The Lord’s Day Evening
August 7, 2005
Matthew 6:9-13
“How Big is Your Vision?”
Dr. Richard Pratt
Please turn with me in your Bibles to Matthew chapter six.
Rather than read this text to you tonight, I’m going to ask you to stand and recite it with me because we all know it, because the Scripture reading this evening is from The Lord’s Prayer. So if you’ll stand with me, together we will recite The Lord’s Prayer as a Scripture reading, reciting the traditional Lord’s Prayer as you know it.
When the disciples came to Jesus they asked Him, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’ And He taught them to pray saying these words:
“Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.”
Let us pray together.
Our Lord Jesus, these are words that You prayed so long ago, words that You taught Your disciples to pray so long ago. We remember them. We recite them Sunday after Sunday, day after day. Because we’re so familiar with them, many times, Lord, we have to admit we just pass through the words and just say them without much understanding, without much concern for what You are teaching us in these words. And so we ask that tonight in these few moments we have together in Your word that You will send Your Holy Spirit to open our eyes and to unstop our ears, and to soften our hearts that we may see Your truth afresh; that we may hear You speak afresh; and that our hearts may be soft and tender to You; that we may serve You and love You more dearly because of this, Your word. And as You do it, we pledge to You our praise and our thanks. Amen.
Thank you. Be seated, please.
I suppose everybody in here who is at least twelve years old knows that you can start a project in life with great intentions and even a good vision, but if that vision isn’t strong enough, and if it isn’t big enough, it’s just not going to carry you through the long arduous task that often comes ahead of us as we go through various projects in life. I mean, can you remember when you first got married, the attitude you had toward each other? You know...‘We may not have money to pay the rent, but like Sonny and Cher, it doesn’t matter: I got you, Babe!’ Remember that? It felt like we didn’t need anything else but each other, but then 15, 20 years later, some of us in here are barely surviving this thing called marriage.
And do you remember when you had your first child? How you looked at each other and said, “Now, Sweetheart, we’re not going to make our kids neurotic like our parents made us neurotic – we’re just not going to do it!” But, 10, 11, 12 years later...oh, I’m afraid sometimes we don’t succeed, huh?
And it’s easy, it’s easy, as you go through a project to lose heart, especially if your vision just isn’t big enough, and I think that’s true with the Christian life, too – that many of us have a vision of what our Christian lives are to be, but they’re just not big enough, not large enough, not compelling enough, to get us through our own Christian lives, much less give something to our children, much less give something to our grandchildren for generations to come.
In this, The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus not only teaches His disciples how to pray, He also teaches them the vision He wants them to have for their lives as His servants. And this prayer teaches us the kind of vision and hope and dream we are to have as disciples of Christ even today.
But as much as we know this prayer, it’s interesting to me how so very often evangelical Christians – well-meaning, godly, Bible-believing Christians – think of their lives only in terms of the bottom half of The Lord’s Prayer. You know the bottom half, you know how it goes: “Give us this day our daily bread; forgive us our debts, and lead us not into temptation.” That’s where most Christians live their lives. That’s about as high and as big as they dream as followers of Christ: “Lord, give us this day our daily bread, help us depend on You more, Lord. Please help us do that.” That’s important, but that’s the bottom half of the prayer.
“Lord, forgive us our debts. I need forgiveness for my sins.” That’s important, but it’s the bottom half of the prayer.
“And lead us not into temptation. Lord, help me do better than I’ve done before. Just please help me avoid temptation in the future.” That’s important, but it’s the bottom half of the prayer, and it’s the top half of the prayer that we usually zip right through so we can get to the ‘real thing’, the things that concern us, the things that are about us, the things that deal with our personal lives, and at most, our family lives.
But the first half of The Lord’s Prayer is where Jesus lays the foundation that sets the context or gives the grand vision of what you and I are to be as His followers; but to get what Jesus is teaching us here in these words, we have to be ready to adjust a little bit. We have to be ready to change our outlooks on some things according to what He teaches right here in these words.
I. The first thing we have to be ready to adjust a little bit is how we think about God, what we believe about God, what we feel about God.
And you know how this opening line of The Lord’s Prayer addresses God: “Our Father, who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name.” Those words “our Father” should ring in your ears, because they are very precious words to Christian people, and they are words that most of the world simply cannot understand.
