neither Mordecai nor Esther protest against this possibility of her marrying a pagan king. Now you might argue on her behalf, and this makes sense in a lot of ways, you might argue on her behalf and point out that she really has no choice here. If she disobeys, she's dead, right? You cannot disobey the king. Queen Vashti kind of got off pretty well, considering he didn't kill her. But as for her own Jewish heritage, more than a heritage as her Jewish history testifies. If we are willing to suffer the consequences, full obedience to God is always an option for us. It's always an option. And so this is the issue of faith here. Not so much living in a harem because that in itself isn't the moral objection as hard as it may be for us to accept in this day and age. Concubines had been an accepted way of life for the Jews for thousands of years, and it was just simply another strange reality of life. It was not even strange to them. It was kind of normal to them. Of course, today we understand that marriage is between one man and one woman, just as Christ taught. But the moral issue here is Esther's apparent willingness to marry a pagan. Not only willingness, but seeming eagerness to marry a pagan. And that's why she becomes a part of the harem and prospers in it. Verses 12 through 14, of course, describe the reality of what it's like to be in the harem. Some of it, anyway. What the description does not say is that these women are in the king's service for life. They are slaves. They will never see their families again. They will always be in the court there, ready for if and when the king might call them. But you know, it might have also been viewed as a pretty good thing for them. Because after all, this meant lifelong security in a place that just oozes wealth out of the seams. And there's comfort everywhere, and always plenty of food to eat, and all that sort of thing. But as a member of the harem, because there are so many women involved, you might not ever be called in the king's presence. So it could be relative that the life you might have been living in poverty or whatever the case may be. It might have been, for most Persian women, a step up in the world. But you might not ever be called in the king's presence. But neither do you have any choices about your life. because you are a slave. You can't come and go as you please. You can't be the person you want to be. There are no hopes and dreams that you can fulfill for your life except for whatever the king wants. So what's really at issue here is the reality of life for a Jew in God's eyes. And that reality in God's eyes can never include marrying people outside of the Jewish faith. We even We even say that today in a Christian marriage, not to be unequally yoked with an unbeliever. And there are reasons for that, and the reason is because of what God says in that passage from Deuteronomy. When we marry off to people who are of different religions, we end up being watered down over time, and then eventually we end up worshiping their gods instead of ours. That can be the danger. And so as we watch Esther win favor with the king's court and even the king, she's being very proactive to be noticed and favored. She uses the beauty that God gave her to do this along with the compliant charm she knows is going to win the king's affections. She doesn't seem to fear violating God's command not to marry a pagan. Beautiful is the way God made Esther, isn't it? And we certainly cannot place a single bit of blame on her or on God for that, and neither should we. And in fact, we can go a step further and say that a woman's beauty is never an excuse for a man's bad behavior. It's never, ever, ever an excuse. In fact, we ought to celebrate a woman's beauty as a gift from God, but without the single-minded perversion and impurity of King Ahasuerus. But even more than physical beauty, ought we not to celebrate Very much so, the beauty of a faithful sister in the Lord whose strong faith leads her to go off to some foreign land and be a missionary, or to raise her children in the Lord and make sacrifices for them so that they will know the Lord, or to be an obvious Christian in the business world, to conduct herself with holiness, even in difficult places. But you see here, Esther seems to be like any other Persian woman vying for the king's attention. And so, we find out even in verse 10 that Mordecai even admonishes Esther not to reveal her identity as a Jew. Nobody knows really why he did this exactly. The text doesn't say. But the long story short, as much as we really, really desire for Esther to be so godly in character that she wins favor in the harem and wins the favor of the king. And this is how many portray her. That seems unlikely at this point. Esther is no Daniel at this point in the story. She's no Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego either, willing to sacrifice or even die for her faith. She's lost touch with who she is, a Jew. a member of a people set apart for God. But as this story unfolds, we're going to see, don't doubt this, we're going to see Esther for the real hero of faith that she becomes, but she's not there yet. God is going to wake her up and wake up the Jewish people to their true identity. But for the time being, in verse 14, she wins the favor of everybody in the king's court. Everybody loves Esther. And probably she's doing that by being just the compliant, cooperative beauty that the king is hoping for. Well, after about four years of waiting, Esther is, if she was 14, hypothetically speaking, if she was 14 when she entered the harem, she's now about 18 years old. And this is after King Ahasuerus has returned from decimating the Greeks in his War of revenge, his own army and navy almost being destroyed in the process. Finally, Esther is brought into the king and she's shrewd enough in verse 15 only to take with her from the harem what the eunuch recommends that she take. And again, this is another sign of her favor winning compliance. King Ahasuerus in verse 17 loved Esther more than all the women. Before this sounds really romantic to you, he loves