Good evening. Sermon text this evening, which we'll be looking at together, is from Deuteronomy chapter four. Deuteronomy chapter four, we're gonna read most of the chapter, fairly long scripture reading, verses one through 40. Turn there with me. This is part of the introduction to the book of Deuteronomy. The first four chapters comprising something of a sermon from Moses to the people of Israel as they were outside the land of Canaan waiting to enter in. So Deuteronomy chapter four then beginning at verse one. And now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you and do them, that you may live and go in and take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers is giving you. You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you. Your eyes have seen what the Lord did at Baal Peor, for the Lord your God destroyed from among you all the men who followed the Baal of Peor. But you who held fast to the Lord your God are all alive today. See, I have taught you statutes and rules as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon Him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today? Only take care and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. make them known to your children and your children's children. How on the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, the Lord said to me, gather the people to me that I may let them hear my words so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth and that they may teach their children so. And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but saw no form. There was only a voice. And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is the Ten Commandments. He wrote them on two tablets of stone. And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and rules, that you might do them in the land that you are going over to possess. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, since you saw no form on that day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire. Beware, lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground. likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth and beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars all the host of heaven you'll be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance as you are this day. Furthermore, the Lord was angry with me because of you, and he swore that I should not cross the Jordan and that I should not enter the good land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance. For I must die in this land. I must not go over the Jordan, but you shall go over and take possession of that good land. Take care. lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God which he made with you, and make a carved image, the form of anything that the Lord your God has forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. When you father children, and children's children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, so as to provoke him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will utterly be destroyed, and the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you. There you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands that neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in tribulation and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the Lord your God and obey his voice. For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you. forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them. For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a God speaking out of the midst of the fire as you have heard and still live? Or has any God ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown that you might know that the Lord is God. There is no other besides Him. Out of heaven he let you hear his voice that he might discipline you, and on earth he let you see his great fire and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire. And because he loved your fathers and chose their offspring after them and brought you out of Egypt with his own presence by his great might, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than you to bring you in to give you their land for an inheritance as it is this day, know therefore today and lay it to your heart the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath there is no other therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments which I command you today that it may go well with you and with your children after you and that you may prolong your days in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for all time I want to ask you a question this evening am I not on Alright, somebody's not hearing me as very well, they're saying, but we will proceed. I want to ask you a question this evening to start off as we reflect on Deuteronomy chapter 4. What is Christianity? How would you define it? Along with that, another question very closely related. When we read Scripture, what are we expecting to find there? Those two things, of course, would go closely together. For many people, the answers to those questions would naturally tend to go in one of two directions. On the one hand, we often tend to think of Christianity as it's associated with an assortment of truths that we teach, a system of doctrine or a set of beliefs. Along these lines, we could go to scripture to find that set of teachings, a set of teachings that we believe is more accurate than what any other philosophy or religion offers, teachings about who God is, about sin and its nature, about how to be saved. This is what God's character is. This is what human nature is. This is how we understand the nature of human sin, the way to salvation, etc. Of course, these things are very crucial to what Christianity is all about. But when we think of Christianity just as that, if we focus almost exclusively on that, a certain problem can emerge in that Christianity tends then to feel somewhat abstract to us, as if it's some sort of a set of propositions to affirm, a set of notions or ideas that we dispense, somewhat like a philosophy. It may seem even somewhat impersonal then, relatively flat or lifeless. On the other hand, we can sometimes also think of Christianity a bit differently as more a way of life, a code of ethics, a set of