1 Corinthians 13:13; Mark 12:28-34
Please be seated. We have three scripture readings today. The first is from Psalm 100, and then over to Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 12. And then we’ll look today at 1 Corinthians 13, the conclusion to the church. The church is called to be a loving church. And so first in Psalm 100, all five verses, you have, sort of a standard call to worship hymn. It tells us that we should worship, why we should worship. and then gives us the reasons and the blessings that we have when we come together to God. So Psalm 100 is a Psalm for giving thanks.
And it says this, make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth and serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with singing. Know that the Lord, he is God. It is he who made us and we are his. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. enter his gates with thanksgiving, enter his courts with praise, give thanks to him and bless his name for the Lord is good. And his steadfast love endures forever. And his faithfulness is to all generations.
Then over to Mark chapter 12, beginning at verse 28, this is Jesus teaching on the great commandment. And so the sum of the law, you have the Old Testament, civil law, that was Israel. You have the Old Testament ceremonial law, that was all the sacrifices. But then you have what we’re familiar with, the Old Testament moral law, which is summarized in the Ten Commandments. Jesus fulfilled that moral law for us, and so when we have faith in him, we are counted righteous in his sight. But because we have new hearts, we are given the new commandment, which is to obey God’s law, not for salvation, but for giving glory to God and serving others. And so the sum of the law is this.
One of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another and seeing that he, Jesus, answered them well, asked him which commandment is the most important of all. Jesus answered, the most important is here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. The scribe said to Jesus, you are right, teacher, you have truly said he, that’s God, is one and there is no other beside him. And to love him with all the heart, with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more than the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. And after that, no one dared to ask. Any more questions?
And then our passage for the day from first Corinthians is the very end of chapter 13. And remember, the congregation at Corinth is having a lot of trouble. They’re suing each other. Some are following Paul, Apollo. Some are following Peter. Some are following Jesus. Lots of divisions, lots of immorality.
And then they’re having trouble with spiritual gifts. You know, I have this gift. You don’t. I have this gift and you don’t round around that went. And remember what Paul said when we looked at the whole chapter of 13, uh, you can have all the great gifts, but not love. And you’re just a big noise maker.
Uh, and so today we want to look at, uh, a little statement he makes at the end in verse 13. And he says this. So now faith, hope, and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love. Let’s do pray together. Lord, we pray that you would convince and convert men and women and boys and girls unto salvation with your most holy word. And that also today by your word and by your sacrament, by our time together in your house, you would comfort and build up saints in the most holy faith we ask in Christ’s name, amen.
I’m sure some of you have sat on a three-legged stool Just a simple stool. Maybe some of you were in a farm community and sat on a three-legged milking stool that made it into the den of the farmhouse. Perhaps you have been to your retirement advisor, and they’ve told you the three-legged stool of retirement. Your social security, your pension, and then your own savings. Or perhaps a life coach has told you about the three-legged stool of life. You need to take time for work, time for self, and time for relationships. And then there’s the three-legged stool of business. It’s information, it’s manpower, and it’s capital.
But what about for Christianity? For Christianity, what is the three-legged stool? Well, in the historic Christian faith passed on from the apostles through the early church, the medieval church, and even since Reformation, post-Reformation up to our times, the three-legged stool for Christianity is faith, hope, and love. Faith, hope, and love are the three legs of the stool, which we ought to constantly see in our lives as the things necessary to grow in our faith, to walk with the Lord in confidence, and to worship him.
St. Augustine, the fourth century bishop of A hippo in North Africa had a disciple named Laurentius and Laurentius said to Father Augustine, St. Augustine, would you write me a little book, a pocket-sized book that I could carry with me, that I could keep by my bedside and it would help me understand, it would remind me of the bottom line of the Christian life. And so one of St. Augustine’s lesser known books, one of his smaller books, I think he wrote close to a hundred, was the handbook on faith, hope, and love. And in that book to Laurentius, he writes a primer on what to believe, that’s faith, what to hope for, that’s heaven, and who are the objects of our love, which are God and one another. Several books over the centuries of church history have been written variations on the theme of faith, hope, and love.
And wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t think of this till last night. It’s bad when the preacher knows he doesn’t remember that he has a book and it really would have helped. But I remembered it last night, and it’s a little book by Mark Jones called Faith, Hope, and Love, The Christ-Centered Way to Grow in Grace. If you want a good read, Mark Jones is a pretty funny guy, pretty good writer, very good theologian.
But he’s written a modern-day, what, 100-page or so book on faith, hope, and love, and it’s in catechism form, question and answer. So the three-legged stool of faith, hope, and love is a really big deal for Christians throughout the centuries, but it’s also a pretty big deal in the Bible. There are these faith, hope, and love triads or triangles throughout the New Testament, most of them by the apostle Paul. Most of them are faith, hope, and love, but sometimes the order is different. Peter has one or two, and the writer of Hebrews, not Paul, some of you, well, we’ll argue that later, right? But Hebrews has a triad or two.
And the familiar one that we ought to remember, or well, at least we’ve heard it, is in the Thessalonian thanksgiving. So after the book of Acts, I think we first went into first, second Thessalonians, then Galatians, And I guess somehow we’re at Corinthians now, but remember, remember, remember the opening Thanksgiving that Paul gives to the Thessalonian church.
He says, we give thanks to God always for you as Thessalonians constantly mentioning you in our prayers. So when Paul and his missionary companions are having prayer time, They constantly pray for the Thessalonians, and one of their constant prayers is a prayer of thanksgiving. And they remember before God, our God and Father, they remember the work of faith of the Thessalonians, the labor of love of the Thessalonians, and the steadfast hope of the Thessalonians that they have in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me repeat that. He remembers the Thessalonians in prayer, and one of the prayers of thanksgiving is Their work of faith.
They’re doing good stuff for God, for the church, work of faith. They’re doing labors of love. Remember, they’re being persecuted pretty badly, but they’re laboring in love in spite of it. And then their steadfastness of hope, which is anchored and rooted in the Lord Jesus Christ. So faith, hope and love. We have our three legged stools for retirement, for life, for business and for other activities. The three legs give stability without one, you’re going to tip over. Um, and so we have a three legged stool for Christianity and faith.
Uh, here is, I’ll explain all these little more, but it’s faith in Jesus Christ. Uh, our hope is in the second coming or the fullness of our salvation. We have salvation now, but we’re going to have salvation fully when Jesus comes. And then our love is our love for our fellow man.
And these three things, faith, hope, and love, help us endure as Christians. In fact, they are essential. Paul has said to the Corinthians, if y’all don’t get the love thing figured out, your church is going to crash and burn. And so the bottom line for believers, you could say, the bottom line for Christians is faith, hope, and love. And so while we wait for the return of Jesus, we need faith, hope and love to be increasing in equal measure in our lives.
We need love, we need faith, we need hope, we need all three, we need them individually, but they work together just like the legs of a stool. So today you want to look at faith, hope, and love. That would be three points, I suppose. We want to answer five questions, though. What is faith? What is hope? What is love? How are they connected? And then, which ones last forever? So first, what is faith?
Our passage says, so now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. So remember in the context of verse Corinthians, I think we looked at this two weeks ago, Paul has said to the Corinthians, some who think they’re mature and some who think they’ve arrived, we only have, and we only see partially, But when we get to heaven, we will have fully and we will see fully, but right now it’s only partial. And so he said, when he says now faith, hope, and love abide, we have them now. But two of them will drop off and we will only have in heaven. We will have love, which is the greatest of the three Christian virtues. So what is faith?
Okay. That’s a complicated question. You can read the Bible and find three uses for faith. You can come to Jude where the writer, Jude, Jesus’ half brother says, I wanted to write to you all about our common faith. I wanted to write about something happy, but instead I had to write to you and tell you to contend for the faith.
Now, what he means there with his use of faith is the content of what we believe. And so faith is the content, at least in one explanation, faith is the content of what we believe. Somebody might say I’m of the Baptist faith. Or we might say we are of the Reformed faith. Someone else might say I’m of the Greek Orthodox faith or the Catholic faith. So we use faith to describe or to, it’s a term for the content of what we believe.
Jude says, I was going to write to you about something happy, but I had to tell you to contend for the faith. We speak of the faith once and for all delivered to the saints. It’s the foundation of the apostles and the church when it’s faithful builds on that. Remember what Paul says at the beginning of Corinthians, there’s a foundation for the church and it’s the apostolic faith.
