2 Thessalonians 2:1-12
You can be seated. Please take
your copy of the scriptures. Turn to 2 Thessalonians 2, 1-12. We’re going to do round two on
this passage. Last week, we looked at the encouraging
side of it, which was that Christians ought to not be alarmed, not
be shaken, not be deceived. not fall into the prey of the
man of lawlessness or fall into the spirit of lawlessness, which
was scaring the Thessalonian church. So today we want to think
about the lawlessness side, what is the stretch of lawlessness,
what is the man of lawlessness and how we can have comfort and
help in that time. So I know we read this passage
last week, talked about it, but different angle this week. Let’s
give our attention now to God’s word. 2 Thessalonians 2 verses
1 through 12. Now concerning the coming of
our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, We ask
you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed either
by a spirit or a spoken word or a letter seeming to be from
us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no
one deceive you in any way, for that day will not come unless
the rebellion comes first. And the man of lawlessness is
revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself
against every so-called God or object of worship, so that he
takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to
be God. Do you not remember that when
I was still with you, I told you these things? And you know
what is restraining him now, so that he may be revealed in
his time. For the mystery of lawlessness
is already at work. Only he who now restrains it
will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless
one will be revealed whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the
breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance
of his coming. The coming of the lawless one
is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and
wonders. and with all wicked deception
for those who are perishing because they refused to love the truth
and so be saved. Therefore, God sends them a strong
delusion so that they may believe what is false in order that all
may be condemned who did not believe in the truth, but had
pleasure in unrighteousness. Let’s pray together. Lord, a
difficult word, but you can help us to believe and to understand
to receive and to put into practice the things that are written in
your scripture. So we ask for that grace, that
help now, we pray for it in Christ’s great and gracious name. Amen.
When I was a kid, growing up in church, mostly in the 1980s,
there was a book, I think I was in fifth or sixth grade, and
everybody was passing it around the church and it was called
88 Reasons. Some of y’all read it. Why Jesus is coming back
in 1988. Well, guess what? Didn’t happen. It’s either that or we’re a bunch
of fools. And then a couple of years later, it got revised and
it got expanded. And you know the drill, thousands
of pages of ink, lots of hours on television, you know, the
left behind series, the late great planet earth, the gotta
read the Bible in the newspaper. And you know, what’s Vladimir
Putin doing? Is he the king of the north?
And I mean, just all this craziness throughout the centuries, people
have looked and wondered and tried to figure out. And I remember
what I mentioned to you last week. What does Jesus say? Quit
all the tomfoolery of trying to figure out when, where, how,
and what only the father knows. Okay. Not some guy on channel
16. Channel 16 was the wacky TV preaching channel when I was
a kid up on Bass Mountain, back when antennas were the thing.
So the wacky guy on channel 16 does not know the day or the
hour, only the father knows. And I had this picture in mind
of Jesus, the king of the universe, doesn’t even know, but God is
going to give him the tap on the shoulder and say, it is time.
Go and receive for yourself the bride, which you have earned
and which you have brought about to be spotless and without blemish. Bring your church home to their
heavenly reward. How often has the second coming
been predicted? How often have we gotten ourselves
tied up in the who’s and the what’s and the where’s and the
when’s and the how’s? And here in the Thessalonian
context, the church has been told by some sort of false teaching
or some false teacher that they’ve been left behind. The second
coming has already happened. This morning, I got here early,
nobody here. Along comes the coffee makers
that make the coffee and we were out of cream apparently. So,
you know, yeah, you were here making the coffee and then you
weren’t. And I didn’t see your note on the counter that said,
I went to Harris Teeter and I thought, well, I’ve been left behind,
you know. But then others started coming
and I got to thinking, well, they’re a pretty good person,
you know, so they weren’t left behind. The craziness is all
around us, isn’t it? The Christian church is eaten
up with all these things. And what does the Apostle Paul
say to the Thessalonian church? What does he say to us to get
us calmed down? He says, first things first. If the man of lawlessness hasn’t
appeared, if the period of lawlessness and rebellion hasn’t been manifest
on earth, then Jesus hasn’t come. And so ask yourselves, okay,
has Jesus come? Well, what are the two tests?
