If you have your Bibles, I would encourage you to turn with me to Luke chapter 19. Luke 19, and we'll take as the text for our sermon this morning, verses 45 through 48. Luke chapter 19, starting in verse 45. Jesus enters the temple. He cleanses the temple and begins to reform the worship of God's people in the church of God. Let's read Luke 19, starting in verse 45. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. and he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priest and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words." Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father God, we come before you, and in this moment we We anticipate hearing the truth of your word, the truth as it is in Jesus, and receiving grace from your hands. And God, we ask that you would illuminate this text for us and help us to understand the things that are here revealed, that we might not miss any of the important truth And God, not only that we would understand it with our minds, intellectually, learn the content here and understand the truth and the message of this at that level, but God, that we might, understanding, embrace the truth and receive it with our hearts and internalize it. And that, God, that this truth being planted into the fertile soils of our hearts might bear fruit for eternity. We pray that you would accomplish your purposes and that you would do your work in our church this morning. Help us to grow, help us to be more like Christ. We pray that you would, God, afflict us when we are inappropriately comfortable. We ought not to be so. We pray that you would comfort us in our affliction. God, and with your word, we pray that you would minister to us as your people. We pray that all of this would be to your glory. We pray it all in Christ's name. Amen. Jesus enters the temple here having publicly embraced his messianic identity as the king who comes in the name of the Lord. And we see as we look back in our previous section the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem. and Jesus enters into the city of Jerusalem on this colt, and as he does, we see in verse 36 that those who are following him in, these fellow pilgrims, they spread their cloaks on the road, and as he was drawing near, already on his way down the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of his disciples began, and this could be upwards of 500 people potentially, not just the 12, but many more besides who are following him. So just imagine the excitement, the enthusiasm, and the way that you just, in a crowd like this, when people are all of one mind, how you can get just swept away in the emotion of it and in the moment. I think about, of course, most dramatically is whenever you're in a sporting event and you're surrounded by thousands and thousands who all are cheering for the same to the same end, that your team succeed, but if you've ever been in a service of worship where there's thousands of people, that is an impressive moment. And I love going, even when we've got Chandler Kelly, our former member back here, who's a member of Christ Reform Baptist Church in Lookout Mountain, and a couple times a year I'll go and meet together with their pastor, with other pastors, and it's not a really large gathering, maybe a hundred people, at the most in the room, but full of pastors who love to sing hymns, and the volume and the enthusiasm of that singing is incredible, and it's very encouraging. And so I think about this moment of just the single-mindedness of recognizing the messianic identity of Christ, who at times has hidden this. This has sort of been a secretive thing. You recognize it, don't tell anyone else, and Jesus has warned others not to. make too big a thing of this, but here he is embracing it. And finally, he is going to come out as the King of Israel and the Messiah, the Son of David. And so, of course, they begin to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest. Some of these who will oppose Jesus, who have always opposed him, and will go on to pose him most vehemently in the coming days, in this last week of his life, they rebuke him. They call him to rebuke his disciples, and yet Jesus says here in verse 40, I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out. And so this is an exciting moment, and Jesus is embracing this royal identity, and he's going to come as the king owning his messianic role. And as his first act, and significantly on this last, this final week of his life, but as the first act, what this king among his people, and what we know, is that this is God himself, not just he who comes in the name of the Lord, but this is the Lord who has come to be king over his people. And the first act of this king is he begins to reform the religious practice of the people of God. And in dramatic fashion, Jesus initiates changes in the church of God. Luke is actually pretty succinct in his explanation and his description of what Jesus does here. We have to look at the parallel passages and other Gospels to see some of the vehemence and the drama with which Jesus begins to overturn the tables of the money lenders and those who are exchanging money and making what ought to be a very spiritual experience into a materialistic and consumeristic enterprise. And so Jesus initiates these changes in the church of God. And significantly, I believe, Jesus says in verse 46, he proclaims, my house shall be. What we do as the people of God, especially our corporate devotional practices, what we do when we gather together, we all get together as the people of God. What we do together matters to the Lord. It is His church, after all. And He promised, I will build my church. And the church is Christ's possession, and its growth and