And good builders build with stone. They build with good materials. Bad builders build with wood, hay, and stubble. What will happen at the last day when the church is judged? The wood, hay, and stubble will burn up, but what will last? The stones and the gold and the precious metals.
And so faith, what is faith? It’s the content of what we believe. Our Westminster Confession of Faith and shorter and larger catechisms tell us that the Bible is our only rule of faith and practice. So faith and practice, two big words in our Presbyterian camp, as it were. And so the Bible tells us what to believe, that’s our faith. But the Bible tells us how to practice our faith, how to worship, how to live, all that. So what is faith? Well, it could be the content of what we believe. And then it gets more complicated. Faith is the instrument of our salvation. We are saved. We are justified in the presence of God by faith. In the Greek language, that’s the instrumental use.
You know, it’s baseball season coming up. That’s what spring training. What does every baseball player have? They have batting practice. And when they walk up to home plate to hit a ball, what do they have in their hand? They have a bat. The bat is the instrument by which they hit the ball. They do not bring a tennis racket, a pickleball racket. They don’t bring a cricket racket or paddle or whatever. They bring a bat. The bat is the instrument of a baseball player.
And so what is the instrument for us, for salvation? It is faith. By faith, we are saved. Now that’s swirling around in your head, I know, but we’re gonna go to the next one. And this is the one we all understand. Faith is our trust. Faith is our belief.
Faith is an action by which we realize we’re sinners, We realize God is a God of wrath and justice. He can’t overlook sin. And so his wrath and his vengeance for sin will come unless we rest in Jesus and escape it. But we believe that by faith, we’re sinners. God is a just God, righteous and holy, and that he has put our sin on Jesus and therefore turned aside his wrath.
And so by faith, that’s the instrument. When we believe, that’s faith. We trust in Him, rest in Him for our salvation. And that’s how often we think of what is faith. Well, faith has an object. Faith is in Jesus Christ. Faith has a pattern. It’s our lifelong obedience to Jesus Christ. Our faith is alone.
We say faith in Jesus plus nothing equals salvation. It’s not faith plus a little works, faith plus a little… Maybe spiritual gifts, faith plus something. No, it’s Jesus and nothing is salvation. And so faith is alone. But then we also say, because we’re tricky, you know, reformed Presbyterians, we also say faith is not alone.
A real faith will be a lively faith and a fruitful faith. And so what is the proof of faith? It’s good works. Not good works that will save us, but good works that show James says that we are indeed saved now all that is really tricky so quick little tedious summary of that faith is the content of what we believe we’re Christian faith reform faith whatever Baptist faith faith is the instrument by faith we’re saved but faith is also our action our belief our trust we come to Hebrews and Hebrews chapter 11 clears it up by faith And it describes faith is the assurance of things hoped for it’s the conviction of things not seen and for for by it the people of old received their Condemnation in Habakkuk and then quoted in Romans quoted in Hebrews. It says the righteous live by faith and so when we look at Jesus and see that his righteousness is perfect obedience is ours by faith and We live by faith in His righteousness, not ours wouldn’t work. And so the righteous live by faith. So faith obeys, faith loves, faith looks towards heaven, faith prays, faith does all kinds of things. In Hebrews 11, you get all kinds of examples.
Abel, by faith, offered a better sacrifice than his brother Cain. Cain offered a faithless sacrifice of fruit. the produce of his garden, the produce of his farm field. But by faith, Abel offered a blood sacrifice and God had regard for it. By faith, Enoch walked with God and God took him. Enoch went to heaven without dying.
By faith, Noah spent over a hundred years building an ark, believing that inside that ark, his family would have salvation from the rain and the floods that would destroy the earth. By faith, Abram, Not yet Abraham, but Abram just meaning simply father. Abram left Ur of the Chaldees and went to the promised land.
By faith, Sarah, when she was old, gave birth to the promised one, to Isaac. And then by faith, now Abraham, which meant father of many, Abraham marched up Mount Moriah with his son, with wood on his back, with fire in his hand, and a knife with which to slaughter him. And on that mountain, which he walked up resolutely, the book of Hebrews tells us that he believed God, who required his son’s life, he believed God could raise him from the dead. And so by faith, Abraham marched right up that mountain, ready to put the knife into his only son, the child of promises body, because he believed that it was the command of God and that God could bring him back from the dead.