her more than all the other women, not exclusively, but more than. And then she won grace and favor in his sight more than all the virgins. Once again, not exclusively, but more than. And so King Ahasuerus makes Esther her new improved queen. Well, all of this begs some serious questions for each one of us today. Do we obscure our faith like Mordecai and Esther do? Are we cooperating with our world rather than holding fast to God's world? And are we doing that perhaps in ways that aren't even obvious to us, that is gonna take some soul searching and prayer? bowing before the Lord to show us our sin in the same way that God showed David his sin so that we can repent. Do people know who our king is just by being around us and looking at us? Or do we blend in enough that his lordship isn't really clear in our lives? Rather than sharing the sufferings of Christ, are we trying to spare ourselves of those sufferings by yielding to our chosen culture's demands of who they want us to be, whether we are politically liberal or conservative? Do our political allegiances define us, or does Christ define us? Brothers and sisters, God has not put us here to blend in. but to stand apart, to be noticed, to be the salt of the earth, so that the world can taste Christ and his gospel. He puts us here even to share in his sufferings, not to do whatever it takes to get ahead at work, to be cool, or to follow every pundit's lead, or to demand our way. God has set us apart to represent and share his gospel and to love the world in the same sacrificial way that Christ has loved us when he met us in the cesspool of our lives. These are our daily challenges, aren't they, in the world we live in? every day presents a challenge to us as believers. And the only question is whether we're going to respond in a way that brings glory to our king or slanders him. Now maybe I have succeeded in really depressing you at this point. This may seem all very overwhelming in this point in the story of Esther. I mean, not even the The heroes of the story, these Jews at this point, are being faithful to God. And then there's King Ahasuerus, who's in a league of his own. But here's the good news, brothers and sisters. Even as the worldly king makes his evil plans, God is at work too. He is at work. He has been at work already, even before chapter two, in the king's idle drunkenness and in Queen Vashti's negative response to his shameful commands. And God has been at work even in Mordecai and Esther's compliance with a pagan world, as we're going to see. So all of this is proof to each one of us here who are Christians, who follow Christ, this is proof that we don't have to be spiritual giants for God to use us. We don't have to be perfect before God is going to use us. He's going to make us perfect one day. But not yet. So here we are. And God has put broken people like you and me, here in Esther chapter 2, in the beautiful form of Esther and her cousin Mordecai, to be just in the right place at just the right time. And that's the beauty of this story. And all of this is confirmed in this next seemingly insignificant detail of our story, as we see one more thing. in verses 19 through 23. Very quickly, Mordecai discovers a plot to kill the king, and he warns the new queen, his cousin, and so she warns the king, and his life is saved. And of course, the bad guys are executed, and Mordecai's deed is made note of in the official record. That's gonna become very important in this story later on. But you see, God has not placed Esther and Mordecai in this situation, not so much to save the king, but to save his people. And his plan is already in motion. In the coming chapters, we're going to watch an evil plot hatch to destroy all of God's people, all of God's people. But we're also going to witness how God's plan already in motion saves his people. And so as we come in for a landing here this morning, as we bring this to a close, suffice it to say for now that what God wants us to learn from chapter two of Esther is that God is always at work to keep his promises to us. God is at work in our lives right now. And you know what? Absolutely nothing, nothing can mess up his plans. God wants us to understand that he's working not just in the big macro things like social issues and abortion and all of those things, but he's also working in your life right now, even in ways that you're not even aware of. And if you knew of them, you would be very surprised. So brothers and sisters, our world might be falling apart. and your personal life might be excruciatingly challenging right now, but know this, God is at work in you. God is at work in you by faith in Christ and nothing, nothing, nothing can stop him, nothing. Listen to what Paul declares in Romans 8.35. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? We can add a few more things to that list. Shall our own weaknesses or our own impulsive rebellious sin against God? And the answer is unequivocally, no. Nothing at all shall separate us. And that's not because we're always faithful, brothers and sisters. It's because God is faithful even when we're not. Just as he is showing us in the story of Esther, all of the marbles of our lives, he is orchestrating into his perfect plan. Every single one of them. And the proof of that fact is that Christ loved us before we loved him. Romans 5.10. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. So brothers and sisters, even our own ugliness isn't too ugly for God. King Ahasuerus was looking for perfect beauty. Our king is looking for broken and contrite hearts, just like he was in King David. And the stunning fact is that we cannot win our king's favor. And that's good news, too, because even so, our king is full of grace and mercy toward us. Someday Christ is going to bring us home as his bride, made beautiful by his splendor. That's his plan. That's his plan. And nobody can mess up God's plan. And that's why He cares for us and is working in every one of our lives right now, this very moment. And this is what makes Him the sovereign King who deserves our total allegiance. Amen? Let's pray.