Man of lawlessness, is he around? The period of lawlessness, has
that come upon us? And it’s going to be a really
horrible, terrible time. So The obvious answer is, is
no, maybe it’s come to local areas and in local periods of
history, but worldwide, uh, global lawlessness and a big, uh, antichrist
man of lawlessness has not appeared yet. So no, Jesus hasn’t come.
And as we mentioned last week, when Jesus comes, it’s going
to be big, loud, and bright, and you’re going to know it.
Every eye, will see him. And so we should take comfort
that, no, the second coming hasn’t happened, but we should keep
our eyes on the sky, our hearts ready to look forward to the
coming of the Lord Jesus. And so one of the things I think
will help and comfort us as believers is that this period of lawlessness,
this period of the antichrist, it will be bookended with restraint.
So we’ll think about the restrainer today and it’ll be also bookended
with the death. of this person and this movement
when the coming of Jesus takes place and he gathers his saints
to himself, his breath, one breath of the King of Kings and Lord
of Lords will take care of this person. And so he will bring
this person to nothing. Well, we’ve got four things for
us to think about today. We want to think about the rebellion,
the man of lawlessness, the restrainer, and then the encouragement. So
we want to think about the rebellion, the man of lawlessness, the restrainer,
and then the encouragement. First, the rebellion, you find
it in verse three, it says, the day will not come unless the
rebellion comes first. The day, that’s the day of the
Lord, the coming of Jesus, will not arrive until the rebellion
comes first. It will be, and if you read the
rest of the scriptures, it’s better to get your answers from
the rest of the Bible and not from TV or, you know, the newspaper,
the left behind, you know, that whole jazz. Read the rest of
the Bible. The day of the Lord in the Old
and in the New Testament is a really awful day. And it means a couple
of things. It means, first of all, God’s
had it up to here, like with Sodom and Gomorrah. God’s had
it up to here as in the days of Noah when he built the ark
and was a preacher of righteousness and no one listened. God sent
them in the ark. He shut the door. The rains came
up from The water came up from the ground and the rains came
down from the heavens and God destroyed the earth. So these
are going to be awful, awful, awful days. And Paul describes
it very well for us in 2 Timothy 3. when he is writing to young
Timothy, who’s pastor at Ephesus, Ephesus, a very ungodly place,
very ungodly city, yet they had a very strong church. And after
Paul’s apostolic missionary ministry there, he leaves Timothy for
a bit. When we get to the end of the
Bible, John, the old man, John, who’s exiled on the Isle of Patmos,
he took Timothy’s place and he was the pastor at Ephesus. But Paul says to Timothy, as
he’s the pastor there trying to encourage him, he says, in
the last days, there will come times of difficulty. It will
be the era of the anti-Christian, anti-faith moment. And everybody throughout the
ages has said, is this it? How anti-Christian are we? How
bad is it? And there are signs. like the
sexual revolution or the abortion movement or the gender confusion
of our day. There’s the wars and the rumors
of wars and all the rest. Well, here’s the list that Paul
gives Timothy. People will be lovers of self. Okay, check.
People will be lovers of money. We can check that one off. People
will be proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents,
ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without
self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless,
swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers
of God. And here’s the kicker. They have
the appearance of godliness, though they deny its power. Avoid
such people, Paul says to Timothy, for among them are those who
creep into households He’s talking about within the church at Ephesus
now. They creep into households, they capture weak women, burdened
with sins. They lead people astray by various
passions, always learning and never able to arrive at the truth.