And by faith, Isaac blessed his sons. By faith, Joseph told his sons, take my bones out of Egypt and bury them in the promised land. By faith, Moses’ parents put him in the basket in the bulrushes to spare him from Pharaoh’s edict to kill all the firstborn boys of Israel. By faith, Moses, when he was about 40 years old, he left behind the riches of being a prince And he identified with the people of God and went into the wilderness to prepare to be a shepherd to lead them.
By faith, Israel crossed the Red Sea. By faith, Israel marched around Jericho and the walls fell down. And by faith, Rahab, who was a Gentile, believed in the stories that she heard of God’s redemption of Israel. And she was spared her family with her. by the scarlet cord hanging from her window when the walls of Jericho came down. How about us when we face trials or we go through storms of life or perhaps when God is chastening us? Are we people of faith?
What does Jesus say to the generation that he preaches to? Don’t be anxious. And then he says, Oh, you have little faith. And so anxiety and faith are opposites. And this world gives us lots of things to be anxious about. It could be finances. It could be health. It could be relationships. It could be who knows what, but we can have lots of anxiety. And what would Jesus tell us? Don’t worry about it. I feed the Ravens. I clothe the lilies of the field. Don’t be anxious. Remember the centurion whose child Jesus healed and the centurion came to Jesus and persisted. I need you to come heal my sick child. And after the healing took place, what did Jesus say? There has never been before my eyes a faith like his. Or how about the disciples on the stormy sea? They’re coming unglued. These are fishermen who live on boats. They’re unglued because of the storm. And what does Jesus say to the storm? Peace, be still. But the disciples could not hold it together.
We have been saved by God’s grace. We’ve been given eyes to see and ears to hear. We’ve been given hearts to receive the good news of the gospel. We understand the Christian faith. We have assented to the Christian faith and we are walking in the Christian faith. But what does that look like? How do we, how do we spell it out?
True faith according to our Heidelberg catechism is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to me in the scripture, but it is also a wholehearted trust that he gives by the Holy Spirit. that’s created in us by the gospel. And it tells us, it reminds us, it assures us that God has granted not only to others, but to me also the forgiveness of sins.
And he’s given us eternal righteousness and he’s given us everlasting salvation. And these are gifts of God’s sheer grace. And so faith is being fully assured these things are so. These things are so by the merit and the gift and the love of Jesus. And so what will build up our faith? It’s the word, it’s the sacraments, it’s prayer, it’s being together in God’s house.
Now, unbelief is the opposite of faith and unbelief is the sin that Jesus says will not be pardoned. And so if you don’t believe, if you don’t have faith in Jesus, if you don’t have faith in Christ alone, For salvation alone, that unbelief will keep you from having everlasting peace. It will keep you from having everlasting joy. But we also, as believers, can neglect our faith. I’m sure that each of us has been through times where life got busy, life got hard, and we put away our Bibles, we maybe less frequently attended church. We didn’t give our attention to the sacraments or Christian brothers and sisters.
And we begin to dry up. We begin to shrivel up like a raisin in the sun. And that can happen to us. And so our faith goes up and down. It’s strong when God is at work in our lives and we’re not neglecting the means of grace. But it can be weak, particularly when we are living in sin. Our faith can be so far down that we feel like perhaps we are unsaved. And so our faith needs nurture. It needs attention.
That’s what the whole book of Hebrews is about, isn’t it? Don’t neglect such a great salvation. So what is faith? That’s a lot about faith. What is hope? I’ll probably say a little less about hope. but faith needed to have a lot said. So what is hope? That’s our second question. Again, our passage says, so now faith, hope, and love abide these three three-legged stool, but the greatest of these is love. I want to say about our hope very clearly.
Our hope is not in something that is in this world. There is lots of this world hope around us. I mean, we’re hoping for spring and here it comes today. We’re hoping for no more snow and sunny days. We’re hoping for maybe a little less rain. There’s lots of hope and fulfillment of those hopes in this world. But there is a worldly hope and there is a heavenly hope. And you begin to see the distinction between worldly hope and heavenly hope.
