Nehemiah 10
Well, let’s give our attention
to God’s word. We’re in chapter 10 of Nehemiah and we have some
names, uh, to, to bear through. Uh, this is a section about,
uh, the people of God renewing covenant officially, uh, with,
with God and with one another. Um, so I’m gonna back up to verse
38, just one verse before chapter 10 begins. It says, because of
all this, we make a firm covenant in writing on the seal document
are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priest.
So on the seals are the names of Nehemiah, the governor, the
son of Hekeliah, Zedekiah, Sariah, Azariah, Jeremiah, Pasher, Amariah,
Malkijah, Hathush, Shevaniah, Malak, Harim, Merimoth, Obadiah,
Daniel, Ginnathon, Baruch, Mishulam, Abijah, Midgamin, Maaziah, Bilgai,
Shemaiah. These are the priest and the
Levites. Jeshua, the son of Azaniah, Benue,
the sons of Hinnadad, Cadmiel and their brothers, Shebaniah,
Hodiah, Kelita, Peliah, Hanun, Micah, Rehob, Hashabiah, Zachar,
Sherebiah, Shebeniah, Hodiah, Bani, Beninu. The chiefs of the
people were Parash, Pahathmoab, Elam, Zatu, Bani, Buni, Asgad,
Bebi, Adonijah, Bigvi, Aden, Eter, Hezekiah, Azar, Hodiah,
Hashem, Bizai, Herif, Anathoth, Nebai, Magpiosh, Mishulam, Hezir,
Meshazabel, Zadok, Jadua, Pelletiah, Hanan, Ananiah, Hoshea, Hananiah,
Hasob, Halohesh, Pilha, Shobek, Rahom, Hesh, Shabana, Maasiah,
Ahiah, and Hanan, and Anon, Also Malak, Haram, and Baana. The rest of the people, the priests,
the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants,
and all who have separated themselves from the peoples of the lands
to the law of God, their wives, their sons, their daughters,
all who have knowledge and understanding, join with their brothers, their
nobles, and enter into a curse and an oath to walk in God’s
law that was given by Moses, the servant of God, and to observe
and do all the commandments of the Lord our Lord with his rules
and his statutes. We will not give our daughters
to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our
sons. And if the peoples of the land bring in goods or any grain
on the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from them on the
Sabbath or on a holy day. We will forgo the crops of the
seventh year and the exaction of every debt. We also take on
ourselves the obligation to give yearly a third part of a shekel
For the service of the house of our God, for the showbread,
the regular grain offering, the regular burnt offering, the Sabbaths,
the new moons, the appointed feasts, the holy things and the
sin offerings. to make atonement for Israel
and for all the work of the house of our God. We, the priests,
the Levites, and the people have likewise cast lots for the wood
offering to bring it into the house of our God, according to
our fathers’ houses, at times appointed year by year to burn
on the altar of the Lord our God, as it is written in the
law, We obligate ourselves to bring the firstfruits of our
ground and the firstfruits of all fruit of every tree year
by year to the house of the Lord. Also to bring to the house of
our God, to the priest who minister in the house of our God, the
firstborn of our sons and our cattle as it is written in the
law. and the firstborn of our herds and our flocks, and to
bring the first of our dough and our contributions, the fruit
of every tree, the wine, the oil, to the priest, to the chambers
of the house of our God, and to bring to the Levites the tithes
from our ground. For it is the Levites who collect
the tithes in all our towns where we labor. And the priest, the
son of Aaron, shall be with the Levites when the Levites receive
the tithes. And the Levites shall bring up
the tithe of the tithes to the house of our God, to the chambers
of the storehouse. For the people of Israel and
the sons of Levi shall bring the contribution of grain and
wine and oil to the chambers where the vessels of the sanctuary
are, as well as the priest who minister and the gatekeepers
and the singers. We will not neglect the house
of our God. Amen, this is the word of the
living God. I couldn’t help but think when
it mentioned the showbread, we have the showbread. We’ve been
thinking about ways to keep the sacraments visible, the baptismal
font and the Lord’s Supper. And so the showbread arrived
yesterday. I do not recommend eating it,
even if you were like David and on the run from your enemies
and without food, that will not taste good. Well, in our passage
tonight, chapter 10, we are following up on a number of weeks of study,
a couple weeks of study, where there’s been a lot of Bible reading. And in addition to the Bible
reading, there’s been a whole lot of repenting. And those two
things go hand in hand. As we read the word and as we
meditate on the word, And as the spirit works in us, we begin
to see where we fall short of God’s glory. And we begin to
see where we need to set our lives to follow after the pattern
of scriptures. And so that’s where the people
of God are. These Israelites who’ve returned
from Babylon, these Israelites who are a hundred years, maybe
the third or fourth wave of people who’ve been returning since Cyrus
issued the decree that we read about in the book of Ezra. And
so, after all this scripture reading, after all this Bible
reading, after all these feasts and festivals that have been
kept, after all this repenting, now what? What do we do next? Well, I can’t help but think
of the words of John the Baptist, when people came to him to be
washed. in the waters of the Jordan River, washed and made
clean because of their sins, he would say to them, go and
bear fruit in keeping with your repentance. And in a sense, where
the people who left the waters of the Jordan were, where these
people are in our passage tonight, this is also really where we
are every Sunday when we renew covenant with God. When you are
given the benediction and you leave Sunday morning service
in particular, We should go out into the world, remembering that
we have renewed covenant with God in our worship service, and
we should go to bear fruit in keeping with our repentance.