development are according to His design. And my house shall be, Jesus says, He alone is the chief shepherd, the senior pastor, and he will brook no rivals for head of the church. You think I'm the head of this church? Well, no, I am an under-shepherd. I'm nothing. I'm a minister, a servant in the house of God. And you call me a pastor because that means a shepherd of the flock. But there's only one who is the chief shepherd and the senior pastor who is the head of his church, and that is Christ. He has been given supreme authority. He alone is the head of this church. And as the head, he is zealous for the house of God. That's something that we see in the other places in the gospels where this exact story, this event is recounted. We see how very zealous that Jesus was for the house of God. And his disciples actually recognize this. They're reminded of the scripture that says these things. And they just noticed his zeal. for the house of God. He cares about his church, deeply cares and is concerned about his church. And so, as the head, he is zealous for the house of God, the gathering of people in whom God's Spirit dwells. And so, what does the Lord Jesus desire of us? For all of this zeal, this enthusiasm, and this concern for what we do as we gather together as God's people, if He cares about us and He cares about what we do together, what does He desire? What is His will for us? And a question we need to ask ourselves, especially in light of this text is, are we, like the church in Jesus' day, in need of reform? In our text, there are a number of areas for us to consider There are areas in which the church then was deficient, and these are areas to reflect upon in our context, to ask ourselves, to what degree are we deficient? And are we pleasing to the Lord? If the Lord were to show up suddenly in this temple, in this place where His people gather together, would He be concerned? Would Jesus be upset? Would he make reforms and seek changes? Certainly, we're no perfect church, and there is no perfect church. A perfect church doesn't exist. And so that's not what we're saying. Are we a perfect church? Of course, there are areas of growth. There are always. That was one motto of the Reformation, or at least it's a saying that has taken hold in the church since the time of the Reformation, is that we are reformed, but we're also always reforming. We want to always and continually be conforming ourselves to the Word of God and making sure that our faith and our practices are based on the teaching of the Word of God. And so, of course, yes, we're never content and settled and think that we can stay as we are and that God's Word can never speak to us in a way of correction. But particularly in light of this text, are there areas that we need to give thought to? What will we be? What is the Lord's will for us? And first of all, I want to consider the first area we can reflect upon here, I think, in light of this text is the church and God's worship in verses 45 through 46. When we gather together as God's people, our number one priority, you think about what we might look forward to about Sunday. We know that we're out in the world and there are things that we enjoy about that. There are elements of our family life. There are things that maybe we enjoy, the things we do for work and for leisure. We might enjoy, but there are also many difficulties and there are many challenges. and there are real low points, there are valleys that we walk through, and sorrows, and so we can look forward to the Lord's Day because we know that there is something to be had on that day, as the Puritans will want to say, that the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath, is a market day for the souls of God's people, that just as in days gone by that we might work throughout the week, but then on Saturday we might go to town, or we might go to the the village to go to the market and we might go and do all of our shopping on that one day. That was at least a common practice in days gone by. We might go to the store any day now. But for us, this is the day we go to church in order to get what we need, not for the body, but for the soul. and we come to seek God's grace. And so we look forward to the Lord's Day, but what are we actually looking forward to? And we might say, okay, well, I enjoy the fellowship and the friendship for those who are like-minded, you know, people I work with, maybe people in my family or extended relatives. There's just, I can't enjoy close fellowship because our values and our priorities are so different and at odds. And so I look forward to the fellowship. Is that the main reason we come together as God's people? Or, you know, I enjoy the teaching just because I'm one of those people that I just love to learn. And of course, it's interesting to learn, especially when the pastor gets into the context of something and kind of brings out something about the ancient context in which these things were written to help us better understand the words that are here and to see things in their connection. And so I love to learn. And so it's mainly about growing in our knowledge of the word of God and the Christian faith. and we might just enjoy the singing. Maybe you're just sort of a musical person, or even if you know that you can't sing, no one wants to hear you sing a solo, but you love to sing. That's kind of where I fall. I don't care if you like to hear me sing or not. I love to sing, and especially there are many of these hymns that are very familiar, and I love the thought, the intent there in these hymns, and so I love to sing in church. Is that what we come? Well, ultimately, all of these things are fine, and they're a part of what we do, and we