As the people who God created in Genesis begin to expand, uh, the people who know, love, and acknowledge God, they worship God and, and they simply live wherever God calls them. But the ones who don’t worship, acknowledge God, they put their hope in cities. You read the, the godly line goes this way and lives for God, the ungodly line in the Bible goes that way. And they build cities and they named the cities. Guess what? After themselves. And so St. Augustine, who wrote the Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love, also wrote his great work called The City of God and the City of Man.
There is Jerusalem, which is above, and there is Babylon, which is below. Read the Bible and Babylon bad, Jerusalem good. In fact, you read Book of Revelation and what are the great words that we want to hear one day? Fallen is Babylon. We want to see the new Jerusalem come down out of heaven where the the dwelling place of God is with man. He is our God and we are his people.
But there is a lot of this world hope. And as you see it unfold in the Bible with cities and with others who call on the name of the Lord, what you begin to see is people who calculate their worldly hope this way, the odds or the possibility or the calculation of this thing being a success are pretty good.
And so I’m going to hope in this, just go back to the three-legged stool of retirement. You hope Social Security will be there, right? Just go ahead and say it. You hope your pension fund will be there. You hope that your 401k will be there. If you sit down with a good financial advisor, they will dutifully tell you, you invest your money in the stock market, there’s no guarantee it will grow, but over the last hundred years, it’s grown at a rate of 10%. Now, can you expect a 10% rate average? Probably. What are the chances of it?
Pretty good. Now, you don’t want to retire in like 2008, you know, the crash. You don’t want to retire in When was the other one? 1929. You don’t want to try to retire in those years because your market value is pretty low. But what are the chances of you putting money away for a lot of years and it growing at 10%?
Probably pretty good. Is it sure? No. And so a lot of this world hope is based on the odds or calculations of success and probability and possibility. But hope for the Christian is something different. We’re told in the Bible that we are born again to a living hope.
We are told that our steadfastness of hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re told that our souls are anchored to Jesus in heaven. We’re told that instead of our anchors going down to the dirt of the sea, they go up to the throne of heaven. and the hooks of the anchor are attached to the throne of Jesus, which is beyond the curtain and in the inner sanctuary of heaven where Jesus sits. And so we have strong encouragement as believers to drop the this life, this world hope, and to put our hope only in what is firm and fixed and final and found only in heaven.
It is sure, it is steadfast. And it is eternal. And we are told to have strong encouragement and hold fast to that hope, which has been set before us. And that hope is in God’s promises. That hope is in the promises of God, which are sure, and they are yes and amen in Jesus. So how do we have confidence in the future? I mean, we should save, right? We should expect 10% returns. We should, you know, social security, all that. We should hope in that stuff. Should hope our house doesn’t fall down, those kinds of things.
But our ultimate hope is in Christ. Our ultimate hope is in God. Our ultimate hope is in his promises and that he will lead us home. What does the scripture say about our hope in Jesus? Though we do not see him, Yet we love him. Though we haven’t yet been to heaven, we long for that city. In fact, you read the book of Hebrews chapter 11, by faith, by faith, by faith.
What did those people all to a man not get in this life? The heavenly city. But what did they get when their life ended and they advanced to glory? They got the heavenly city. Now, I know we live in this world, which is full of thorns and thistles and heartaches and hardships. And life is very hard. We can get overwhelmed. Our tank can get empty. Our circumstances can be overwhelming. We can spiral down into the pit of despair and there is no staircase up.
And there’s a couple of things that believers can do. We can glimpse at the stars on a dark night and we can remember the promise to Abraham, count those stars and your offspring will outnumber the stars of heaven. Or we can stick our toes in the sand of the seashore and say the covenant promise to Abraham’s offspring is firm and fixed and final. and its foundation is in heaven, and it’s not a this world hope. We can also look at the lilies of the field and remember that God has arrayed them in all their splendor, and even Solomon, the wealthiest man who lived, was not even clothed like that.
I read an article this week that spoke of hope, hope in this world and hope in the next world. One is ordinary hope, that’s this world hope. The other is deep hope. And so when we are faced with anxiety and uncertainty and impossibility, we’re breathless, depressed, cast down, overwhelmed, out of gas, we can look to the little twinkling light that’s in the distance that can barely be seen through the darkness, through the clouds of this life.