And by that task, we should probably think more on Sunday and a little
on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday.
We should think through what we heard and how our lives can
respond to God’s word. A listener last Sunday morning,
as y’all were, to our guest preacher, and I took notes, and on Monday
morning I woke up, was starting my day, and I got those notes
out and I looked over them. It was very helpful to read over
them and to remember the three things that we learned on Sunday,
how to be sure you’re a Christian, you have a spiritual relationship
with Jesus. You have a moral life, right?
You’re obligated to obey God and live as a transformed person.
And then our relationship with other Christians, if you take
God as your God, you’ve got to take God’s people as your own.
And so it was good to remember that and maybe pray through it
during the week. And this, Example here in our
passage tonight of covenant renewal ought to give us a little maybe
outline or to-do list as we renew covenant with God week by week
or day by day. So now what? Go and do what the
Bible says. Now what? Go and bear fruit in
keeping with repentance. Now go and show your faith by
your works. Follow through on what God has
taught you. There’s a pretty standard cycle
of the Christian life that we find throughout the Bible, and
it’s faith, repentance, and obedience. Our faith remembers what God
has said. Our repentance says, I want to
turn from my wicked ways. And then we endeavor to live
obedient lives. That does happen when we first
become Christians. We come to saving faith. We repent
of our sins and we want to obey and walk in newness of life with
Jesus. But that happens often. Doesn’t
it? In our lives of covenant renewal
before God, Martin Luther said that the life of the Christian
should be a life of continual repentance. So faith and repentance
and obedience. Obedience is a fitting response,
isn’t it? To God’s grace and to God’s generosity. So we want to think tonight about
the covenant renewal. of the covenant community. We
want to think about the covenant keepers and also the covenant
particulars. Let’s first think about covenant
renewal. Isn’t it wonderful in God’s economy that we can have
fresh starts? We can have fresh starts every
day. We rise from the death of sleep
and we rise to a new day, to new life, to serve God. Today
is the first day of the week, isn’t it? Sunday, the Sabbath.
And so we rise this week to put last week behind us and to do
this week well. Maybe you plan out your month
or you plan out your quarter. In about eight weeks or so, we’ll
all be thinking about the new year. You know, we’re gonna eat
less ice cream, we’re gonna lose weight, we’re gonna buy a treadmill,
and then we’re gonna sell it in two weeks. We’re gonna join
the Y and then never go. But it’s gonna be a time of New
Year’s resolutions. And so covenant renewal is a
good thing. Covenant renewal, recognizing
failures and desiring to be faithful, that’s a wonderful thing. Sometimes
we renew our marriage vows. You know, it’s been a while,
and so we renew our vows. The Bible, our confession of
faith in catechisms tell us that, you know, we’re baptized once,
but at the baptism of another we’re to remember our baptism,
that we were brought into the covenant community by the blood
of the Lord Jesus. And we’re even told in the larger
catechism to improve our baptism, to think on it, to think on our
relationship with Jesus. You think about from time to
time, Maybe the church gets a little wishy-washy, the broader church. And so there are declarations
made, like 10 years or so ago, the evangelical church said,
let’s come together and make the Manhattan Declaration. Let’s
be faithful to God again, church. And before that, there was the
Lausanne Declaration. And throughout history, there
have been covenant renewals among God’s people. Let’s strive to
be faithful again. Well, covenant renewal is not
a strange thing to the scriptures. Remember Joshua, when Israel
has entered the promised land, Joshua says to the people, It’s
time to renew covenant. There’s a bunch of Canaanites.