ought to look forward to them, but they're not the main reason we come. The main reason we come is for the worship of God. That God would have a people in this world that worship him, that exalt his name, that give him the glory due his name. Our purpose and our primary aim as we come together as God's people is we're coming together for worship. And Jesus suggests this, I think, when he says here, my house shall be. First of all, he's the one that determines what his house will be. My house shall be. He's not making suggestions, he's laying out commands and imperatives. And what his house shall be is his house shall be a house of prayer. Prayer is at the heart of worship. Because all the other things that we do, they ought to be worshipful and a part of our worship, but they can be isolated from worship and we can have fellowship with one another in which we're really not conscious of doing these things for the glory of God or as an effort to worship him. But prayer is this one thing that it most directly is an act of worship because when we pray we are coming before God's presence and we're speaking to Him and we're praising Him and we're doing all of these things that we do in prayer. But worship in Jesus' day had become corrupted and although the focus ought to have been prayer, ought to have been worship, The focus had shifted away from the simplicity and the spirituality of true religion and towards a great deal of worldliness and material concern and consumer interest. And it had been what Jesus says here in verse 46, a den of robbers. The back story here is that the high priest had basically developed this scheme and it was really a racket. Before you offered your sacrifice, there were temple inspectors who had to inspect the sacrifice to make sure that it was what it ought to have been according to God's law. And so they would sell, there would be those who would sell animals for sacrifice there that were sort of pre-approved by the inspectors. Of course they were marked up significantly and the high priest and his family and others among the leadership would profit greatly off of this. And so the pilgrims who were coming in, they could bring their own animals but then they risked those animals being rejected. And the inspectors hadn't had a reason to reject animals even unfairly because they wanted you to buy their animals that were marked up. So you can see this whole thing was corrupt and it was unjust and it was all about greed and avarice and the leadership among the people of God rather than seeing their role as Jesus as he calls Peter back to the ministry and recommissions him After his resurrection, he tells Peter that your role is to feed my sheep. Is to preach the word and to feed the sheep and to care for the people of God. But the leadership, they're seeking to care for themselves at the expense of God's people. And so they are really unqualified and they're evil in their spiritual abuse of the people of God. And this is what's going on. And so Jesus comes into this and whereas the worship that takes place in the courts of the temple ought to have been simple and spiritual, and these sacrifices ought to have been offered as a ceremonial part of the worship of God's people, pointing forward to the coming of Christ, so that the hearts of God's people ought to have been expecting Christ, so that they would recognize Jesus. When He came into His temple, because they had been worshiping the Lord through these ceremonial practices, they ought to have seen Jesus coming and have shouted Hosanna and worshiped Him. We see that is the purpose of the worship, the Old Testament ceremonial worship, and we see that it was at times effective. Think about Simeon and Anna at the beginning of Luke's Gospel. They were there in the temple worshiping in this way, and when Jesus came, The worship had reached its sort of fulfillment because it was pointing forward to Jesus and when Jesus came they recognized Jesus and they worshiped him. And yet God's people here are so distracted in their worship and it was about everything but the Lord that they totally are missing the coming of the Lord into his own temple. When we gather together on the Lord's Day, our purpose ought to be to draw near to God. We may have other things that we're thinking about that are on our mind. We're tempted to be distracted. But when we gather together on the Lord's Day, our purpose ought to be to draw near to God, to enjoy His presence, to receive His grace. And our services ought to be intensely God-centered. And this focus of worship is directed by a full diet of prayers. What we see when we come together on the Lord's Day is we have a variety of prayers and all of them are significant. We have invocation prayers and prayers of adoration at the beginning of our services in which we seek God's presence among us and we give praise to him. We seek his help as we desire to worship him as we ought to. And then there's the prayer of confession following the reading of God's law in which we humble ourselves before God's holy presence and we confess our sins, we plead for God's mercy on the basis of the shed blood of Christ. And there are prayers of intercession and petition, especially in our evening services where we lift up our concerns to the Lord. We seek his help and that his will would be done in our church and in the world. And there are prayers of illumination before the preaching of the word that we might understand and embrace the truth. And then there are, finally, at the end of our services, there are prayers of benediction. And some of these prayers are said, some of them are read. We read scripture for our benediction, which really are prayers as we prepare to conclude our services