Thursday, January 19, 2012
Audio of Wednesday Morning's 'Read the Bible in a Year' Discussion
At Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, we're reading the Bible together in a year, about three chapters at a time. Once a week, we get together to discuss the readings. This week's readings have been John 19 through Acts 15. Today's discussion mostly focused on Acts.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
7 Things Jesus Will Never Say or Do to Get Your "Vote"
It's presidential campaign season. Candidates say a lot of things to get your vote. The God we meet in Jesus Christ (in Him, the Bible says, "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell") has been engaged in a "campaign" to win our "votes" as Lord and Savior of our lives for centuries. But, unlike the political candidates frenetically seeking your vote, there are some things that Jesus will never say or do to get your vote:
But today, as in Jesus' time on earth, those who receive Him and believe in His Name, are given the power to become the children of God (John 1:12-13).
Vote for Jesus by giving your life to Him. As Jesus Himself says: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life."
- Jesus will never pretend to be something He's not, part 1. Jesus, God the Son, never downplayed His origins. Asked, "Are You the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" Jesus answered, "I AM" (Mark 14:62). I AM, Yahweh, is the name with which God first identified Himself when God called Moses to lead His people Israel.
- Jesus will never pretend to be something He's not, part 2. When God came to earth in the Person of Jesus, He experienced a life of humility and simplicity. He was raised by a couple so poor that when they brought Jesus to be dedicated at the Temple in Jerusalem, they couldn't afford the sacrifice given by wealthier parents, a lamb. Instead, the offered what the Old Testament stipulated for families of more modest means: "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons" (Luke 2:23, Exodus 13:2, 12).
- Jesus will never pretend to be empathetic; He really does understand us. The Bible says that we do not have in Jesus a "high priest," an advocate, Who "is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but...One Who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin." This allows us to "approach the throne of grace [God] with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:15-16).
- Jesus will never turn His back on some followers in order to placate others. He promises all who believe in Him, "I am with you always, even to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:20).
- Jesus will never tell us that we are blameless. Politicians try to build coalitions of support by appealing to our egos. But Jesus once told a group of people who had believed in Him (John 8:31), "If I tell you the truth, why do you not believe Me? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear then is that you are not from God..." (John 8:46-47). Yet it was to "seek and save" those lost in sin--the entire human race--that Jesus came to die on a cross and rise from the dead (Luke 19:10). Only those who "repent and believe" in the Kingdom of God over which He reigns can have Jesus as their king, today and in eternity (Mark 1:15).
- Jesus will never tell you He will make this world perfect for those who "vote" for Him. While Jesus' kingdom has invaded this imperfect world (Luke 17:21), His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). It's Jesus' intention to establish a "new heaven and a new earth," in which sin and injustice are banished forever and where those who have become part of His new creation, by faith in Him (2 Corinthians 5:17), will live eternally (Revelation 21:1). In the meantime, even believers in Jesus will be pressed hard by the pain, difficulties, and tragedies of this fallen world. Sometimes, following Jesus will make our lives harder than they otherwise would be. "In this world you face persecution" for faith in Him, Jesus once said, "But take courage; I have conquered the world" (John 16:33).
- Jesus never promises His followers material wealth. But He does warn us of the dangers an obsession of wealth can cause our souls when money takes the place of God in our priorities: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24).
But today, as in Jesus' time on earth, those who receive Him and believe in His Name, are given the power to become the children of God (John 1:12-13).
Vote for Jesus by giving your life to Him. As Jesus Himself says: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life."
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
After God Has Forgiven You...Forgive Yourself
Today, after you've confessed your sins to God, ask God to help you to forgive yourself as God has forgiven you.
No more rehearsing of the sins that caused you to tell God you were sorry and to ask God for His forgiveness! God's Word in the Bible promises: "As far as east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12).
When we hold onto sin that God has forgiven, we display a lack of faith in God's compassion and God's willingness to keep His promises. But the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, show us God's compassion and God's resolve to do all that's necessary for us to be forgiven and have our relationship with God restored. When we genuinely confess our sins to God in Jesus' Name, we can be sure that we are forgiven.