There’s a bunch of foreigners in this land. There’s a bunch
of idols. And, and if you’re not careful, you could fall away
in a generation from God. And of course we read the book
of judges and that’s exactly what happened. There arose a
generation that didn’t know Yahweh or what he had done for Israel. But you remember at the end of
Joshua, I think we studied that about a year ago, Joshua said to the people, be
careful. Don’t, don’t say, Oh yes, Lord, we’ll make a covenant
because he says, you can’t do it. And if you fail, he’s going
to be really upset and it’s not going to go well with you. Well,
verse 38 tells us of the situation of the people of God, because
of all this, they’ve been reading the Bible. They’ve been seeing
their sins. They’ve been repenting. So because of all this, we make
a firm covenant in writing. And we sign our names, our seals,
they pledge, they bind themselves, bind themselves to God and to
one another to agree to walk with the Lord. And in fact, if
you read chapter 10, verse 29, it says, we join with our brothers
and we enter into a curse and an oath to walk in God’s law
that was given by Moses, the servant of God. bind ourselves to observe and
do all the commandments of the Lord. our Lord and his rules
and his statutes. And so this covenant renewal
is an important moment in the life of the church. It’s legal,
it’s binding. If they fail, they have already
spoken curses on themselves. If we fail, Lord, you may do
to us what has come. Now, remember they’re saying
that after they just got home from the big covenant curse of
exile. And so the whole covenant community
is pledging the blessings and the curses. It’s their idea. This is not something God comes
to them and says, all right, boys and girls, it’s time to
renew covenant. It’s their idea. They’ve been reading the Bible.
It’s their idea. They want to walk with God and
be faithful. It’s their idea. They want the city of Jerusalem,
uh, the witness among the watching world to be a faithful witness. And so there’s great danger and
failure, and there’s great hope and obedience, and it’s by God’s
grace, it’s with the help of the Lord that they can do these
things. In fact, I’m thinking of one
of our church membership vows, with the Lord’s help, do you
promise to be faithful in your Christian duties? It’s not, do
you promise to be faithful in your Christian duties? with the
Lord’s help, do you promise by grace, with his help, we commit
ourselves to the Lord. I wonder, just a little time
to stop and think, take stock. It’s not even New Year’s, but
good time to do it every Sunday, right? Are you wallowing and
wandering in your Christian walk? Are there days that go by where
you don’t think on God, pray to God, read his word, meditate
on it? Do you get busy? Perhaps it might be good to renew
covenant with God and say, I want to study, I want to learn, and
I want to sit under the teaching of God’s word. Well, that’s what
the people of God want to do. And it’s almost as if they’re
holding hands and they’re going to do one, two, three, jump,
right? One, two, three, covenant renewal. One, two, three, let’s
do this thing together. And so the covenant renewal involves
the whole covenant community. That’s what we want to think
of secondly, All the names. This is a declaration. We, the
people of God, we, the redeemed ones who’ve joined together,
we have rehearsed our sins. We want to make a break with
our evil ways and our wicked neighbors. We want to repent.
We want to turn. And so from 938 all the way to
1028, you get all these names, hard to pronounce names, names
you probably wouldn’t give your boys. These are their names. These are their seals. 21 priests
put down there, John Hancock, 17 Levites and 44 chiefs of the
families. And if you look at verse 28 of
chapter 10, it says, the rest of the people. So you’ve
got the priests, the Levites, the chiefs, and the rest of the
people, the priests, the gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants,
everyone who separated themselves from the peoples of the land
to the law of God, their wives, their sons, their daughters,
and all who have knowledge and understanding join with their
brothers. And so the covenant community
comes together. These are the separated ones
from the wickedness of the land. These are their offspring. These
are the future generations of God’s people. They’re distinct,
they’re holy, they’re sold out for Yahweh, as we might say. And this is a great visible line
in the sand for the people of God to say, as for me and my
house, as for we in the whole covenant community, we will serve
the Lord. And so there was a great revival.
of God’s law, God’s ways, and God’s works. They did this all
together. They were willing, they moved
together, and they speak in the plural. This is a we, the church
effort. They’re gonna do this together.