and depart and go with God's blessing and the help of the Spirit. And so we pray all of this, and our services are really full of prayers. And some of them are more brief, and some of them are quite lengthy. But we do this intentionally because prayer is the business of the church. It is a ministry and it ought to take up a substantial part of our services. And I think that churches go astray and are in danger of losing their God-focused direction and aim when they begin to grow impatient with prayer. I once heard a minister talk about how there are at least one prayer in each service that runs a little long, it's a little lengthy. The Puritans actually had, they called it the short prayer and the long prayer. They would have one prayer that might run 10 or 15 minutes in the service. And I heard one minister explain it in this way. He said, you know, that they intentionally have these prayers that for some are uncomfortably long and require focus because, you know, they're going to make sure that those who come and are interested in this service of worship at this church are doing so for the right reasons. They want to commune with God. They're not here for anything else. Because if you're here for other things, you will grow impatient and weary of prayer and you will find another church where prayer is just brief and perfunctory and few in number. But we pray substantially because we want to commune with God and we want to draw near to Him. and to ensure that everything else we do is done in the context of prayer. And yet too many churches reduce their prayers to very brief opening and closing prayers at the start and end of services. Too many believers would love to sing for half an hour, and I do love to sing the hymns of the faith. but it is too easy to prefer to just mindlessly sing familiar hymns. We can all do that. We enjoy it, but if we're honest, we've not really sung as an act of worship, more as just sort of a rote, enjoyable, but act of recitation of lines of a hymn or a song that we are already familiar with and just sing in a mindless way. And there are far too many believers that prefer doing that to the hard work of prayer. But as enjoyable as singing is, and as beneficial as it can be, unless it's done in the presence of God, it will not satisfy your soul or do you any spiritual good. Prayer brings us into the presence of God and it gives singing its proper context. And the same could be said of preaching. It would be easy to sit and listen to the sermon. And there are some people who don't even like to sing. And they don't want to come for prayer or singing or anything else. They just want to get in the sermon. And we want an hour and a half of preaching and we want you to fill our minds with truth. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with singing. But it would be easy to sit and listen to the sermon in order to merely learn or to be aroused to excitement. Some people like preaching because maybe the preacher is, maybe he's sweating and spitting and getting excited and he's arousing us to some degree of excitement, and that's what we like. But preaching ought to bring us into the presence of God who is speaking to us. And preaching ought to feed us on the bread of life. And so it is an act of worship. And so prayer gives preaching its proper context as an act of worship. And so you can see why Jesus chose to call it a house of prayer. Everything that we do in worship is done in the context of prayer. And prayer helps us to do all in a spiritual way of drawing near to God's presence. So in Jesus' day, they may have continued with the external elements of worship. They were doing all the right things. In our context, this would just be, they're reading the scriptures, and there's a sermon, and they're singing, and all of this, but it was a distracted worship that they engaged in, and no real worship at all, because it wasn't done in the presence of God for the glory of God, self-consciously God-directed and God-centered. We must be on guard against this tendency to make church about other than what it really should be. We must not come with a desire to be entertained. Again, there are far too many believers that that's their criteria for how they choose a church or what they find to be good about a church is if they're really honest and they say what they like about it, they just want to be entertained. And there are far too many preachers who preach in order to entertain. And oftentimes it's a preacher trying to stroke his own ego. Because if I entertain you, you will like me because of my charisma, my personality, you'll like my humor, and I'll get a lot of really good feedback that helps boost my self-esteem. We need to avoid the desire for entertainment. I don't care what you think about me. I want to be clear. I want to be helpful in all this. And so I appreciate sometimes you give me encouragement that, you know, this was helpful. This was encouraging. Thank you. I appreciate that. But I don't need that. And I'm not looking. myself to be encouraged. My goal in preaching and my goal for you as you listen to the preaching of the Word of God is that this be supremely spiritual as we draw near to God in worship in a prayerful way. We must not come with a desire to be entertained, but we mustn't come either, as strange as it may sound, with a desire to learn if we content ourselves with merely growing in knowledge. We must not come, first of all, for the fellowship or the friendship. We must come for prayer and to enjoy the presence of God with the people of God, to know Him in order to love and serve Him and to sing to Him as the overflow of our love. So if that's our goal and our ambition in worship and in prayer, then all of