instructions about what to do and what not to do. Here, our focus would be on living in a certain way. We would tend to look to scripture to provide us with a code of ethics, to tell us what behaviors are good and what behaviors aren't in various situations. If we think principally in this way, Christianity can come to feel rather small, perhaps, even somewhat claustrophobic. The main concern is whether I'm following all the God-given guidelines for my life. May even begin to feel somewhat hopeless, since I so often don't do the things that I'm told to do. In both cases, whether you think of Christianity primarily as a system of truths to affirm or primarily as a set of things to do, either one tends to have a view of Christianity very focused on me and what I should think or what I should do behaviorally here and now. Both views also tend to produce some tension as we read scripture We go to scripture to see what it is that I should believe and affirm, what are those truths that I should confess, or what is it that I should be doing, but when we come to scripture, we often find things ostensibly describing neither of those, at least immediately so, but we often find our stories about something that happened a long time ago in situations very different than ours, with people whose situations were not all that much like our own. Certainly, Scripture does provide us with doctrine, and it does provide us with instruction and commands for how to live. Both of those are extremely important. Neither of them, however, is really the foundation of what we find in Scripture or the foundation of the Christian faith itself. There's something else even more basic to what Christianity is. distinctly and differently than any other philosophy or any other worldview, before it is a system of things to confess and believe, a system of truths, or a system of behavior, the Christian faith is an announcement of what God has done in the world, in time and space, throughout history, over centuries even, stories of what God has accomplished outside of us, before us, apart from us, but for our sake. First and foremost, what we often see in scripture then, is a rehearsing of history, God's history, an account of his great acts to create, to redeem, and to bring his purposes to consummation in this world. Actually, if you look at Scripture as a whole and step back, observe its contents, you can see that describing and rehearsing the great things that God has done in the world is extremely important to God. And he says that it ought to be extremely important to us. You think, for example, of the many lengthy historical books in Scripture. So many of them are principally history in their content. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, keep going all the way through Nehemiah. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts. Over half of the pages of the New Testament, lengthwise, committed to recounting God's great acts in Jesus Christ and through his apostles. Scripture doesn't intend simply to give us the bottom line of what doctrines we should confess or what behaviors we should or should not commit. Instead, it also, and even principally, reflects at length on what God himself first does before we have believed anything or done anything or even were alive. What I want you to see from our passage then is the importance of our lifting our eyes up from things that we are ordinarily preoccupied with, things in the here and now, things about ourselves, to reflect on the history of redemption, God's great deeds as they are recorded for us in scripture. And how doing this provides a much richer perspective both on the doctrine that we confess and the ethics that we seek to uphold, a much richer perspective as well on our own lives. When we look at the context of the book of Deuteronomy, we should notice how Israel is facing a very difficult situation, really an unprecedented situation in their history. They're poised outside of the land of Canaan about to do the most difficult thing that they've ever been asked to do by fighting against the Canaanites, purging this land, the land of Canaan, of all of their enemies for the Lord. At the very same time, as they're about to do this unprecedented thing, this difficult thing, they are also about to lose their leader. Moses, it's very clear, is about to die. Not to join them in the land for that fight. Moses obviously feels this quite poignantly. We read that at the end of Deuteronomy 3, where he asks the Lord again, around this time, to allow him to enter Canaan. But his request is denied. And within this very challenging context, Deuteronomy itself then functions as somewhat like Moses' last will and testament. The last set of things that he will say and then write to the people of Israel. His parting words before they embark on this very difficult stage of their history together. What is it then that Moses would say to the people of Israel on this occasion? What is it that he would most want to draw their attention towards or have them focus on? What would you say to your children or your church if you were leaving them? What would you most want them to keep in mind? Well, obviously, Deuteronomy is a big book. Moses says quite a lot of things in it. But central to what he says, especially in the first four chapters, is the foundation of all that follows thereafter is a record of what God has already done for them in the past. They need to remember this. And as the passage tells them, they need to remember it and tell it to their children and their children's children after them. You might think that Moses, in a situation like this, would focus on that situation. What Israel is going to face in the land of Canaan, the difficulties, That they need to know something about themselves, their strengths, their weaknesses, something about the Canaanites, the Canaanites' strengths and weaknesses, something about the land that they're going into. Maybe some strategies, some tactics for how best to take it over, how best to be successful in their surroundings. And of course Moses does want them to be successful in their surroundings. But that's not itself what he talks about. where Moses actually focuses is mainly on God's own deeds in the past and somewhat also