1 Thessalonians 4:3-8
You can be seated. Please turn in your copy of the
scriptures to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. 1 Thessalonians 4. Our passage today will be verses
3 through 8. As I mentioned last week, chapter
4, 1 through 12 is an exhortation to holiness and there are There’s a general exhortation.
We should live lives that please God. Today, we should live in
holiness with our bodies. And then next week, it’s going
to speak of kind of general discussions, brotherly love, living a quiet
life, minding our own affairs in a holy way. But today we want
to hear God’s word, perhaps even a tough word. on living holy
lives in our bodies. And they’re going to be three
exhortations. You’ll notice as we read this passage, the exhortations
are that we abstain from immorality. We control our bodies and we
do no wrong to another. And then there are three reasons.
First, God is an avenger of evil. Second, we’re called to sanctification.
And third, if you hear the word and don’t do it, you reject not
the Apostle Paul, but you reject God himself who gives his Holy
Spirit. And so let’s hear the word of
the living God together. I’m going to read beginning at
verse one in chapter four, but verses three through eight will
be our passage. The apostle says to the Thessalonian church, finally,
then brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus. That as
you receive from us how you ought to live and to please God, just
as you are doing, that you do so more and more. For you know
what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this
is the will of God, your sanctification. That you abstain from sexual
immorality, that each one of you know how to control his own
body in holiness and honor. not in the passion of lust like
the Gentiles who do not know God, and that no one transgress
and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an
avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and
solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for
impurity, but in holiness. Therefore, whoever disregards
this disregards not man, but God, who gives his Holy Spirit
to you. Pray with me. Lord, help us to
hear and to perceive and to believe and to put into practice the
things that we hear in the scriptures. May you comfort us and build
us up in our faith so that we would be those who live holy,
unpleasing lives in your sight and before the watching world.
Help us, we pray in Christ’s mighty name. Amen. So y’all know
pastors have a little bubble over their head. I remember reading
the funny papers Sunday morning, back in the day, the cartoons
in the papers every day. And when they wanted to display,
you know, that the character was thinking, there was the bubble,
bubble, bubble with the balloon, you know, and pastors have these
bubbles in their heads. I think I’ve told y’all before,
you don’t want to know what I think about during church because I
can see all of you. Y’all can only see me really.
But I wonder what the pastoral bubble in Paul’s head was as
he began to leave the confines of Jerusalem. the holy city as
he began to leave the confines of Judea, the holy tribe of Israel. And he began to go on these missionary
journeys into the Roman Empire. You can imagine Paul, this man
who was, how would we put it? He was Jewish on steroids. Remember,
we say of Paul, he had the equivalent of two PhDs in Old Testament
knowledge, Old Testament theology. And so You know, we talk about
growing up in the South, everybody goes to church. That’s the way
it used to be. He grew up in Jerusalem. He grew up in the
schools of Old Testament thought. He grew up at the feet of Gamaliel.
He was a Pharisee. He was a man who kept the law.
And so the more he went out into the world, He saw many strange
things contrary to his beliefs, his upbringing. And so you can
imagine the bubble in his head as he ministered from city to
city in the Roman empire was quite something to read. Well,
as he’s writing this letter to the Thessalonians, he’s sitting
in Corinth. And he’s sitting in Corinth where
the verb to Corinthianize meant to do all kinds of things you
can’t talk about. In fact, when he wrote them letters,
he wrote them four. We have two of them in our copies
of the scripture. He said of their immorality,
you do things that even would make the Gentiles blush. You
do things that people who do wicked things don’t even speak
of or talk about. And so as he’s sitting in Athens
and writing this letter to the Thessalonians, who also live
in a similar context, You can imagine his thoughts of having
grown up in an isolated Jewish environment where purity and
holiness was all he heard every day. And now he’s out in the
Roman world where debauchery is on display in every city where
he goes. You can imagine he didn’t always
write the things that popped in his bubble. But today he gives
us a glimpse of what I would say is practical theology. Now,
a lot of you grew up in the purity culture. You know, we sign a
paper, we do this or that, and we’re going to make it. And Paul
doesn’t do that. He doesn’t line up the Thessalonians
and say, you need to sign the purity promise. He says there’s
a holy God. And he says this holy God calls
you to be a holy people and then therefore live this way. And
so today, as we think about this call to holiness, this call to
sanctification, this call to purity in a very impure world,
don’t think of it as rules, rules, rules. Think of it as a holy
and pure God calls you to be a holy and pure people. And then
there are practical ways we ought to live. If God is pure and he
calls us to be pure, then we ought to live pure lives. So
today we read this portion of the letter of Paul where he writes
boldly. He writes boldly to new converts.