There’ll be encouragement as they do it together. There will
be accountability as they do this together. But they desired
to serve the Lord. They desired to keep covenant.
And it’s a good reminder, I think, that as we identify with God’s
people, as we say, I am part of the church, I am part of the
called out ones. That’s literally the word church,
right? Ek, from out of. The gathering, we’re the gathered
ones from out of the world. We are God’s chosen ones, his
holy ones. And it’s good for us to separate
ourselves from the world and identify with God’s people. It’s
why we like to, Affirm our faith through the
creed, I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven
and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his son, our Lord. We say the
things that we believe and hold us as separate and different
from the rest of the world. And so these folks desire to
serve the living God and they separate themselves from evil
and attach themselves to the law. They separate themselves
from a lawlessness and maybe individualism and autocracy,
self-rule, and they attach themselves to God’s law, His kingship. And so this is a mighty, strong,
and great action that they take. We are not of the world, we are
citizens of heaven. We are God’s people, consecrated,
set apart. So we got covenant renewal. We’ve
got the whole covenant community. Now we want to think about the
covenant keepers. What is the thing they intend to do? What
is the covenant they intend to keep? What does their life now
look like? Um, well, verse 29 gives us,
gives us a clue. Uh, we joined together with our
brothers and enter into a curse and an oath to walk in God’s
law. That’s what they’ve been reading
for a month. that was given by Moses, the servant of God. And
we want to observe and do all the commandments the Lord teaches. So on Sunday mornings, we’ve
been saying, don’t do the ceremonial law, right? You got Jesus, so
you don’t need to do the ceremonial law. Well, come to church on
Sunday night and read Nehemiah. They’re gonna do the ceremonial
law. In fact, they’re gonna chop wood and bring it to the temple.
They’re gonna give the shekels and the offerings and all the
rest. So thank the Lord, we’re Galatians people, right? Don’t
have to keep the law, just trust in Jesus. But for them, before
Jesus, they’ve got to observe the law of Moses, including the
ceremonial law. And so they wanna be covenant
keepers. They want to be faithful to the
scriptures. And there’s three verbs that
pop up. They want to walk, they want
to observe, and they want to do. They want to walk in God’s
ways. They want to walk in God’s commandments.
They want to observe them. They want to, to, to see them,
to read them, to know them, but to keep them and to do them.
We remember that God’s word is the only rule of faith and practice. The scripture is our only guide
of what to believe. and how to act, what to believe
and how to practice church life and regular daily life. And so
they’re putting themselves under authority. They’re putting themselves
under the command of almighty God because his word has so impressed
them. that they willingly seek this
obligation and desire to do it. This is a radical way of life,
isn’t it? This is a commitment. And isn’t
it very different than what we hear in the world today? You
just pray this prayer and you’re now a Christian. And you won’t
burn in hell, right? That’s kind of how salvation
goes in the American culture. It’s fire insurance. It’s, as
we say, the get out of hell free card. Of course, y’all are learning
better when you go to union with Christ Sunday school class and
you realize all that you are in Christ, all that you have
in Christ. and all that we do in Christ. It’s a way of life. It’s radical. It’s a commitment
to live out our faith and our practice, our doctrine and our
duties from the scripture. They’re all centered around the
Bible and what God has spoken to us. So these covenant keepers
are going to be a great witness before all the enemies. Remember
all those people that said, you can’t build the wall. All those
people said, you can’t build the temple. All those people
that wrote nasty letters off to the occupying rulers. These people are rebellious.