in the future, the history of redemption. We start the chapter, we see Moses charging Israel to obey the laws that God has given them through him in verse one. Now, O Israel, he says, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you and do them And then he enumerates various reasons for this. The principal one, the first one at least, that he comes to in verses 3 and 4, the reason why Israel ought to obey this code of ethics that he gives them in these laws is because they should remember what God did at Baal of Peor. In Numbers chapter 25, Moses recounts this in verses 3 and 4 of our passage. There in Numbers 25, Israel had been mingling with the daughters of Moab, attracted to the daughters of the land, joined with them in worshiping their foreign gods, and as a result, Scripture records the Lord sent a plague against Israel that killed 24,000 people. Moses wants them to remember that. The point of remembering is clear enough. It shows quite plainly God's great zeal for law keeping in general, but also his great zeal for his worship. Your eyes have seen what the Lord did at Baal Peor, Moses says. For the Lord your God destroyed from among you all the men who follow the Baal of Peor, but you who held fast to the Lord your God are all alive today. This is a crucial event to remember then because it shows something about who God is. It shows us his character. We understand who he is principally through what he does. And therefore we must remember what it is that he has in fact done. In this case, in a chastening and judgment. And Moses goes beyond that in verses 9 through 24, turns further into the past again to recall another event in Israel's history, this time the revelation of God to Israel at Mount Sinai. Here again, Moses wants Israel to remember God's great deeds in history, which they saw. He says, verse nine, only take care and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, unless they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children. Interestingly here, when Moses describes what your eyes have seen, many of the people that he's talking to actually were not alive at Mount Sinai. that occurred 40 years earlier, before the Lord had sent Israel in to wander in the wilderness, where the generation that had refused to go into Canaan then died. It had only been the very young people at Sinai that some of whom would still be alive, and yet many others would not have been alive then at all. And yet, so Moses wants to remind them. What is it that corporately you saw at Sinai? What happened? Don't forget the great deeds of God. So Moses highlights for them the awesome, the fear-inducing nature of how God spoke to them on that mountain. Verse 11, recalls how the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven. It was wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire, verse 12, and declared to you his covenant, verse 13. Clearly this event itself Not just what God said at Sinai, but how he said it is meant to move Israel to a proper kind of fear and respect. Israel must be careful not to forget this great event, this founding event in their history. So Moses recalls it to them again here in Deuteronomy 4. It's not only the fearsome nature of the event, but also the way that God spoke to them, to Israel, without showing them his form that Moses calls their attention to. Verses 15 and following. The central revelation that God gave to Israel at Mount Sinai was in words only, Moses says. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, verse 15, since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire. Beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal, etc." Notice again how Moses points back to what God did in the past, what Israel had seen, and of course what they had not seen, God's form. He contrasts that with what they would see later with their own eyes. Verse 19, he says, beware lest when you go into the land, you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you'll be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them. It's crucial, Moses says, for Israel not simply to look around themselves when they come into the land at whatever they see with their eyes then, but instead to remember what their eyes had seen before. The great acts of God previously, even to a prior generation. These are things that God gave to show them who he is. They're things that God gave them to show them also how to worship. That their God is spiritual. He has no form, he has no body like we do. That he's separate and above all creation. And so it's an insult to Him to worship Him through the creation by making an idol. And so what God did at Baal Peor, what God did at Mount Sinai, these teach Israel how they are to fear the Lord and how they are to worship Him. see then right there how it's these events of history, these things that God has done in the past, these are particularly what Moses grounds both doctrine in, teachings about who God is, what he's like, and ethics in, teachings about what Israel should or should not do. And Moses turns thirdly in verses 25 through 31 from what God had done in the past, to something that God would yet do in the future, particularly after the exile. Here, Moses foresees the inevitability of Israel's unfaithfulness when they come into the land, the inevitability of their going into exile. As a result, God would indeed drive them from the land. Yet, when they go into exile and they experience God's discipline, His judgment, what hope do they have? The hope that they have is that even though Israel so easily forgets the Lord, so easily forgets what he has done for them, God himself will not forget what he has done by making a covenant with their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he will, yet again, have mercy to bring them back into the land. Finally, in verses 32 through 40, to reassure Israel even more, Moses turns farther back in the past, all the way back to the Exodus. Does Israel doubt the Lord's faithfulness and commitment to them, given their clear sinfulness? How will they know that they are indeed his peculiar people and that he will in fact do for them all that he has said? Verse 32 recalls one of the greatest reasons for that. The utter uniqueness of what God has already done