He writes boldly to new converts where he really only had about
a one month ministry. He says, he writes, he was torn
away from them. He had to leave them prematurely
because of the persecution. In fact, he had to sneak out
of the city by night. He had to be rushed away in the
night down to Berea where the enemies followed there. So he
went to Athens where he was troubled with the other gods. And now
sometime later, he’s in Corinth where he’ll stay about 18 months.
But the issue is they were new converts and they needed more
teaching. Jesus says, go into all the world. And he doesn’t
say just make converts and move on. He says, no, go into all
the world and make disciples. So it’s assumed they become Christians,
but it’s also commanded that you stay and you teach. You don’t
give the gospel, get your numbers and move on. And so he knew they
needed more. He was with them in their city.
He was with them in their town. He saw all that they had to deal
with as baby Christians, as new Christians. And remember, after
some time, he sent Timothy to go and to encourage them, to
go and to strengthen them. But he sends this letter as a
tune-up. And he’s gonna turn the wrenches pretty hard on their
lives as he tunes them up. Now, you may have noticed in
other parts of Thessalonians, it’s in today’s passage, he refers
back over and over to the time he was with them and to the things
that he said to them. So what he says to them here
and what he’s saying to us is nothing new. It’s nothing new
to many Christians. It’s nothing new to the Thessalonians.
And remember in this letter, a tune-up for the Christian life,
He gives them exhortations, abstain from immorality, control your
bodies, do no one wrong. The reasons, God is an avenger.
You’re called to sanctification, not impurity. And if you hear
this and reject it, you’re rejecting God. So I want to think about
this passage in four ways. The first being the world we
live in. I think it’s safe to say, it
is not hyperbole, it’s not exaggeration to say, immorality is everywhere. It’s all around us. It’s on our
TVs, it’s out in public, it’s on billboards, it’s on the radio,
it’s just flat everywhere. It’s the result of sin, isn’t
it? It’s the result of man in the garden saying to God, I think
we’ll try it our way. I think we’ll live for ourselves
by our own rules and it’s going to go really well. You just wait
and see God. No, that’s not the way it was
meant to be. Sin is not the way God meant
for people on earth to live. He meant for them to live in
righteousness and holiness and purity. But where we are in life,
where the Thessalonians were in life is a result of sin. Now
we think immorality is everywhere and it is. And let me assure
you, it was far worse for the Thessalonians. Let me explain
why. Most of us have grown up in America
where who came and It was the Puritans. And why did the Puritans
come? They wanted to come and establish a place where they
could live and worship God and obey God without persecution
from a crown or a throne or a scepter. And so for many years, American
states and cities and towns followed, maybe not out of a saving way,
but they followed in a moral way, the teachings of God. And
so many of us have been raised, we have lived in, well, I love
how Flannery O’Connor, the Southern author says, we’ve lived in the
Christ haunted South. where there’s a church on every
corner. There used to be Bibles in schools. The Ten Commandments
were on display. People lived out of a Christian
ethic. That is quickly disappearing.
And that was not the way for the Apostle Paul in the Roman
world and the Thessalonians and the Corinthians. They never were Christians. They
never followed God. They never had a church on every
corner. In fact, they live in the Roman
world with a pantheon of gods. And in their system, often the
god in each city had a god. Thessalonica had one, Corinth
did. There would be a temple to that god. And the way that
you communed with that god was through temple prostitutes. And
so immorality was far worse than even in our downgraded American
culture, as bad and rotten as it is. And we need to remember
this, though the world we live in is a filthy place, we need
to remember that we are citizens of heaven. We are from another
place and we live out of a different ethic. And when we come to faith
in Jesus, Though sexual immorality is everywhere, it should be nowhere
in our lives. But it is everywhere in the world
around us. So how do we live? I remember an interesting quote
some years ago. It went something like this. Our world is so absolutely sexualized
that growing up in our overly sexualized world, it’s like trying
to train a dog in a field full of rabbits. And I think we all
chuckle, but we also all know that, yes, indeed, that is the
case. And so the world we live in,
what about the God we serve? We serve a God who is holy. We
serve a God who dwells in unapproachable light. We serve a God who is
righteous. There is no wrong in him. He
is completely and perfectly righteous. In fact, the scriptures tell
us our God is pure. There is no impurity in him at
all. And when we study who God is,
we study his attributes. We study things like his omnis,
like his omnipotence. He is all powerful. His omnipresence,
he is everywhere in all places at all times. We study things
like his sovereignty. He is over all things. He is
Lord over all things. We talk about how God is love. God is faithful. God is these
things. And we speak then about his incommunicable
attributes. These days, when we think of
incommunicable, we’re often thinking of diseases, right? But this
is a positive way. God has communicable attributes
and incommunicable. As people made in His image,
there are things that we in a very small way can imitate about God.