And then he gives an Old Testament example, just as Janus and Jambres,
we’ll talk about them in a minute, opposed Moses. So these men also
opposed the truth and corrupted in mind, They are disqualified
regarding the faith. And then here’s the great encouragement
Paul gives Timothy, they won’t get very far. Remember the bookends,
there’s the restrainer and what’s at the other end, Jesus comes,
breathes on them, dead, gone, judged. They won’t get very far
for their folly will be plain to all as was that of these two
men. And so what will be What will
the rebellion be like? It will be a time of anti-Jesus. It will be a stretch of anti-gospel. It will be a stretch of playing
church, but without the truth. Sounds like our mainline church
era, doesn’t it? The last hundred years y’all
are in Christianity and liberalism. It got bad 100, 150 years ago,
and it’s gotten way, way worse. So the rebellion will be people
are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. They exchange,
as Paul says in Romans 1, the truth of God for a lie, but they
do it in a churchy setting. Now, y’all know this, I think,
from culture and from history. People love to latch onto a framework. They love to latch on. Okay,
let’s, let’s latch on to the church. It has rights and ceremonies
and buildings and people. Well, there’s all kinds of, and
y’all are getting this, I think in your Sunday school class,
there’s all kinds of people that gather in some building and it
may have some tall thing on one of the roofs and they may do
certain things, but none of it is Christian and none of it is
church. but it’s a really good forum. It’s a really good format. It’s
a really good place to, to get people in the door and say, look
at us, we’re doing churchy things. and they’re really peddling Antichrist. They’re really peddling the anti-gospel. And so what is the rebellion? Well, it’s the thing that must
come first, and it’s characterized by all these things Paul lists
to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3. These are folks who refuse the
truth. They refuse to be saved. And
so the rebellion, I think, could be seen as a Great deception
within the church of Jesus Christ. A great deception and even a
falling away among the people of God. We’ll mention a bit more
about it in a second, but that’s the rebellion. Now let’s think
about the man of lawlessness. He comes up in verses three and
eight and nine. It speaks of the man of lawlessness
being revealed. It speaks of the son of destruction,
or if you’re a King Jameser, the son of perdition. Uh, the
lawless one will be revealed. And then again, it speaks in
verse nine, the coming of the lawless one. So this man of lawlessness,
the son of destruction, uh, is mentioned a handful of times
in our passage. He is a lawless one. He is what other places
in scripture we call the anti or against Christ. Now let me just say something
about that for a sec. We believe there’s like the, the grand poobah
antichrist, right? The big one, right? Hadn’t appeared
yet. Oh, but we’ve, we’ve named the
Pope, right? We’ve, we’ve probably named Trump
and Obama and Clinton and all the Bushes. And, you know, we’ve,
we’ve probably, you know, Eisenhower, we probably listed, you know,
a couple of British prime ministers. Saddam Hussein. I mean, everybody
has been named the Antichrist, but there’s going to be a big
one, the Grand Puba, we might say, but there’s also going to
be lots of little Antichrist, lots of smaller, a Antichrist. And we certainly have seen many
of them who would, who would, display all the things we just
read from 1st or 2nd Timothy chapter 3. I mean, think of all
your friends who were on tour overseas and they got to go in
Saddam Hussein’s palaces. I mean, the people lived in utter
poverty and he had gold toilet seats. And so the list there
certainly would lend itself to folks like that. But what do
we think of the man of lawlessness, the Antichrist? Well, this is
the simplest way I think to do it. And you base it on the whole
rest of the Bible, verses that pop up here and there, but you
also base it on the grand story of redemption. Think back to
Christmas and into the new year when we thought about the covenant,
how God made the world and everything in it. He made it wonderful and
he made it beautiful. And then Satan came in. And he
tempted Adam and Eve to sin. They did sin. And so the world
became bent and broken by sin, as did all mankind born after
Adam. And so what did Satan, who fell
from righteousness in heaven, seek to do? He sought to deceive
the world and to get them to fall from righteousness. And
so the rebellion, the man of lawlessness is just a continuation
of the work in the garden. You’re going to hear lots in
this passage about deceit, lots in this passage about people
getting duped and believing in these anti-Christian things.
Think if you will, about the lion, and the witch in the wardrobe,
the Chronicles of Narnia. I’m sure you’ve read the books
as children. Maybe you saw the movie that
came out 20 years or so ago. And the best character in that
movie is the white witch. Isn’t she cunning? Isn’t she
beautiful? Isn’t she deceptive? And what
does she offer Edmund? All the Turkish delight. He can eat. And so he gets in her sleigh
and he goes off with her to her palace. And there’s no Turkish
delight, but there’s Edmund, a frozen statue. Isn’t that how
it goes? And we get duped into the Turkish delight. We get duped
by the deception and the beauty. What does the scripture say of
Satan? He’s beautiful. He’s deceptive. Lewis captured
that so well in that allegory, that story of what evil must
be like. And so the Antichrist, the rebellion,
it’s just a continuation of the work of the serpent in the garden
who was more crafty. And all throughout the grand
story of scripture, don’t you see Satan at work? I mean, the
two big stories would be Adam in the garden and Jesus in the
wilderness. But he’s at work in your life.