for them by bringing them out of Egypt. Ask now of the days that are past, Moses says, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth and ask from one end of the heaven to the other whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a God speaking out of the midst of the fire as you have and still live? Or has any God ever attempted to go and make a nation for himself from the midst of another nation? by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the Lord God did for you in Egypt before your eyes. To you it was shown that you might know that the Lord is God. There is no other besides Him. Here again, then, we see the great value of rehearsing biblical history, knowing the events that have gone before us that the Bible records. Do you want to know who God is? That He alone has all power and authority, and so He alone is worthy of all of your devotion, your entire life, everything that you have. This is what biblical history shows us. Because God triumphed over Egypt. God triumphed over every so-called Egyptian god. He showed who he is, not just by saying it, he demonstrated it by what he did. You want to know how deeply the Lord loves his people? That he will, in fact, never leave them or forsake them? Look at what lengths he has already gone to to bring about salvation. Has anyone else ever done things like this in the history of the world? You can see then the nature of Moses's logic here in this chapter, Deuteronomy 4. Remember God's great deeds. Recall their details, what he did, when he spoke, how he spoke. This is what grounds your understanding of the truth. This is what's underneath our doctrine. This is what tells us how to serve him. This is what's underneath our practice, our ethics. We should notice, too, that this same logic is something we see all throughout Scripture. This is just an example of it, really. We could turn to many different passages to see essentially the same thing again and again. Old Testament and New Testament, authors declare and then they reflect upon the great new things that God has just accomplished in history and tells us, therefore, what we should believe about God, about ourselves, about the world around us. about our hope in him. In Matthew chapter 12, Jesus interprets his own miracles, these great acts that he did during his life here on earth. He says, if it is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. He says, if it is by the spirit of God that I'm doing these works, which of course it is, then you should see and know that God's eschatological rule, God's final ultimate rule over all things is being asserted right here, right now by me. Romans chapter five, Paul interprets Christ's cross and what it demonstrates to us or shows us about God. The indisputable proof of how loving he is While we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, Paul says. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. But God shows us his love in this, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. You want to know with certainty how overwhelmingly deep and how true God's love for you is. There is nowhere better to look, to see that, to know that, than the cross. In Acts chapter 17, Paul reflects on the event of Christ's resurrection. He says to the Athenian philosophers that the times of ignorance in the past God has overlooked. But now he commands all people everywhere to repent. Why? How does he command them to do this? Because he's fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ therefore makes clear what it is that all men ought to do. They ought to repent, they ought to be reconciled to God who will soon judge the world. Or in Hebrews 9, the logic is the same. Looking at what God has done in Christ, interpreting it for us and therefore telling us what we ought to believe and what we ought to do. There, in particular, the author interprets Christ's ascension in chapters 9 into chapter 10, how Christ has gone up into heaven with his own blood, atoning for our sin and consecrating the heavenly tabernacle as a place of priestly intercession and service. And so in chapter 10, the author draws these conclusions. He says, therefore, brothers, essentially he says, because of the ascension of Jesus Christ, Therefore, brothers, since we have a confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Christ, by the new and living way that he has opened for us, since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us do various things. Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near. In all of these passages then, just as in Deuteronomy 4, and many other passages that we could name as well, it is the great events of redemptive history that show us what it is we ought to think about God, show us how it is that we ought to serve him. Deuteronomy 4 recalled and interpreted especially the Exodus and Sinai. The New Testament again and again recalls for us and interprets especially life, the death, the resurrection, the ascension of Jesus Christ. These things, brothers and sisters, are the core, the heart of Christianity. Before Christianity is anything else, It is an announcement of things like this, things that God has done apart from us, prior to us, for our sake. In light of which, then, we have a system of doctrine and a code of ethics. These things, these events of history, what God has accomplished at various times, and in various ways for our sake. These are the things that make Christianity a gospel, good news. These are the things that make it possible for us to believe all that Scripture teaches and possible for us to seek to do what it is that the Lord wants us to do to begin with. See then something of why Scripture contains so much history And why it is that we need to read and to think about biblical history, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Indeed, if we are God's people through faith in Christ, this history that the Bible describes is our history. It's your history. Through which we understand who it is that we are at all. How it is that we became who we are. and where we are headed from here. The stories that people tell, I'm sure you know this, but the stories that people tell, say, family stories, often reflect who it is that they think they are and how they're expected