They’re seditious. They’re going to build a kingdom
and they’re going to rebel against you. And they’re going to hide
in their little fort called Jerusalem and When you come to try to get
your tribute, there’s going to be this great rebellion. None
of that’s going to be true. These are going to be covenant
keeping faithful members of the covenant community, as well as
be faithful people under the authority of the occupying king
that rules them through the governorship of Nehemiah. And it’s a good
thing to remember, I think, in this culture, your little bright, shiny light
that emanates from your life may be the only light that people
see. You know, we’re coming out of the era where, you know, we
had these big crusades and thousands of people supposedly got saved
and churches are big and, you know, churches are shopping malls
and all the rest, big, big churches. Everything’s big, big, big, big,
big. And, and, and, you know, it could be that every time you
wheel out the trash, your neighbor sees a hint of godliness in you
and that’s all they ever see. It could be that in your quiet
spirit at work or the way you treat others out in public. So
as you go in the neighborhood, in the marketplace, and go out
into the places where you go, your best witness is to be a
covenantally faithful person before God and the watching world. And by God’s grace, when you
endeavor to live this way, perhaps, The light of God, the witness
of Jesus is made known to the ends of the earth. Well, when
we realize all that God has done for us in Christ, when they realize
that they’ve been brought back from Babylon, when they realize
that they’ve been able to rebuild the city and reestablish worship,
when we realize all that Jesus has done for us, we should live
lives of thanksgiving. We should seek to live lives
that please God and bear fruit, and that there’s evidence of
our faith, a lively faith. And we’re enabled by God’s grace
to do that. If it were left to us, we’d be
negligent, we’d be weak, and we’d be unprofitable servants.
And we could not pass the judgment of God, but thank the Lord for
Jesus, who came to this earth to please his heavenly father. He came to this earth to do his
father’s will, and he’s done his father’s will for us. When God sees us as if we’ve
never sinned, he sees Jesus’ sinless life. And when God sees
us as if we’ve always obeyed, he sees Jesus’ perfect life that’s
given to us by faith. And so we could never pass as
covenant keepers because we’re covenant breakers, but thank
the Lord for Jesus Christ, the great covenant keeper. Well,
as we think of this covenant renewal and the covenant people
and the covenant duties that we’ve thought about, let’s think
about the covenant particulars. This is the last one. There’s
a couple areas where they want to do better, we might say. They want to do well. So it’s a couple, Weeks, eight
weeks or so before the new year, and we want to do better in 2024,
right? It’s good to make an assessment
of where maybe particularly we could do better. I should eat
one hamburger, not two. I should eat one bowl of ice
cream. per night and not two or three
or whatever it is. It’s good to also take stock
spiritually and say, Lord, show me some areas where I’m weak
in my covenant faithfulness. Well, here. Remember, it’s a
month into the new year. They think through a couple of
things. They want to be more faithful in the area of marriage.
They want to be more faithful in the area of Sabbath, and they
want to be more faithful in the area of worship. And so you get these verses 30
and then 31 and then 32 to 39, where they speak of these things.
Verse 30, they speak of marriage. We will not give our daughters
to the people of the land. or take their daughters for our
sons. So one of the covenant particulars
where they want to be more faithful, they want their sons to marry
believing wives of the same stock, of the same people. They want
believing marriages because they want believing grandchildren.
And believing grandchildren will beget more believing grandchildren. Remember, One of the big problems
that has already occurred in the covenant community, and it’s
going to come again after Nehemiah has to reform the people again
in a number of years from this point. But they made eyes with
the foreign women, right? They made alliances with their
people. They brought them into their homes. They married them
and they had foreign children. That was Solomon’s downfall,
wasn’t it? It was the downfall of many,
but they said, you know what? This is sacred. Our marriages,
our people, our heritage is sacred. And these offspring need to be
godly seed. And so in faith, they avoided
the snares and the detestable nature of foreign marriages.
They had been warned of it. They had seen evidence of how
disastrous it was. Paul speaks of this when he says,
don’t be unequally yoked. Ezra has already dealt with this
and some of the reforms and it’s going to come up again. So take
heed. There’s always a danger to say,
well, you know, what do we call it? We call it missionary dating,
right? The person is so handsome or so beautiful. And I’m pretty
sure if I’m around them a while, they’ll come around to loving
Jesus too. Well, your romance and your good looks are not going
to woo a person from death to life. Only God by his word and
spirit will do that. And so we ought to take heed
of the warnings of scripture in the old and in the new covenant.
Don’t be unequally yoked. And so marriage is one of the
covenant particulars they speak of, but they also speak of the
Sabbath and that pops up in verse 31. And if the peoples of the
land, that’s all the pagan neighbors, bring in goods or any grain on
the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath
day or on a holy day. And we will forgo the crops of
the seventh year and the action of every debt. There’s two aspects
here of the Sabbath. One is the day of rest and worship.