Holding onto our sin and refusing to accept God's forgiveness can also turn our guilt into shame.
Guilt is God's prod to our consciences, alerting us to something we have done that's building a barrier between God and us, between us and others, between us and God's forgiveness.
Shame is that boulder we carry on our shoulders when we think that our faults, real and imagined, make us irredeemably bad.
Look, no one is irredeemably bad. Even the bandit on the cross next to Jesus turned from sin and to faith in Jesus with His dying breaths and Jesus told him, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43).
Through Jesus, we know, as the Bible tells us, "If we confess our sins, [God] Who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). It also says that "everyone who believes in [Jesus] receives forgiveness of sins through His Name" (Acts 10:43).
Today, after you've confessed your sins to God, ask God to help you to forgive yourself as God has forgiven you.
No more rehearsing of the sins that caused you to tell God you were sorry and to ask God for His forgiveness! God's Word in the Bible promises: "As far as east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12).
When we hold onto sin that God has forgiven, we display a lack of faith in God's compassion and God's willingness to keep His promises. But the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, show us God's compassion and God's resolve to do all that's necessary for us to be forgiven and have our relationship with God restored. When we genuinely confess our sins to God in Jesus' Name, we can be sure that we are forgiven.
Holding onto our sin and refusing to accept God's forgiveness can also turn our guilt into shame.
Guilt is God's prod to our consciences, alerting us to something we have done that's building a barrier between God and us, between us and others, between us and God's forgiveness.
Shame is that boulder we carry on our shoulders when we think that our faults, real and imagined, make us irredeemably bad.
Look, no one is irredeemably bad. Even the bandit on the cross next to Jesus turned from sin and to faith in Jesus with His dying breaths and Jesus told him, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43).
Through Jesus, we know, as the Bible tells us, "If we confess our sins, [God] Who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). It also says that "everyone who believes in [Jesus] receives forgiveness of sins through His Name" (Acts 10:43).
Today, after you've confessed your sins to God, ask God to help you to forgive yourself as God has forgiven you.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
To Be an Honest Witness for Jesus
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
John 1:43-51
Let’s say that friends are visiting you. You’ve just renovated your living room: new chairs, couch, end tables, lamps, entertainment center, furnishings. All are tasteful, plain, functional, pleasing to the eye. The chairs and couch are comfy. The wall coloring is rich and inviting.
Now, sometime during their visit, your friends, who have been to your house before, are going to ask you about your newly appointed living room. Where did you get the furniture, the paint, the carpeting? Did you have help? If so, who was the contractor?
Let me ask you this: If your friends asked you questions like these, would you refuse to answer them? Of course not! You’d be happy to answer their questions, maybe even with a trace of pride. When we have good things happen in our lives, we want to share the story with others.
We are now in a season of the Church Year called Epiphany. The New Testament was, of course, originally written in Greek and the word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaino. It means to show oneself, to appear. The Gospel lessons for the season of Epiphany are ones in which Jesus showed Himself to be more than just another man—more even than just another king, but God enfleshed, the King of all kings, the Savior Who offers freedom from sin and death to all who will repent for sin and entrust their lives to only Him.
Today, as in Biblical times, the true identity of Jesus can be shown to people in miraculous signs as well as in moments of quiet clarity. People come to life-saving faith in Jesus Christ in many different ways. But coming to believe in Jesus always involves an epiphany, whether one that evolves slowly, one that takes roots in us as children on our parents' knees, or one that comes in a flash.
Whenever our epiphany comes to us, we know that Jesus is our God and King and that the only reasonable thing to do is bow down and surrender our whole lives to Him.
Today’s Gospel lesson recounts an epiphany in which Jesus revealed His identity to an honest skeptic named Nathanael. And it all happened when a friend of Nathanael’s talked about Jesus the way we might talk about a newly renovated living room with friends.
You know the story well. But let’s look at it together this morning. Please go to our Gospel lesson, John 1:43-51.