He’s at work in the church. He’s at work in this world. And
the activity of Satan is meant to deceive believers. Now back
to the Janus and Jambres that were mentioned, uh, from second
Timothy chapter three, supposedly those two, you’ll do a little
Bible search. You’ll never see their names. Supposedly that
was the name. Those were the names of the two
people that Moses and Aaron were up against in Egypt. When God
sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh to say, let my people go, they
gave him all those signs and wonders. And remember, some of
the magicians of Egypt could do the same things. Now, there
was a point where they could not. They did some by their magic
arts or the power of Satan. But Janus and Jambres opposed
Moses. They opposed the truth. They
were corrupted in mind. And God says, their folly will
not get them far. It will be plain. And that’s
the comfort we have in the rebellion and with the man of lawlessness,
they can only go so far, but they will have all power. Our
passage tells us they will have the ability to do signs and wonders.
Now think about that for just a moment. When God was continuing
the work of Jesus after the resurrection, After the ascension and through
the apostles, which Paul is now one of those, and he’s on his
little missionary journey number two. And what did God give the
apostles? He gave them signs and he gave
them wonders. Now, I know I’m going to step
on somebody’s toes, but that’s OK. You’ll get over it and repent,
I hope. If you watch preaching on TV,
minus a few of them, minus very few of them, what are they always
doing? They’re always bonking people on the head and Be healed
and they fall over and you send in your donation so they can
buy another Gulfstream. That’s a jet. And they give you
a little prayer cloth and whatever you, you dust the house with
it and whoo. You touch people with it, they
get healed. And I mean, all that signs and wonders, we’re still
stuck on that stuff. And guess where it’s from? It’s
from the deceiver. People don’t have that gift and
that ability. God doesn’t give it in the scripture.
He gave it to the apostles, but their signs and wonders were
proven, right? I remember Johnny Erickson Tata,
been in a wheelchair I think since the 60s, maybe since 68. She said in the early days of
her quadriplegia, she’d go to those things. And how heartbroken
she was, she never got called. Guess why she never got called?
I couldn’t heal her. She was not good for their props,
their TV, their ads, or whatever. But this is what we will see,
power, signs and wonders that are false, false spirits, false
teachers, people that oppose God, and they oppose the worship
of God, and instead they exalt themselves. If you want a really
interesting read, and I know I’m treading on dangerous waters,
but that’s okay, because it’s heresy. Read Costi, C-O-S-T-I,
Hen, H-I-N-N. You beginning to see where I’m
going here? He’s the nephew of Benny Hen. He’s not only come
to faith in Jesus, but he’s a reformed guy now. And he will tell you
the amount of dollars they spent per night on hotels. He will
tell you of the opulence and the riches and the charlatanism
that went on. And that’s exactly what these
things are. They oppose God. They oppose truth. They exalt
themselves. and they are all the things that
Paul says in 2 Timothy chapter three. Now, I’ve upset some of
you, quit watching that TV, repent, and read your Bible. It’s just
way better. Now, some people wonder, was
there ever a guy who did some of this? And the answer is before
Paul’s day, yes, there was Antiochus V. Antiochus V was one of the
Greek rulers, I believe, and he took over the temple in Jerusalem
He put an altar to Zeus on the altar for burnt offerings there
in Jerusalem in the temple, and he sacrificed a pig on the altar.
Big no-nos, no other gods, and the Jewish folks weren’t too
big on barbecue. And so this was what we would
call, from the book of Daniel, the abomination of desolation.
And so in history, there have been things like this. And as
I mentioned, down through the history, popes and military leaders
and kings, and you name it, people have been the Antichrist. The
big one, I don’t think, has appeared yet. And so you’ve got the rebellion,
characterized by Paul, 2 Timothy 3. You’ve got the man of lawlessness
listed here several times, an Antichrist, an against-Jesus
person, sometimes lowercase a Antichrist, and then someday we’ll see the
big one, the capital a Antichrist. Well, what about the restrainer?
A little bit of good news. What about the restrainer? He
pops up in verses six and seven. And you know, Paul says, what
is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time
for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who
now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. I’m going
to just get to it. Most conservative Bible-believing
Bible scholars, and there are non-Bible-believing, non-conservative
Bible scholars who have all kinds of wacky views, like, as in miracles
aren’t real, God’s not real, all the rest. But the people
we like, they will say this is probably the restrainer government. Okay, that’s got your minds going.