When we say God is love, He is perfect love. And then when we
say we are love, we strive after it. fail at it, but we, in a
finite way, are love. And so on and on, you can go
through the attributes. Now, there’s things about God
we can’t be. We can’t be omnipotent. I think we are. We can’t be omnipresent. We can’t be the omnis, but in
finite ways, limited ways, we can imitate God and his communicable
attributes. Well, one thing we need to remember
about God and his purity and his righteousness he can’t stand
sin. He rejects sin and even when
sin is rampant in the world and it is all around us, we still
must define it and name it and reject it for it displeases God. I think one of the most troubling
passages in the scripture is found in Genesis chapter 6. It
talks about how on the earth after Cain killed Abel and how
the generations of Cain came on in life. There’s a passage
that says there was only evil and only evil continually on
the face of the earth. And then it says, it’s so grieved
God, it’s so grieved God that he determined that he would wipe
away all mankind from the face of the earth. What a troubling
passage that is. The evil had risen up. This past
spring, I made a trip through the Grand Canyon and the biblical
view of the way the canyon was formed is from catastrophic flooding. And you go on this trip and it’s
all these days and all these miles down the Grand Canyon and
by the end of it, you think all I’ve looked at is rock. But it’s
rock that was laid down by the floodwaters of Genesis when God
in his hot anger and his hot wrath determined to deal with
sin. And he determined to deal with
sin in a mighty way. You know, sometimes we’ll go
out after a storm, a tornado. And a couple of years after a
tornado, you know, the twisted trees, the busted roofs and all
that, after a couple of years, you ride through that place and
the trees have grown. The greenery’s back. After a
little time, the roofs are back on. And you can’t tell after
a time that God’s wrath has come through town. But not so the
Grand Canyon, those sediments hardened into rocks. And for
the billionth time you pass a rock, as you make your way through
Grand Canyon, you have to realize the catastrophic flood, but also
the catastrophic anger of Almighty God. And thank the Lord for his
promise. Thank the Lord for his promise
to Noah, his promise with the sign of the rainbow, that he
will never again destroy the earth. But isn’t it, a wonder
that Jesus sweated blood. The night that he was betrayed,
he was given over into the hands of those who would next day crucify
him. He sweated blood, droplets of
blood came out of his pores as he pondered the next day when
he would drink the cup of God’s wrath. We don’t think of God,
the God we serve, like we should. Think of the great quote from
the Narnia series, little Lucy, ask of Aslan, is he safe? And the answer is he’s good,
but he is not safe. God is a God who is holy and
righteous and pure in all these things. And he promises to avenge
sin. And Jesus knew on the night of
his betrayal, he knew that on the Gethsemane night of his prayers,
he knew what the cup of the wrath of God would bring upon him.
And he would pray, not my will, but yours be done. But Lord,
if there’s a way, take away this cup from me. For he knew the
judge, and he knew the judge’s justice, and he knew the avenger. And so we ought to think about
the God we serve in light of this immoral world. Some of you
have been reading through the Bible in a year, and perhaps
you’ve gotten into the book of Numbers. We’re there on Wednesday
nights, and we’ll get to this chapter maybe around Thanksgiving
or so. But there’s the story of the
camp of Israel, and there’s immorality in the camp of Israel, and what
does Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, do? He follows the immoral
people back to their tent and he drives a stake through their
bodies in the camp. And what had been going on before
that alerted that something was going on is there was a great
sickness in the camp. God brought sickness on the camp of Israel
because of their adultery, because of their idolatry, because of
their immorality. And this happens other times. This happened when,
I forget the guy’s name, he stole some good stuff from Jericho.