I had the privilege of being in Indonesia, in Jakarta, just two days after the tsunami hit Thailand and Indonesia. I was already scheduled to be there to do some teaching, and I got a phone call from the MTW office asking me if I would be eyes and ears for us over there (since they knew I was going), and I was happy to do that.
But what I was able to do in that role was to talk to a lot of Muslims, and I would go around asking basically the same question over and over again to these various types and various classes of Muslims that are there in Jakarta – the largest Muslim nation in the world. And I said to them, “Did God have anything to do with this, in your opinion?” And they said, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Allah had everything to do with this. Everything like this comes straight from God.” And then I asked a follow-up question. I said, “Well, is there any kind of comfort that you get from God? Do you get any comfort from Him? Do you pray to Him and seek understanding and some kind of intimacy or some kind of comfort from Him?” And they all looked at me with blank stares, and they said to me, “Oh, we pray.” I said, “Well, why do you pray?” And they said, “Well, we pray not for comfort. We pray because we’re afraid he’s going to do the same thing to us.”
You see, mainline Islam...now, there are exceptions to this, but mainline Islam has a belief of God that is so big and so transcendent, so that God is so far away they can hardly conceive of calling him their father, and that’s one of the great things about the Christian faith: that as followers of Jesus, we have actually been given the right to be called “the children of God.” God can be called our Father so that we know He has intimate concern and intimate love for us, that He cherishes each one of us, that He cares about each one of our pains and sufferings and trials. It’s great and good news that we can call Him “Our Father.”
But I have to tell you something. I really don’t think that’s our problem here in the United States. I don’t think our big problem with God is thinking of Him as too big and too far away. I’m sure there are some people, maybe even some people here tonight, who need to adjust that and realize that God wants to be close and wants to be intimate. But I think by and large that’s not the way we understand these words.
When we hear Jesus say, “Our Father,” what we think is “Our Sugar-Daddy.” Now, every grandfather in here knows what a Sugar-Daddy is, because every grandfather in this room is a Sugar-Daddy, because our job in life is to make our grandchildren happy, and we do everything we can possibly do to get our grandchildren to love us and to adore us and to think we’re just absolutely fantastic! And we figure, as grandfathers, that it’s the Dad’s job to say “No.” Right, men? Uh-huh. I saw some men going “uh-huh.”
That’s right. That’s what grandfathers do. They’re Sugar-Daddies, and unfortunately in evangelical Christianity today most of us believe that the Bible teaches when it says “Our Father” that God is like a granddaddy who sits up in heaven wringing his hands trying to figure out a way to make people like Him more. “Oh! Maybe if I do this, they’ll like Me more. Or maybe if I do that, they’ll pay more attention to Me.” And so we have this very peculiar notion in our world that God is like a Sugar-Daddy, but that’s not what Jesus is talking about here in this prayer, and we can tell it right up front, because He doesn’t just say “Our Father.” He says, address God this way: “Our Father in heaven....”
Every single time the Bible uses images or gives us pictures of heaven, what is the picture? I don’t care if you’re in the Old Testament in books like Daniel or Isaiah, or if you’re in the New Testament in books like the Book of Revelation, there is one picture that the Bible always gives of heaven, and it has to be the picture that Jesus has in mind when He says “Our Father in heaven.” And what does heaven look like? It is God’s grand, glorious throne room. God, seated on His throne with lightening flashing from His throne, with peals of thunder, with color all around Him, with lapis lazuli under His feet, and myriads upon myriads upon myriads of creatures attending and worshiping Him, crying out, “Holy, holy, holy, hallowed be Thy name.”
And you might be surprised to know this, but in the days of the Bible, they frequently called their kings their fathers, much like the British call the Queen of England “Mum,” or in Haiti they used to speak of “Papa Doc.” They would call the leader of the country, the king, their father. And the Bible has frequent references to David – “our father, our royal father....” So when Jesus says these words here, He’s telling us something, reminding us of something that isn’t new. It’s something that’s throughout the Bible. The Number One way the Bible reveals God to us is as our royal Father, enthroned in heaven. Of all the other things you may want to say about God, the Number One impression you should have of Him is this: He is the Emperor of all creation. He is the Absolute Monarch over all.