Here's a bit of background to put the incidents in today's lesson in context. Three days before the incidents recounted in our lesson, John the Baptist had told crowds thronging to him to repent for sin because the Messiah was coming. He said that he himself was such an imperfect sinner, he was unworthy to even do the slave’s work of untying the thongs of the Messiah's sandals.
The next day, John saw Jesus and said, “Here is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.” (John was saying here that Jesus, without sin Himself, would become the perfect sacrificial Lamb for the whole human race, taking our deserved punishment for sin so that, when He rose from the dead, He could give everlasting life with God to all who follow Jesus through the crucifixion of their old sinful bodies and the resurrection of their new bodies in eternity.)
The following day, John told two of his own followers, Andrew and John, known as disciples, mathetes in the Greek, a word that means students: “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” John, the preacher who said elsewhere, “He [Jesus] must increase, I must decrease” was, in effect, telling his two students, “I’m giving you to a new teacher, this One is the Lamb of God, the One you and I and all the world have been waiting for!”
We pick up what happens next in today’s lesson. Jesus has gone from the Jordan to His native region of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a fishing town on the lakeshore there. Jesus goes to Philip and says, “Follow Me.” Philip, who already has spent time with Jesus the previous evening, is ready to follow when Jesus calls.
But Philip understands that following Jesus is not a private matter. He seems to understand that if followers of Jesus fail to tell others about Jesus, God will be forced to make the inanimate stones cry out Jesus’ Name, so that all the world will have the chance to hear of Him!
Look at what happens next, in verse 45. Philip has received no training as an evangelist. He hasn’t been to seminary. But he can’t contain himself! (Jesus is a bigger deal than a renovated living room!) So, Philip finds his friend, Nathanael and tells him: “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote…” Stop right there a second.
We’re nearing the end of our year of reading the Bible together. It’s been the best experience of my twenty-seven years as a pastor! Two things that come through loudly and clearly as you read the whole Bible—Old and New Testament—are:
Nathanael has an understandable question. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Nazareth was a pigsty of a village in the Galilean hills, composed of maybe 15 shacks where impoverished people eked out their livelihoods.
Besides, Nathanael may have known the prophecies as well as Philip: the prophets said that the Messiah would be from Bethlehem. Knowing nothing of the place where Jesus was born, Nathanael was skeptical.
We run into skepticism about Jesus all the time. But Philip doesn’t get defensive. Neither should we when people challenge our faith. Look at Philip's response in verse 46: “Come and see.”
Folks, this is a great example for us as Christians who have been commissioned by Jesus Himself to “make disciples.”
And this is no small matter! As I read the Bible, making disciples is the only job Christ has given to the Church.
Jesus did not commission the Church to do political advocacy, to erect church buildings as monuments to our piety, to perpetuate congregations as social clubs where everybody smiles and nobody's life gets changed.
The Church has one job and one job only: to make disciples, to help people know and grow in their faith in Jesus Christ.
Conservative and liberal Christians alike often grow impatient with Jesus’ way of changing people’s lives. They want to push their own particular versions of Christian living on people through things like politics, political correctness, or social pressure.
But Jesus never once coerced goodness or faithfulness out of people and we would be faithless, shortsighted fools to try coercion ourselves.
Instead, we Christians, together in Christ’s body, the Church, are commissioned to speak and lovingly live out God’s truth about human sin and about the forgiveness and hope offered to every single person on the planet through faith in Jesus Christ.
We do so in order to make disciples of Christ.
Ideally, this can happen when people see us living for Jesus and they ask us about the steadying, joy-giving influence over our lives and we can say, “Jesus.” That, after all is the quiet way we Lutherans would prefer to spread the Good News of Jesus. No muss. No fuss. No witnessing.
And sometimes, it actually works that way. I've known John since I was in the fourth grade. We were in Cub Scouts together. We played Gra-Y and Junior Hi-Y basketball together. John was a good athlete. I wasn't. John was popular. I wasn't. John got elected to student council. I didn't. John and I liked the same girl in the sixth grade. Guess who she went with to Fun Night, the biggest event of the year?