And Achan, remember he buried it under the carpet in his tent.
Israel went out to war and they lost the war because he took
some silver. He took some gold. And so they
dug up the loot in his tent and they took him and all the stuff
and burned it outside the camp. We need to not forget God is
an avenger of sin. We’ve tried to defame God. We’ve
tried to make God nice. I love how John MacArthur says
it. God does not need you to be his PR man. He says who he
is, he says what he does in the scripture, and it is true. And so Jesus sweated blood the
night before he would be under the wrath and curse of God for
sin. And so one motivation that we
ought to have to purity is God is an avenger of wrath. This
is the God we serve. Now we’ll get to the good stuff,
the safety of being found in Jesus. But I want us to think
about the provisions we have. There’s the world we live in.
There’s the God we serve, the provisions we have. St. Augustine,
the fourth century theologian, was a pretty wild man before
he was converted. If you read St. Augustine’s Confessions,
you’ll begin to think to yourself, this is the most famous theologian
since the Apostle Paul? This is the most famous theologian
until Martin Luther and John Calvin, you know, about a thousand
years later? You’ll be reading about the autobiography
of Augustine, who tells it all plain. He lived and grew up in
this Roman world that Paul is preaching to, maybe just about
two, three hundred years prior. And he says this in a prayer
to Almighty God. He says, God, command what you
will, as in tell me what you want me to do. But then he gives
a second petition. Give what you command. And so
as we think about the world we live in, the God we serve, we
want to think about the provisions we have. Yes, God gives us commands
to live righteously, but he also gives us the grace in Jesus Christ
and by the power of the spirit to do it. And so that’s why Paul
at the end of this passage is going to say, Hey, you hear the
command, don’t reject it. You hear the command, if you
reject it, you’re rejecting the Holy Spirit who gives you the
grace to walk this way. God never gives us impossible
things to do. Well, actually he does. But he
gives us the grace and the ability and the strength and the spirit
and the power to do these things. We have the word and spirit.
And Paul is appealing to the Thessalonians and I’m appealing
to you as Christians who sit under the word of God very often.
You’ve heard God’s word. You’ve heard what he offers,
what he provides, what he gives, what he commands, and what he
gives so that you can live out of his grace. Now, the Thessalonians
need more discipleship. Paul was there a short time,
got run out by persecution. And so Paul, more and more and
more and more, is desperate to visit them and preach to them.
He couldn’t stand it, so he sent Timothy. Timothy’s back giving
a report, so now he’s writing this letter, but there’s a prayer
all through Thessalonica through the letter to the Thessalonians
that Paul will get to go and Paul will get to stay with them
and preach. And we’re pretty sure, don’t
have the details, but he did go back and minister. And so
as Paul is writing this apostolic teaching under the power of the
Spirit, Through the command and the authorization of Jesus to
the Thessalonians, he’s also writing to us and saying, we
have these same provisions. We have the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t
matter what’s going on all around us. We serve a living, pure,
holy, righteous God. He gives us commands and he gives
us the grace and the ability and the power. Now, Paul has
been among the Thessalonians because he says, He says, I’ve
already told you this stuff before. I’ve already taught it to you.
And I can’t wait to tell you again. But throughout this letter,
he says, I declared it to you. I appealed to you to live this
way. I exhorted you. I encouraged you. I proclaimed
this to you. I charged you. I established
and comforted you further in the faith by sending Timothy.
And even says the word of God came in power. You received it
as such. you’ve been full of conviction.
God’s word has been at work in you. And so now, with the spirit
of the living God in you, you can do everything that God commands
because he’s given you everything that you need for life and godliness. That’s a wonderful passage that
Peter writes. Everything we need for life And
everything we need for godliness has been provided for us by God,
by the Spirit, through the Bible and in the ministry of the church. And if there’s something you
don’t have, you can pray for it. If something is needed, you
can ask for it. If there’s something in your
life that is uncultivated, you can cultivate it. God gives you
every good gift to live the Christian life. But we’re an excuse culture.
Have y’all noticed that? Oh, we’re an excuse culture.
I can’t do this. I can’t do it today. And I can’t
do it tomorrow. We make excuses about everything.