That’s what Tolkien wrote in his trilogy, he wrote of Sam and Frodo making their way through Mordor, the dark area of the world. And they were dark clouds. They were in great despair. And they thought on an eerie, eerie night, this is it. This is the end. And while Frodo slept, Sam looked up to the heavens and through the dark clouds of this wicked world, he saw a little twinkling star.
And he had that overwhelming feeling that we sometimes get when we remember what is good, right, and true. And his despair turned into hope. And he was able to encourage his friend, let’s march on. Let’s press on and keep the faith. We sing that song from time to time, whatever God ordains is right. And we talk about how in the circumstances of life, we can’t see what God is up to, but there will be a day when the clouds break. There will be a day when we see what is ultimate and we have a clear picture, a clear hope and our despair turns to joy.
That’s how God encouraged the people of old. He showed heaven to Elijah. He showed heaven to Ezekiel. He showed heaven to Isaiah and he showed heaven to Paul and he showed heaven to John. And that was to give them a hope. This world is not all there is. There’s a heavenly reality. And if we are constant in prayer, patient in tribulation, and keep an eye on heaven, our hope will be the same as the people of faith. So what is faith? It’s complicated, but there we had it. What is hope? It’s not of this world, it’s of the next.
But what is love? Last time we looked at love, more thoroughly but remember our passage now faith hope and love abide these three but the greatest is love and we’ll just say a few things about love because we spent a whole Sunday on it but love we have to think of is the love God has for us it’s the life poured out for others love it’s the father on the porch looking for the prodigal son it’s the father who listens to us confess the same sin for the 700 time it’s a The love of Christ greater love hath no man than he would lay down his life for another in the Christian Church. It’s agape It’s not the other four or five loves in the Greek language, but it’s the agape love It’s the love where we don’t love someone because they deserve our affection or because they’re lovable We love them just because and isn’t that what God says to his people in the book of Deuteronomy? I didn’t set my affection on you because you were great I didn’t set my affection on you because you were numerous and In spite of popular evangelical theology, he did not look down the corridor of time and say, you’ll be swell. I love you. God loves the unlovable and that’s what he calls us to do.
And that’s what was missing in Corinth, the factions and the fissures and the lawsuits and the division in the congregation. You got the gift and I don’t, or I got the gift and you don’t. And what does Paul say? You can have faith that can move mountains, you can have the tongues, you can have the prophecies, but if you don’t have it, you’re just a noisy, loud gong clanging symbol.
And so love is the greatest of these three virtues. These are the gifts of God to the people of God to serve one another. And we need all three faith, hope, and love in life. It’s the three-legged stool. You lose one, you’ll fall over, right? But love is an important aspect of the Christian faith.
And here’s why it lasts forever. Faith one day will be sight. Our faith will be completed, as it were, in heaven when we see God fully. Our hope will be fulfilled when we get to heaven and see what we hoped for in its fullness. But the thing that will never end is love.
And why is that? Because it is the Trinitarian love of God, the father, God, the son, and God, the Holy spirit that we will see on display in heaven. It will be the object of our worship, the fuel of our worship, and it will be the thing that we see most clearly when we get there. Now, here’s a question.
What about Jesus? Did Jesus have these three virtues? Did he have faith, hope and love? Is there something in his life that we can see and we can imitate? Of course he had faith in God, the heavenly father. Of course he had hope in the salvation. He longed. It was for the joy set before him that he went to the cross. And of course he had the love for the father, but the love that the Father had for us. He also displayed for God so loved the world that he gave up his only son.
Here’s something about heaven that we ought to consider. Our hearts should now be, because they always will be, swelling with affection for Jesus and for God and for the Holy Spirit, swelling with affection to the God who loved us first, to the God who’s made us sons and made us heirs And one of the things we will never get over in heaven, we’ll never get over the beauty of the Lord and the grace that we will see in him when we see how much he delights in us. And we begin to understand just little by little how much he went through to seek and to save the lost.
And I believe we’ll see that in a moment at the Lord’s table. Pray with me. Our great God, we thank you for Faith, hope, and love, and pray that you would work each, all three in us so that we are stable and growing and powerful and effective Christians. Prepare our hearts and minds now as we prepare to come to your table and feed on your mercy. We pray in Christ’s name, amen.