to live. When I was a kid, I heard a story different times about my great-grandfather. The story is that when news finally broke that World War II had ended, that the Allies were victorious, everybody around went out to celebrate and got drunk. but not my great-grandfather. I don't know. This is what they tell me. Papa went into his workshop and made a lamp. Now, my great-grandfather, I didn't know him well, but he was a quiet and austere Norwegian man who thought that quietness and austerity were both very great virtues. But the story wasn't really just about him. The story was about us as a family and what it is that we should value and what it is that we should do, that we should value sobriety and hard work and not being frivolous. And I think maybe when World War II ended, we could have thrown a party, though not gotten drunk. This is the way stories are intended to function. For us as Christians, We are given a new and far more important set of stories as we are adopted into Christ's family by faith. What the Bible describes, it describes in order to tell us who God is and who we are by virtue of that. Therefore, because of that, how to live. We need then to be encouraged to read our scriptures, to read our history, not just to read the easier, more obviously relevant parts of Scripture, say Ephesians, but also to read the stories of the Old Testament, which seem so far removed from our lives, which seem sometimes relatively confusing. We read Scripture here to tell us about our Lord, and we see who He is because of what He has done. We reflect on that, and then we learn how it is that we should live before Him as well. The stories of Scripture help make our doctrine and our ethics more concrete, less abstract. It's one thing to affirm in theory that God is merciful or loving, but sometimes when we say that, it can seem relatively unpersuasive to us at the time. I'm going through great difficulty. Is this really loving? We always say this, but how do we know it's true? You know, it's true in many respects because of how we see God act, what He's done, and most particularly, what He's done in and through our Savior. If you want to know that God is loving, again, look at the cross. the greatest event of self-sacrifice that the world could ever know. Do you struggle with God's providence in your life, the pain, the disappointments, things that others go through or things that you go through? You look around you now and the world might seem out of control. I don't see the Lord doing miracles. look back into the past, the record of what has happened before us long ago, which in one sense would seem to have very little to do with our lives, and yet it does because it shows and confirms to us, it lives out, it spells out who it is that our God is and how we can be assured of that. Reading our history also helps place our doctrine and our ethics into a larger context. It provides a foundation for them. Without those great deeds of redemption that God has done on our behalf, our doctrine really seems somewhat more lifeless or abstract, as we said before. In the end, though, our system of doctrine is the system of doctrine it is. because it's describing all the things that God has done for us over the centuries. The commands that scripture gives to us, they seem difficult, they seem impossible, they are in one sense impossible, a reason for despair apart from the fact that they're grounded in what God has first done for us before he ever commands us to do something for him. The history that the Bible records for us also does us a great service by pointing us away from ourselves. Pointing us away from the here and now. Pointing us away from that immaturity that often clings to us where all the questions always revolve around me. The Lord says to you, let's not first look at yourselves. Let's not first even look at 21st century Illinois or America or whatever. Let's first look back into the past as Moses did for Israel in Deuteronomy 4. Recall the great deeds that God has accomplished and recorded for us in Scripture. Brothers and sisters, it's part of the immaturity of a child that they can't see far beyond their own immediate circumstances. I'm hungry. I'm tired. But as we want to grow in maturity, we have to look beyond what we see and what we experience day by day and place what we see and experience day by day into a much bigger context. A context of a great and glorious history of redemption. Look to those situations that are in some ways very different than your own. See how people struggled with many things that are much more difficult than what I typically struggle with. That's one of the benefits, right? It places my situation in a larger context that many have suffered much more greatly than I do. But in particular, throughout it all, see the God who consistently and continually acts in faithfulness, in mercy, with unprecedented glory and power. See who He is. and therefore see who he has made you to be as his child. Commit yourself to him and trust in him, not simply because of what he says, but because of what he says along with what he has done and what he will do for us, even as he promises. Ask now about days that are past, which were before you. since the day that God created man and the earth. Ask from one end of the heaven to the other whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Indeed, brothers and sisters, ask about what God has done in Christ. This is our confidence. This is our invitation to hear again good news, good news about what God has done, and therefore what we should believe and what we should do in light of that. Let's pray. Father and our God, we are thankful for your word, how it provides for us, not always what we might choose, but certainly exactly what it is that we need. We pray that we'd be instructed by what's in it, that you would help us to value it for what it is and how it informs and guides, strengthens us. We pray that we would take it up for all that it's worth. We pray in particular, Father, that you would cause us always to look to you, outside of ourselves, outside of our situation, to see you by faith as we contemplate what it is that you have done in the past and what you will yet do in the future. We ask this in Christ's name, amen.