In the forty years after we graduated from high school, I ran into John twice and each time our conversations were quick and perfunctory. Then, at our high school class reunion last year, John, his wife, and I had a long and enjoyable chat. After the reunion, a number of our classmates kept in touch through a Facebook page. We talk with each other fairly often, even John and I.
In the months since last June, John undoubtedly saw the sermons and prayer requests I post on Facebook. But I never once "witnessed" to John. Yet he wrote to me last month just before Christmas to say, "Mark, haven't been to church in a long time, but you've inspired me to go. Christmas Eve I will attend a service here in town."
It isn't a confession of faith, but when I read that, it made me feel good! It's a beginning and it's to hear and read things like that that every Christian is made for! My invitation to John to "come and see" Jesus had happened quite indirectly, without my really knowing it.
But Jesus has commissioned us to take a more direct approach in making disciples for Jesus. It's an approach like that of Philip, who went to his friend, Nathanael...or, like my friend Zack, when he went to his father.
After Zack's mother died, his dad was inconsolable. Unlike Zack's mom, a faithful believer in Jesus, his dad had always been indifferent to God, almost scornful of the Church. Following his mother's death, Zack watched his father go into a tailspin of depression and self-destructive behavior. He had no hope and he ricocheted between long periods of sleeping for hours on end and almost frenetic activity, anything to block out his pain and grief and utter hopelessness.
Zack finally approached his father. "Dad," he said, "do you remember how strong and joyful Mom was? It was because of her faith in Jesus, Dad. You need Jesus, too. If you'll trust in Him, you'll know that He's beside you, helping you get through these tough days. You'll also know that one day, not only will you see Jesus, but you'll see Mom again."
Amazingly, Zack's Dad took his son's message to heart. He came to faith in Christ. When I met Zack's father some years later, he was a truly joyful follower of Jesus, deeply involved in his church. This once self-absorbed man spent many hours every week providing help to people without work, food, or shelter. It all happened because his son, like Philip in our Gospel lesson, proactively went to him and said, "Dad, come and see. Come and see Jesus."
Who could you issue the same invitation to this week?
When Nathanael took Philip up on his invitation and Jesus told Nathanael things about himself that Jesus could only have known if Jesus were God in the flesh, Nathanael confessed his faith in Jesus: "Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"
Philip, the Gospel of John makes clear, was no perfect disciple. But he was what we are called to be: an honest witness for Jesus. He made himself available for Jesus’ great commission and available to his friend who needed the Savior. When he invited Nathanael to “come and see” the Messiah, Nathanael saw the God Who knows all about us and loves us anyway.
May we be more like Philip, so that the people we know will experience epiphanies about the forgiveness, the healing, and the wholeness God gives to all who turn from sin and trust in Christ.
May we tell the story of Jesus and let others see Jesus for themselves. Amen
John 1:43-51
Let’s say that friends are visiting you. You’ve just renovated your living room: new chairs, couch, end tables, lamps, entertainment center, furnishings. All are tasteful, plain, functional, pleasing to the eye. The chairs and couch are comfy. The wall coloring is rich and inviting.
Now, sometime during their visit, your friends, who have been to your house before, are going to ask you about your newly appointed living room. Where did you get the furniture, the paint, the carpeting? Did you have help? If so, who was the contractor?
Let me ask you this: If your friends asked you questions like these, would you refuse to answer them? Of course not! You’d be happy to answer their questions, maybe even with a trace of pride. When we have good things happen in our lives, we want to share the story with others.
We are now in a season of the Church Year called Epiphany. The New Testament was, of course, originally written in Greek and the word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaino. It means to show oneself, to appear. The Gospel lessons for the season of Epiphany are ones in which Jesus showed Himself to be more than just another man—more even than just another king, but God enfleshed, the King of all kings, the Savior Who offers freedom from sin and death to all who will repent for sin and entrust their lives to only Him.