Now, to you and me as Americans that does not make a bit of sense. We have no monarchs. I come from Virginia. We have a great state flag. Let me tell you about this state flag. It’s great. If you have looked at it closely, you’ll remember it has a blue background, and in the middle is a circle. But maybe you haven’t looked inside the circle. Let me tell you what’s inside the circle. Inside of the circle of the Virginia state flag there is a man lying dead on his back. Now, he’s a king. You can tell he is because the crown has fallen off of his head onto the ground next to him. So here’s this king lying dead on his back, and standing over this king is a woman, and she has a spear in one hand and her foot on the chest of this dead king. Get the picture, now: dead king, woman, spear, and a foot on his chest. And written around that circle are these words in Latin: Sic Semper Tyrannis – “Thus always to tyrants.” You see, we will never have a king in Virginia, I can tell you that right now! It will never happen. I expect that’s true in Mississippi, too.
What we do in Virginia is this: If somebody wants to be our king, we send our women after them! That’s what it’s saying, “We will have no king in Virginia.”
You see, Americans have no idea of what it means to have an absolute monarch ruling over them. We elect our officials; we give them power over us for a few years and, if we don’t like them, we get them out of there. And that’s often the way we think about our religion, too. We think that our job as Christians is to give Jesus a little bit. “Oh, that would be nice. Let’s elect Him to have this much power. Let’s ordain Him to have that much authority in our lives.” But the reality is when Jesus says, “Our Royal Father, who art in heaven, may Your name be kept holy,” He’s making a claim that all of us must adjust our thinking and our hearts toward, and that is this: Jesus owns you. The Father in heaven owns you. He is your absolute monarch, and that means every inch of your life belongs to Him.
Yes, Sunday morning. Yes, your family. Yes, your finances. Yes, your work. Yes, your recreation. Every single inch of your life is to be put in submission to the great King of the universe. Whatever else we may say about His intimacy and His love, which are so very precious to us and should be precious to us, we must never forget that our Father is the Royal Father in heaven. In Him as the great monarch is not simply the Lord of our individual lives; as the Emperor of all, He makes another claim: every inch of the universe is His, and that tells us that if we are to have the kind of vision that Jesus had for His own life and for the lives of His disciples, we must be people who have a vision for the entire creation, to see it come under the lordship of the great King.
I think we all have a little bit of adjusting to do when it comes to this thing of what we think about God – not a Sugar-Daddy, but a Royal Father who requires much of His people.
II. But Jesus’ words here at the opening of The Lord’s Prayer don’t just challenge us in the way we think about God, they also challenge us in the way we think about the earth.
The earth – I mean the planet that we’re living on. Do you remember what He says? He says, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Most Christians today think of this planet as about as important as the paper that wraps a Big Mac. Get rid of that thing and throw it in the trashcan, because we didn’t like it to begin with! But the reality is Jesus does not say that we should pray that God will hurry up and throw the earth away. What He says is, “Thy kingdom come...” and then He explains what He means by that: “Thy will be done...”; and then He explains where that will is to be done, and how much it’s to be done, by saying “...on earth as it is in heaven.”
You see, Jesus does not speak of heaven as the goal of our lives. He speaks of it as the ideal of our lives, the standard of our lives. So very often Christians today think that the reason they trust in Jesus, the reason they’re followers of Jesus is so they can go to heaven. If you ask most Christians today why they believe in Jesus, their answer is going to be “So I can go to heaven.” In fact, if you were to walk down the street tomorrow at work or wherever you may be, and you say to someone...someone you would know, someone like you, even if they’re not a believer...this is what the unbeliever would say if you were to ask him something like “What would be a good life? What would be the kind of life you would live, and you could look at it in the last moment and say ‘I’m glad I lived this life’ – what kind of life would that be?