And our reasons are manifold. And aren’t the reasons getting
a bit more ridiculous? God, I’ll serve you, but tomorrow.
God, I’ll serve you, but next week. And we’ve been given everything
for life and for godliness. In fact, the apostle Paul wrote
to the Ephesians, another Roman city with horrible immorality. He says, God has raised you up
with Jesus and he has seated you in the heavenly places. So we have what we need to live
the Christian life. So we’ve talked about the world
we live in. It’s bad. We’ve talked about the God we
serve. He is pure, holy, righteous, and he’s an avenging God. We’ve
talked about the provisions we have. to fulfill the commands
that God gives us. Let’s think now about the obedience
we owe God. I think I told y’all at the outset,
there are three commands with sort of three reasons for doing
it. And the three commands are that we should abstain from sexual
immorality. Second, we should control our
bodies. And the third is we should not transgress or wrong our brothers. And there’s a couple more reasons.
We’re called to holiness. We’re also called not to disregard
God or the Holy Spirit. So we’re to abstain from sexual
immorality. This is the obedience that we
owe to God. I don’t know if you’re aware
of this, but when God calls us, to faith in Jesus. He calls you
out of sin. He calls you out of Satan’s wicked
control over you. When we come to faith in Jesus,
we are called out of darkness and into light. We are taken
out of Satan’s prison and we are put into God’s gracious realm
of living. We are the king’s sons and daughters.
We live by the king’s commands. with the king’s gifts at our
disposal. And so when God calls us to abstain
from immorality, he reminds us that we were not called for immorality
or impurity, but we’ve been called for purity. And that word abstain
is pretty clear. It doesn’t say when New Year’s
comes around, maybe cut back by 30 percent. But we like to
negotiate, don’t we? We’re an excuse culture and we
like to negotiate. But abstain, nothing, no more. You know, it’s why we have trouble
with diets. You know, 10 o’clock at night, the cravings come,
right? And our brain says, don’t do
it. But our heart says, you deserve it, follow your heart, right?
And so we go to the cabinet and we sneak a little something.
It’s really difficult. Abstain, stop, no. Not moderation, not cutting back,
complete abstinence. And then there’s this phrase,
and I like the King James a little better. It says control your
vessel. It says control your body. If
you’re watching sports lately, maybe the Olympics or the U.S.
Open is kind of at its end. Maybe football season’s on your
to-do list. You look at these athletes and
boy, do they have control of their bodies. They know what
to eat. They know when to eat it. They
know how to train, how to exercise. They know how to abstain. They
know how to fill up on pasta or whatever. They know what to
drink. They know how their body needs
to recover. They’re crazy enough to get in a freezing cold bath
of ice. But they know how to control
their body so that it will perform to the maximum. And you see this
in tennis. You see it in football. You saw
it in the Olympics over the last weeks. And so if we can learn
how to control our bodies, for athletics, can we not lean into
controlling our bodies for our holy God and for his witness
of righteousness in this world? And so we are to abstain from
immorality. We are to control our bodies
and not be like the Gentiles who follow every passion and
they follow every lust, but we are to live lives of self-controlled
living. And he says, third, don’t transgress,
don’t wrong your brother. Imagine this, there’s a church
full of Thessalonians. There you go. There’s a church
full of Thessalonians. And you can imagine, as we understand,
some people came to faith in Jesus out of cult prostitutism. Some people came to faith in
Jesus of having more than one spouse. Some people came to faith
in Jesus, and you fill in the blank. We’re not used to that
today, though it is true all around us. But we think people
just grow up in the faith. They just grow up in the church.
And when they get converted, it’s just, well, they’re finally
obeying everything mom and dad told them or that they learned
in Sunday school. One of my heroes in the faith
in their autobiography challenges Christians today to think through
when you’re sitting in church, And when people are being convinced
of their need for salvation through faith in Jesus today, they’ve
got so much more baggage than we understand. And we don’t think
that way today, but think in light of the Thessalonian church.
You’re in church with people that you probably know something
about or you’re in church with people that perhaps you have
wronged. And so this is for the sake of
the peace and the purity of the church community. Do not transgress
or wrong your brother for you have been called to holiness
and you cannot disregard these things for these are the commands
of God. Now, remember the main subject
of this passage. In chapter 4, verses 1, 2, and
3, Paul is saying to the Thessalonians, I want you to more and more and
more and more live the Christian life. And we understand that
when a person comes to faith in Jesus, something happens in
their head, something happens in their heart, and then something
happens in their lives, and that something continues on. a person
hears about the God we serve. And they hear that he’s pure.