Today, as in Biblical times, the true identity of Jesus can be shown to people in miraculous signs as well as in moments of quiet clarity. People come to life-saving faith in Jesus Christ in many different ways. But coming to believe in Jesus always involves an epiphany, whether one that evolves slowly, one that takes roots in us as children on our parents' knees, or one that comes in a flash.
Whenever our epiphany comes to us, we know that Jesus is our God and King and that the only reasonable thing to do is bow down and surrender our whole lives to Him.
Today’s Gospel lesson recounts an epiphany in which Jesus revealed His identity to an honest skeptic named Nathanael. And it all happened when a friend of Nathanael’s talked about Jesus the way we might talk about a newly renovated living room with friends.
You know the story well. But let’s look at it together this morning. Please go to our Gospel lesson, John 1:43-51.
Here's a bit of background to put the incidents in today's lesson in context. Three days before the incidents recounted in our lesson, John the Baptist had told crowds thronging to him to repent for sin because the Messiah was coming. He said that he himself was such an imperfect sinner, he was unworthy to even do the slave’s work of untying the thongs of the Messiah's sandals.
The next day, John saw Jesus and said, “Here is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.” (John was saying here that Jesus, without sin Himself, would become the perfect sacrificial Lamb for the whole human race, taking our deserved punishment for sin so that, when He rose from the dead, He could give everlasting life with God to all who follow Jesus through the crucifixion of their old sinful bodies and the resurrection of their new bodies in eternity.)
The following day, John told two of his own followers, Andrew and John, known as disciples, mathetes in the Greek, a word that means students: “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” John, the preacher who said elsewhere, “He [Jesus] must increase, I must decrease” was, in effect, telling his two students, “I’m giving you to a new teacher, this One is the Lamb of God, the One you and I and all the world have been waiting for!”
We pick up what happens next in today’s lesson. Jesus has gone from the Jordan to His native region of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a fishing town on the lakeshore there. Jesus goes to Philip and says, “Follow Me.” Philip, who already has spent time with Jesus the previous evening, is ready to follow when Jesus calls.
But Philip understands that following Jesus is not a private matter. He seems to understand that if followers of Jesus fail to tell others about Jesus, God will be forced to make the inanimate stones cry out Jesus’ Name, so that all the world will have the chance to hear of Him!
Look at what happens next, in verse 45. Philip has received no training as an evangelist. He hasn’t been to seminary. But he can’t contain himself! (Jesus is a bigger deal than a renovated living room!) So, Philip finds his friend, Nathanael and tells him: “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote…” Stop right there a second.
We’re nearing the end of our year of reading the Bible together. It’s been the best experience of my twenty-seven years as a pastor! Two things that come through loudly and clearly as you read the whole Bible—Old and New Testament—are:
- how the God of the Old Testament is exactly the same God we meet in the New Testament and
- how all of history up to Jesus’ time was aimed toward the moment when God would take on flesh, walk among us, go to a cross for us, and rise to give everlasting life to repentant sinners who believe in the Messiah, Jesus.
Nathanael has an understandable question. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Nazareth was a pigsty of a village in the Galilean hills, composed of maybe 15 shacks where impoverished people eked out their livelihoods.
Besides, Nathanael may have known the prophecies as well as Philip: the prophets said that the Messiah would be from Bethlehem. Knowing nothing of the place where Jesus was born, Nathanael was skeptical.
We run into skepticism about Jesus all the time. But Philip doesn’t get defensive. Neither should we when people challenge our faith. Look at Philip's response in verse 46: “Come and see.”
Folks, this is a great example for us as Christians who have been commissioned by Jesus Himself to “make disciples.”
And this is no small matter! As I read the Bible, making disciples is the only job Christ has given to the Church.
Jesus did not commission the Church to do political advocacy, to erect church buildings as monuments to our piety, to perpetuate congregations as social clubs where everybody smiles and nobody's life gets changed.
The Church has one job and one job only: to make disciples, to help people know and grow in their faith in Jesus Christ.