These are the kinds of things your friends, your non-Christian friends would say: they’d say things like, “Well, I hope not to get divorced more than once. That would be good. And I hope my kids don’t get hooked on drugs. That’s real important to me. And...I know! A career! A good career. I need a good career. That would be a good life, too. And you know, if I could really do well in my investments, I could retire early and travel, and that would be great. That would be a great life, too. And I suppose I’m going to die, everybody else seems to...and so maybe if there is a heaven, if I’m a good person, maybe Saint Peter will let me into heaven, and then I’ll have this blissful existence up in the clouds forever. I’ll just kind of float around as some disembodied spirit, just kind of bouncing from one cloud to another forever and ever.” That’s what most of your non-Christian friends hope for. That’s their dream of “the good life”, that they will die and maybe go to heaven, if they’re good enough.
Now, if you were to ask most Christians today, most evangelical, Bible-believing Christians, “What would be a good life? What’s the kind of life that you could look at it in the last moment and say, ‘I’m glad I lived this life’?” Do you know what they would say? They would say things like these: “Well, I hope not to get divorced more than once. And I hope my kids don’t get hooked on drugs; and you know, a career. A good career would be good, and I’d like for it to go really well so that I could retire early and travel around and maybe I’ll visit a missionary or two, and I’m going to die...everybody else does. I’m going to die, too, and well, when I die, because I’ve trusted in Jesus, my soul will sprout wings and start fluttering like this, and then I’ll fly off to heaven, and I’ll get a golden harp, and I’ll sing in choirs forever and ever, up in heaven dancing around from one cloud to another.” Sound familiar?
Our vision of what life is to be is not that much different from what unbelievers think life is to be. And let me ask you this question about the golden harps and choirs: Have you ever been in a choir? It sounds a whole lot more—doing that forever sounds a whole lot more like the other side than it sounds like heaven to me! Now, choirs are OK for a few hours, but ask the choir members here what it’s like as they’re preparing for the Christmas program. There’s a lot more like the other side.
You see, Jesus did not come to this world telling us to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in heaven because that’s where we’re all going anyway.” He did not give us that as our destiny. He did not give us that as our goal, to escape this world and to go to another place. Yes, it’s true that when Christians pass away they go to be with Jesus in heaven, but Jesus is not going to remain in heaven forever! Jesus is coming back, and He’s coming back to this earth to make all things new, and that is our goal; that is our destiny. You see, Jesus gives us heaven in this verse not as our destiny, but as our standard, as our ideal; because our goal, our dream, our vision must be to make the earth mirror heaven, so that God’s will is done as perfectly on the earth as it is in heaven. And in the throne room of God, even Satan himself does exactly what God tells him to do, and nothing more. And that is our dream, that is our vision as Christians: to turn the world into the kingdom of God.
We live in a day when evangelical Christians have given up on the power of Christ to transform the world. We have been told so many, so many times, that the world is disintegrating before our eyes, that we can only hope to throw a few life preservers to as many people as possible so they can escape this disintegrating world and enter into the heavenly bliss that awaits them up there in the clouds, but that is not Jesus’ vision. Jesus’ vision is that we set our eyes and set our sights on not just getting people saved, but getting people saved so that they can save others and so that we as a whole can be the instruments of transformation, changing the world into the kingdom of God.
Do you know? Our kinds of Christians used to believe this. Unfortunately, we don’t anymore, by and large. But we used to believe it, and it did great things for us. Let me tell you just one of them.
John Calvin, one of the fathers of our branch of the church – not a perfect man, by any means, but nevertheless one of our fathers, John Calvin had a seminary. In his seminary, his students would graduate and many of them would go into the mission field, and lots of them would go just next door from Switzerland into France. And at that time France was controlled by the Roman Catholics in very stern and harsh ways, and it was quite illegal to establish Protestant churches in France at that time. The life expectancy of a graduate of the Geneva Divinity School was six months. Six months! The graduates of that seminary expected to live about six months!
And several years ago, the Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, received a bunch of materials that they had not really had in their hands before, and there were things like the forged passports that these missionaries would use to go back and forth over the border between Switzerland and France, and records of the City Council where they told stories of young women coming to Calvin’s front door in the middle of the night and knocking on his door in their nightgowns...in their nightgowns drenched in the blood of their husbands, because the assassins had followed their husbands back from France to Geneva and had murdered their husbands in their marriage bed. Six months, they expected to live!