the things we do will find their proper context. We'll have fellowship, and we'll enjoy that fellowship, and we'll sing, and we will learn, but all of that will be to further this relationship that we have with the Lord. So learning and fellowship and singing are all a part, but they are means to an end and byproducts. And we should therefore pay close attention to our worship in order to avoid the superficiality and worldliness that we see as negative examples here in this text. So Jesus, in the strongest terms, rebukes them for making his house, which ought to be a house of prayer, into a den of robbers about other things than what it ought to be. There are two other areas in which we might give careful thought here, and we'll cover these more briefly. We look at the church in God's worship, but there's also the church in God's Word. Because our worship, if it's to be done properly and in good order, in order to please the Lord, He's the head of the church. Well, how does He order, how does He institute and order and govern His church? It's by his word. So as Jesus calls out the church for all of the faults and evil ways that are there amongst the people of God in the context of their worship, how does he begin to sort of make a change and turn things around? Well, look with me at verse 46. The first thing he actually says is, you might overlook this, but the first thing he says is, it is written. He reminds them of the Word of God and what God's Word has already said in quotes Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 7. And so he goes back into the Word of God and says, if you're to worship me as you ought and to please me with what you do as you gather as God's people, then you have got to make sure that everything you do is on the basis of the Word of God. And so notice how Jesus reforms the church by quoting from Scripture. And we likewise ought to have this as a significant part of what we do as a church. Verse 47, we have this emphasis. He comes in after he's made his corrections and he has driven out those who sold and who were a distraction, he's gotten rid of all of the distracting man-centered elements, inappropriate elements. What does he do? In verse 47, he was teaching daily in the temple. So there's Jesus in the courts of the temple where rabbis were sometimes found giving instruction because this is how God's worship is to be maintained and how it's all to be done in a spiritual manner in which it ought to be done is that we must emphasize the teaching of God's Word. And we see that the people are in verse 48 hanging on to his words. This is how we ought to reform ourselves. You know some people, I had a visitor to our church who at one time, some of you may know who I'm talking about because I've told this story and been a little more critical of this person, but you know from the pulpit I'll refrain from calling names and being mean, but there was a person who was visiting and they just didn't like me. And so they moved on and they ended up going to another church. And I was trying to be friendly and ask them about how their new church was going. And they said they loved it. And the reason they loved it is because the preacher didn't just get up there and read from the Bible all the time. And I thought, well, I think you meant that as an insult to me because the only other experience in church you've had, you know, is here and with me as your preacher. I took it as a compliment, actually. I was thrilled. by that, it's like a five-star review. But the reality is there are a lot of people who are like that. It's like, I just, I don't like a word-centered church because it's too preach, there's too much preaching and explaining and learning and you've got to think. And I mean, there's always lengthy scripture readings and these sermons can run on and like, you know, we know what time it is and we're getting hungry, you know. So, there are people who can become very impatient with a very word-centered ministry, but if we're to reform ourselves in a way that pleases the Lord, and if we are ultimately going to be what Christ wills for us to be, what his desire is for us to be, as he says, my house shall be. Well, how are we to be what Christ would have us to be? It's if we know the Word of God and if we're drawing ourselves ever more closely in conformity to the Word of God. And that's got to be our standard. is the infallible and all-sufficient Word of God. It's enough. It's totally adequate. It's what we need as God's people, and so we need to be familiar with it and study it and learn it and have an appetite for it. And of course, first of all, the Word of God is for communion with the Lord. We read it not to learn and to just fill our minds. We learn it to hear the God who's speaking to us. and to have fellowship and communion with Him and a relationship with Him through the Word. But secondarily, of course, as He speaks to us, you know, it would be foolish of me to say to Lauren, you know, I love to just hear your voice. Just talk to me more. You know, I just love to hear your voice. Just keep talking, you know. And then just to ignore everything that she actually says and fail to understand. You know, hello, are you hearing me? Well, kind of. I love the intonation of your voice, you know. I don't want to pay attention to the things you're saying to me. That takes too much work. But that's what we may do if we hear the preaching of God's Word, but we're not wanting to, ultimately, we've got to take out of that, what is God saying to us and what ought our response to be? And so there's the church in The need for reform, the reform of its worship, and reform by the Word. Finally, and very briefly, we need to consider this, that as we