Conservative and liberal Christians alike often grow impatient with Jesus’ way of changing people’s lives. They want to push their own particular versions of Christian living on people through things like politics, political correctness, or social pressure.
But Jesus never once coerced goodness or faithfulness out of people and we would be faithless, shortsighted fools to try coercion ourselves.
Instead, we Christians, together in Christ’s body, the Church, are commissioned to speak and lovingly live out God’s truth about human sin and about the forgiveness and hope offered to every single person on the planet through faith in Jesus Christ.
We do so in order to make disciples of Christ.
Ideally, this can happen when people see us living for Jesus and they ask us about the steadying, joy-giving influence over our lives and we can say, “Jesus.” That, after all is the quiet way we Lutherans would prefer to spread the Good News of Jesus. No muss. No fuss. No witnessing.
And sometimes, it actually works that way. I've known John since I was in the fourth grade. We were in Cub Scouts together. We played Gra-Y and Junior Hi-Y basketball together. John was a good athlete. I wasn't. John was popular. I wasn't. John got elected to student council. I didn't. John and I liked the same girl in the sixth grade. Guess who she went with to Fun Night, the biggest event of the year?
In the forty years after we graduated from high school, I ran into John twice and each time our conversations were quick and perfunctory. Then, at our high school class reunion last year, John, his wife, and I had a long and enjoyable chat. After the reunion, a number of our classmates kept in touch through a Facebook page. We talk with each other fairly often, even John and I.
In the months since last June, John undoubtedly saw the sermons and prayer requests I post on Facebook. But I never once "witnessed" to John. Yet he wrote to me last month just before Christmas to say, "Mark, haven't been to church in a long time, but you've inspired me to go. Christmas Eve I will attend a service here in town."
It isn't a confession of faith, but when I read that, it made me feel good! It's a beginning and it's to hear and read things like that that every Christian is made for! My invitation to John to "come and see" Jesus had happened quite indirectly, without my really knowing it.
But Jesus has commissioned us to take a more direct approach in making disciples for Jesus. It's an approach like that of Philip, who went to his friend, Nathanael...or, like my friend Zack, when he went to his father.
After Zack's mother died, his dad was inconsolable. Unlike Zack's mom, a faithful believer in Jesus, his dad had always been indifferent to God, almost scornful of the Church. Following his mother's death, Zack watched his father go into a tailspin of depression and self-destructive behavior. He had no hope and he ricocheted between long periods of sleeping for hours on end and almost frenetic activity, anything to block out his pain and grief and utter hopelessness.
Zack finally approached his father. "Dad," he said, "do you remember how strong and joyful Mom was? It was because of her faith in Jesus, Dad. You need Jesus, too. If you'll trust in Him, you'll know that He's beside you, helping you get through these tough days. You'll also know that one day, not only will you see Jesus, but you'll see Mom again."
Amazingly, Zack's Dad took his son's message to heart. He came to faith in Christ. When I met Zack's father some years later, he was a truly joyful follower of Jesus, deeply involved in his church. This once self-absorbed man spent many hours every week providing help to people without work, food, or shelter. It all happened because his son, like Philip in our Gospel lesson, proactively went to him and said, "Dad, come and see. Come and see Jesus."
Who could you issue the same invitation to this week?
When Nathanael took Philip up on his invitation and Jesus told Nathanael things about himself that Jesus could only have known if Jesus were God in the flesh, Nathanael confessed his faith in Jesus: "Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"
Philip, the Gospel of John makes clear, was no perfect disciple. But he was what we are called to be: an honest witness for Jesus. He made himself available for Jesus’ great commission and available to his friend who needed the Savior. When he invited Nathanael to “come and see” the Messiah, Nathanael saw the God Who knows all about us and loves us anyway.
May we be more like Philip, so that the people we know will experience epiphanies about the forgiveness, the healing, and the wholeness God gives to all who turn from sin and trust in Christ.
May we tell the story of Jesus and let others see Jesus for themselves. Amen
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