What gave young men and women the energy and the drive to do such a thing? What would make a young father leave his family and go somewhere, knowing that he was probably going to die? What would give a young mother the strength to give her husband permission to do such a thing? What would allow a Christian community like ours to have that kind of zeal for the spread of the gospel? It was a vision! And it was the vision that John Calvin had, and it was this: that the faithful preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ will not just save a few souls here and there; the faithful preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ will transform the world into the kingdom of God, and for that these young men were willing to die.
And as late as the late nineteenth century, when missionaries would go to Africa – you know the stories – they would pack their belongings...not in suitcases. They would pack their belongings in coffins, even coffins for their children, knowing that they were likely to die because they were going on the mission field.
Now, can you imagine what would happen to my beloved seminary, for which I have served now 21 years – your beloved seminary – can you imagine what would happen to our student population if they knew that they were going to live six months after they graduated? I would dare to say we would have very few students. And I am convinced that one of the reasons we would have very few students in that kind of a setting is because we have lost the vision that Jesus gives us here. Our church has lost the vision that Jesus gives us here: “Thy kingdom come” - not just in our hearts; “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on the earth, as it is in heaven.”
We live in a day when the world tells us we are losing, but get some perspective on this! I know it looks as if, on the news, Islam is on the rise and Christianity is about to breathe its last breath. I know that’s what it looks like, but it is not true.
Remember how we began? Do you remember how we began? It was one Man with twelve followers, and one of them was the devil...one Man, twelve followers, and one of them was the devil...and now what has happened to the kingdom of this one Man and the twelve followers? It is literally everywhere on this planet! We are not losing. King Jesus will not lose the battle for the earth, you can be sure of that! That’s why He’s coming back, to make all things new, to rectify all injustices, to turn this world into such a beautiful place that it will be appropriate for God the Father to come here to this earth and to dwell with us here on this planet. That was the goal from the beginning, and it is the goal that Jesus will succeed in bringing.
Do you believe that? Do you have that kind of vision? It’s a very serious question. We live in a day when Christians are as pessimistic and cynical and skeptical as the non-Christians that live around them, and so we turn inwardly, thinking that the only goal in life is our own peace, and our own affluence, and our own safety.
I hated it when my parents told me, “Rich, you’ve gotta be a good sport!” I just hated that! Because you know what it meant, don’t you? It meant I was a loser! I mean, you go to the basketball tournament – which team gets the “Good Sportsmanship Award”? The losers! The losers, of course! Well, I fear that many of us teach our children and teach our grandchildren, and teach each other by our example and our lack of zeal for the kingdom of God that Christians are losing...that we are the losers. But it’s OK. You get the “Good Sportsmanship Award,” so you should smile as you lose.
No. Our King Jesus doesn’t get the “Good Sportsmanship Award.” He receives the crown of glory, and He will be seated at the right hand of God the Father until all of His enemies are put under His feet, and then you and I who are in Him will reign with Him on the earth forever! That’s the vision of the Bible. Don’t lose it! Don’t give up on that vision. You’re not going to get the “Good Sportsmanship Award.” You get the championship trophy, because Jesus gets the trophy.
So, we do need to adjust the way we think about God, and we also need to adjust the way we think about this planet. You see, in this regard the Muslims have it right. They understand this is the place where the gods prove who is greatest, and we have forgotten that. We just want to escape and go somewhere else. But the good thing is, Jesus hasn’t forgotten it, and He will prove that His holy Father is the King of all by turning this world into His kingdom.
III. Adjust on God; adjust on the earth; but there’s a third thing that the beginning of The Lord’s Prayer calls us to adjust ourselves on, and that is the way we look at ourselves.
Do you know what I think the strangest thing is about these opening words of The Lord’s Prayer? It is that Jesus tells us to pray for the coming of the kingdom. I mean, I’m a good Presbyterian. In fact, I’m a Presbyterian by choice, and that makes me a really good Presbyterian! We all know that, don’t we? I’m an old Baptist, and the one thing I know as an old Baptist who became a Presbyterian is nobody predestined me to be a Presbyterian; I became one by my own free choice, OK?! So that makes me a real one!
So here we are as good Presbyterians. We would think that if God wants the world to be His kingdom, then God would just snap His finger and He would say “It’s My kingdom now.” But that’s not what Jesus says. Jesus says His disciples are to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven.