They hear that he’s holy. They hear that he’s righteous.
And they hear that he cannot overlook sin. And they hear that
he offers his son, Jesus, who lived and obeyed in our place
and who suffered and died in our place so that when we come
to faith in Jesus, we received all of Jesus’ obedience. We receive
all of Jesus’ righteousness. And God forgives us of all our
sins, past, and present and future. And he offers us, he gives us
his righteousness so that when God looks on us, he sees us as
if we’ve never sinned. He sees us as if we’ve always
obeyed. And when we come to faith in Jesus, he sanctifies us. He
sets us apart. He makes us holy. And Paul has
said in chapter four, verse three, the will of God is your sanctification.
The will of God is your holiness. The will of God is your growth
and grace. And so we are set apart for God and our lives under
the word, our lives under the spirit, our lives under the apostolic
teaching of Paul or the apostolic preaching of the word in our
day, we’re to more and more die to sin and more and more live
to righteousness. That is the Christian life. We
die to sin. We live to righteousness. And
there is a daily dying. The more we read the word, the
more we’re convicted of our sin. The more we read the word, we
can live life for almighty God. That’s what David was writing
in Psalm 119 we read earlier. Lord, give me your word, give
me your law so I can delight in it and I can live it. before
your great and mighty and holy face. And so the Christian life
is to build, build, build, putting away sin, living for righteousness.
And we will not be perfect in this life. Our perfection comes
in heaven. Our perfection comes in glory.
And the good and gracious and wonderful thing about God is
he continues to give us grace. I listened to a song this week.
I couldn’t tell you the name of it. It’s a little bit more
of a modern church song. And it had a line in it that
stood out that says, heaven has nothing more to give than has
been given to us in Jesus. And so living the Christian life,
we have everything thrown at us. Everything about Jesus, everything
about the spirit, everything about the word, everything about
the will of God is thrown at us. We can live the Christian
life. That’s why Augustine could pray, Lord, tell me whatever
you want me to do. and give me the power, the strength and the
resources to do it. And so as we more and more live
the Christian life, as we more and more realize what is evil
and hate it and flee from it, as we more and more repent of
our sins, as we more and more are washed by Christ and by the
Spirit and by the Word, We can come to a place where we find
great comfort. We find great joy in what we
have and what we are in Jesus. And I know every single one of
us has a past and a present and a future. And every one of us
has things we wish were never true, things we regret. And the
writer of the greatest prophecy, I think the writer Isaiah says
this, all we like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has sought
our own way. And that’s the lead in, isn’t
it? To the suffering servant. He was bruised. He was pierced
for our transgressions. The chastisement that was due
to us by God for our sins was laid on Jesus on the cross. And it even says in Isaiah, it
was the will of the Lord to crush. It was the will of the Lord to
crush his son. And what a good reminder this
is for us. We can say it’s true. Immorality
is everywhere. It is all around us. And we can
say it’s also biblically true. It should not be found in or
among Christians. And thank the Lord that he’s
given us the blood of Jesus. He’s given us the power of the
spirit. He’s given us the word to live and to repent and to
be washed and to be cleansed and to have new life endeavoring
to live for him. Let’s do pray together. Lord,
it is your will that we be sanctified. It is your will that we have
purity in our bodies. You’ve caught us out of darkness
and you’ve placed our feet on level ground so that we can please
you. And Lord, our flesh, our remnant
sin wreaks havoc in our lives. The world offers us so much and
the devil is, he’s so sinister and he tempts so well. And so
all we like sheep have gone astray. Each of us have gone our own
way, but we pray today that your word would govern every part
of our lives. that the scriptures would regulate
and oversee as we discharge our duty to live for you. And that
everything about our lives, because it’s been washed in the blood
of Jesus, it’s been empowered by the Holy Spirit, would adorn
the doctrine and the purity of you, Almighty God. Lord, we’ve
made a mess, but you can clean it up. And so help us and hear
us in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. We want to sing a rendering
of, I believe it is Psalm 1, and so turn to 557 and we’ll
sing together.