seek to be the church that God has called us to be, and to reform our worship and to reform ourselves by the Word. We need to understand that we're going to do so in the midst of a world that is hostile. So we consider the church in the world. We are living out our faith in a world that is hostile to it. And there will always be this antithesis between the church and the world, and we ought to expect opposition. I want you to look with me here at verse 47 and 48, because this is exactly what we find. As Jesus comes in, he begins to reform the worship of his people, to insist that God's worship be centered upon upon his presence and upon prayer, that it be God-centered and so forth, and to teach daily." What do we see in verse 47? The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him. They were seeking to destroy him. It will be much easier, in fact, easier in this way that if we are content for entertainment, or if we're content with anything else besides biblical, God-centered, Christ-centered worship, if we're making our worship man-centered, and if it's just good feelings, and it's just to meet what we feel like are our needs, our felt needs, The world is not going to have a problem with us. The world is going to see us like some Tony Robbins seminar and say well you know if they receive some encouragement and some uplift and if they're encouraged to you know live more moral and ethical lives, then fine, leave them alone. They can believe all this crazy stuff they want to believe. But it's only whenever we take our faith seriously and worship the Lord as we ought to worship Him that we will increasingly face the hostility and the opposition of a world that is at odds with our God, the God that we worship. Christ all throughout the Gospels we see this emphasis of Christ not only facing opposition but saying that there is no servant who is greater than his master and if and if they've hated me they will hate you also. So we know that that the more that we work the more sincerely we worship the Lord and emphasize our faith and grow in the Lord we're not going to find the world's going to make that easier for us. Those that we know that we live with and live around, our family members, our work associates, the more that they see these things, the more that they're going to oppose them and there will be mockery and ridicule and difficulties and being passed up for promotions and there's going to be being alienated and outcast in relationships and we just have to acknowledge that and expect that because if we're going to be what God's called us to be we can't on the one hand be seeking to please the Lord and trying to receive the applause of the world or being accepted by the world. We've got to expect that the more we love the Lord the less the world will love us. And so we have to make sure that they're mindful of this, this difficulty and this challenge. But here's how we deal with it. I've already said this is how the people in Jesus' day here are responding to his teaching daily in the temple, but this is exactly how our response ought to go if we're going to continue to be the church in the midst of a world that is in opposition to God and to his people. We hang on to his words. We hang on to his words. All the people were hanging on his words. It's actually hard to communicate the strength of this word. It's one of these words that's only really found once in the New Testament. It's hard to translate because we don't have other places in the Greek where it's translated in other ways. So anyway, it's a difficulty. It's just kind of a rare word. But it does communicate this hanging on to this is probably about as good as you get. It communicates as being on the edge of your seat. It communicates that the Word of Christ is a matter of life and death, and it is life to you. And that more than anything, you need this. And if we hang on to the words of our Lord, then we won't go far astray. then our worship will be what it needs to be because we'll continually be receiving the correction from God's word and drawing ourselves in conformity with his will. And we will be helped tremendously in terms of persevering and receiving the grace that we need to endure and to persevere, to be sustained through this life. And so I would call you this morning to hang on to, hang on to the words of Christ as we pray together. Father God, we thank you for your word. And God, if only your people then would have been mindful of the words, especially of the prophets, which continually called them back to covenant faithfulness and to an obedience to your word and to your will. God, they might not have received such a thorough rebuke, such a hard correction. As we look forward into the book of Revelation and some of the correction and the hard words that Christ reserves for his wayward people who are not what they ought to be. God, we desire as your people to avoid this also. And so in whatever ways that we're deficient, God, and we know that there are ways, we pray that you would help us to be soft-hearted, to receive correction, to be what you're calling us to be as individual Christians, as a church of believers. We pray that what we do, especially as we gather together, would be what you've asked, what you have asked in your word for us to do, you've commanded in your word for us to do. And God, we pray that in this way you would give us much grace, help us to grow, help us to persevere, keep us and guard us through our earthly pilgrimage, through all of the pitfalls and the snares, temptations and the hostilities. And God, we ask that as we draw near to you in prayer, that you would draw near to us and delight us with your presence. We pray all of this in Christ's name. Amen.