Why pray? First because we need to realize we can’t do this in our own strength. We must have the strength and the power of the risen Christ, the Holy Spirit who fills us with power so that we may have the courage and the boldness to make the sacrifices and to give our lives to this cause called the building of the kingdom of God. We cannot even fix our personal lives ourselves, can we? We can’t even fix our family lives. How can we possibly fix the world? But, through the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the risen Lord, the world can be transformed, and that’s why He tells us to pray for the coming of the kingdom.
But He also tells us to pray for the coming of the kingdom for this reason: it’s because this coming of the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven is to be your Number One priority in life. Your Number One priority in life...sometimes we’ll say “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever,” and that’s true, that’s our chief end and goal. But that chief end and goal is reached by the coming of the kingdom of God, and we know this because of what Jesus says at the end of this chapter. You know the verse. Out of all the things you could seek – money, safety, relationships, happiness, goodness – many of which are perfectly legitimate – out of all the things you could devote your life to, what must be Number One, according to Jesus? He puts it this way: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Seek first the kingdom of God, not your personal comfort; not your personal safety; not your peace of mind; not the ways you have lived your life day after day as the world does, but seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, turning this world into the place where God’s will is done as it is done in heaven.
The story is told of an eight-year-old boy who was watching some bricklayers, and he noticed that the first bricklayer was kind of gruff and a little bit scary, but he went up to him anyway and he said, “Hey, mister, what are you doing?” And the man looked down on him and cursed at him, and he said, “What’s wrong with you, boy? Can’t you see I’m laying bricks? Get out of here!” The little boy walked away thinking to himself, “I don’t want to be a bricklayer, that’s for sure.” But he looked back again because the second man seemed a little bit nicer, so he went up to the second man...he was energetic, and he was doing good things and had a little bit of a smile on his face, a sense of satisfaction...and he said, “Hey, mister, what are you doing?” And the man looked down on him and said, “Son, I’m earning a living to take care of my family.” And the little boy thought to himself, “Well, that must be a good thing, then. Must be good to earn a living and take care of my family. That’s a good thing.” He walked away, but then he turned back, because the third man was whistling. The third bricklayer was singing a tune, and so he walked to the third bricklayer and he said, “Hey, hey, mister, what are you doing?” And the third bricklayer looked up in the sky for a second and thought to himself, and he looked back down at the little boy and he said, “Son, I’m building a kingdom, one brick at a time.” And the little boy looked up at him and said, “I want to build a kingdom, too.”
Isn’t that what you want your children to say to you? Isn’t that what you want your grandchildren to say to you? Isn’t that the legacy you want your grandchildren to have for generations to come? Don’t you want them to be builders of the kingdom, brick by brick by brick? Oh, let’s pray that they will not be the kinds of people who will curse and say, “Get out of here, boy, don’t bother me.” And let’s pray that they will be those that earn an honest living and support their families, but let’s pray that they will be the kinds of people whose vision will be even greater than that: that they will look at their lives as they earn their living, as they support their families, as they take care of their responsibilities in this world, and they will say, “My life is even bigger than that. My life is to build the kingdom of God, one brick at a time.” And you know how your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren will have that vision? If you have that vision, and only if you do.
Jesus put it this way: He said when you pray and you think about what’s really important in your life, when you’re committed to those things that are the highest priority, this is what’s to be on your mind: “Our Royal Father, enthroned in heaven, may Your name be kept holy. May Your kingdom come. May Your will be done on this earth, just like it’s done in heaven.
Let’s pray together.
Our Lord Jesus, we bow before You knowing that You spoke words of truth and words of vision, and hope and destiny, and we bow before You confessing that we’re the kinds of people who lose sight of this and grow ever so limited in thinking about our lives and the purposes for which we live. How we pray, Lord, how we pray that You will write these words on our hearts, that we might not sin against You; rather, that we might be people who build Your kingdom, one brick after another, after another. And as You do that, Lord, we will give You the praise; we will give You the glory for it all. Amen.
Let’s stand together and receive the benediction of our Lord.
May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make His face to shine upon you; may the Lord be gracious to you, and give you His peace. If you love Christ and are willing to serve Him faithfully, if you will seek first the kingdom of God, go now in the peace of your Royal Father in heaven. Amen.
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