It’s not a day to trade, not a day to, you know, to get a
move on for the week ahead. It’s a day of rest and worship.
It’s a day to honor the Lord and declare his goodness and
to serve him and serve others. Remember the tyranny that they
were under in Egypt. And so part of the promised land
and part of the Sabbath was to give them rest. You’ve just been
under the tyranny of Babylon and now you’ve been brought back
into the promised land. It’s good for you to rest. But there’s
also the seventh year where the land should lie fallow. And if
you’ll remember the prayers of Daniel and others, that’s one
of the reasons they were gone 70 years. They had not let the
land have its rest. And so they promised we’re gonna
keep Sunday, well, for them, Saturday Sabbath, and we’re gonna
keep the land and the debt Sabbath. We’ll give people a break. We’ll
release them from their debts. And then there’s a third particular,
And this is the longer one. It’s in the area of worship.
And if you read through 32 through 39, as we did earlier, they want
to make sure the wood is chopped. The animals are there for sacrifice. They want to make sure the priest
and the Levites and all the others who depend on the people of God
for their wellbeing and their, their, their keep. have the tithe,
have the first fruits, have all that is needed. I’m thankful
today I get paid in dollars and not Bitcoin. But I’m also thankful
I get paid not in corn or in coins. But back in the days,
even not too many days gone by, preachers still sort of got paid
by the Levites. We’ll put you up in a house.
Um, and we’ll give you the produce of the land. If you’ve ever been
in a rural congregation, that’s often the case. Well, we’re preacher,
we’re slaughtering hogs. How about some bacon that’ll
last you the winter? I would take that. Um, especially
if it was thick sliced. That’d be super good. But that’s
often how the Levites and the priest and maybe some preachers
and the not too distant past for us lived. It was by the produce
of the land that the people also lived off of. But that you see
their great commitment. They want to provide for the
house of God, provide for the church of God. And I think in
a sense we have that today. We have people that, you know,
they want the flowers to look nice. People that come in, they
vacuum, they straighten up. Um, you know, we got our, our
lovely new show bread. We have somebody that comes in
and sets up communion for us, which we’ll have in two weeks
and, and we’ll walk in here on Sunday and just, there it is.
Poof. Um, it’s not magic. Uh, they’re not here tonight,
but it’s, it’s Jill and Joel. And I don’t have to fuss about
it, worry about it, think about it. It just, it just happens. And there’s things like that
in the church because people make covenant to serve God and
to make sure worship can happen and other things. Well, what
have these folks done? And what have these folks done
that we can do ourselves? I think it’s this. We can make
a firm promise to God, God with your help. God with your grace,
God with your mercy, God with your strength, my response to
my salvation through faith in Jesus, my gratitude for Jesus
taking away my guilt and my sin and my shame is I can serve you
in tangible ways. We think of, I think it’s Psalm
116, which we sometimes sing at communion. We sing it after
communion. Lord, what fit response can I
make for all that you’ve done for me? We’ve just been at the
table. We’ve just seen the body. We’ve just seen the blood of
Jesus. We’ve just remembered Calvary. We’ve just remembered
the wrath of God. Lord, what fit return can I make? We can sing, we can worship,
and we can serve. We can serve the Lord’s people
under the Lord’s rule at the Lord’s house. And when we serve
the Lord’s people, we remember we are not our own, but we’ve
been enjoined to others. When we serve under the Lord’s
rule, we remember we’re not autocrats, but we have King Jesus who rules
us. He is not just our savior, he’s our Lord. And then we remember
where the Lord’s house, the presence, that’s the goal, isn’t it? I
think it’s been well said, if you don’t like church, you’re
not gonna like heaven. Because if you don’t like church,
heaven is gonna be the people of God and the presence of God
forever. And so we should make this firm
promise not to neglect God’s standards, his laws, his worship,
and his people. Let’s do pray together. Lord,
sometimes we grow lukewarm and you wish that we would either
be hot or cold, you promise to spit out those who can’t decide
because we’re incomplete, we’re apathetic, we’re asleep in your
church. Lord, take away our lukewarmness.
Help us to be hot. Help us to be on fire, as we
say. Help us to desire to live by
your word. and to live by your ways according
to your commandments. We remember the one whom you
love, you reprove and you discipline. So we want to be zealous and
we want to repent. Hear us and help us, we pray
in Christ’s name, amen.