How can that be? Well, think of my little mantra
that I say all the time. Is childbirth a miracle? Please
say no. No, it’s just a regular pattern
of nature. God made the world and everything in it, and he
made seed, time, and harvest, right? He made sun, moon, stars.
He made day and night. And so we believe that God executes
or performs his decrees through his work of creation, just normal,
natural law. Gravity, the reproductive process
of humans, animals, plants, all the rest. And we believe that
he also works in his providence. Theologically, we believe he
sees before, that’s the pro, and he provides because he’s
a God who makes and takes care of all that he makes. But God
works through means, and what are the three means that he set
up, we call these creation ordinances. We believe God created the family. We believe God created the church
and we believe God created the state. And so ministering for
Christ, our parents. Ministering for Christ are governors
and ministering for Christ, at least if you’re a good Presbyterian,
are elders. And what is God given to each? He’s given parents the
rod. What does Proverbs say? Withhold
not the rod of correction. What is he given to the state?
He’s given the sword. Romans 13, the government does
not bear the sword in vain. The governor is to commend what
is evil and to punish what is wicked. Just this weekend, I
think, or before the weekend, we saw In the state of South
Carolina, did the state bear the sword? They did, the firing
squad. That was an execution of a confessed criminal. What
does that do? That hinders others. They say,
oh, he got it. I got it. And it’s the same in
the home. Remember when your brother or sister is getting
it? Oh, I’m away. I don’t want mom and dad coming
after me. Well, what about in the church? We have the keys
to the kingdom. Remember Jesus tells Peter and Crue, I give
you the keys to the kingdom. Whatever you bind is bound in
heaven. Whatever you loose on earth is loosed also in heaven. And so many people believe that
God in his ordinary creation ordinances and in his ordinary
providence uses government to restrain much, much evil. And so the civil law restrains
so much evil that could come through the false or the fake
church. Now, how do you know this is true? Well, there’s two
examples in Paul’s life that show that this was probably both
his biblical thought and his personal experience. Where is
he writing this letter from? He’s writing it from Corinth.
He’s writing it from his 18 month ministry there. And in Corinth,
there’s a ruler, a proconsul of the Roman empire named Gallio. And there’s a Jewish uprising
against Paul. They hate his Messiah preaching
gospel ministry. And so they raise up a big stink.
Just have all the other Jewish populations in all the other
cities he’s ministered to. And what does Galileo, the proconsul,
do? He squashes that rebellion. he
puts it to rest. And so Paul, uh, has his Old
Testament, probably Daniel 11 on his mind as he’s writing this
letter, but he’s probably just likely had the experience of
the Roman authority saying to the fake false church, you leave
this man alone. Now it was not done for righteous
reasons or religious reasons. It was done for Pax Romana reasons,
the peace of Rome and the empire. And, There’s another example
of this. You all should remember this
from a couple of years ago when we went through the book of Acts.
In Acts chapter 21, remember Paul is back from his third missionary
journey. He goes into the temple to keep
his Nazarite vow and the Jews make a big uproar. And they’re
wanting to kill him. And the tribune and the cohort
of Roman soldiers, they go out into the temple courts and they
snatch Paul, who’s within inches of his life, getting beaten to
death. They pull him into the barracks. They put him in custody.
What in the world? Paul says, let me go speak to
these people. Goes out, speaks to them. win friends and influence
people, gets brought back in. They’re gonna flog Paul and see
why this is happening. So they stretch him out to whip
him. He says, hey, I’m a Roman citizen. And what does the tribune say?
Oh, I am too. I bought mine. How’d you get
yours? Paul says, I was born. I’m Saul of Tarsus. And so this
tribune stops the mob and he whisked Paul away, remember,
by horse in the night. And they send something like,
is it 100 men on horseback? I mean, this is getting the guy
to safety and they take him up to Caesarea where he’ll stay
and he’s hardly bothered thereafter. So twice in Paul’s life, who
has been the restrainer of the Antichrist or the anti-church? It has been the government. Now
we don’t know. Paul tells the Thessalonians who it is. We don’t
know, but that’s the best educated understanding. Okay, so we got
the rebellion. We got the man of lawlessness.
We got the restrainer. Maybe it’s the government. Holy
Spirit would be a good one too, right? How about the encouragement? Now, I’m going to cheat here.
We’re going to go to verses 15 and then 16 and 17. This is next
week’s passage, but this is where we get the encouragement. Verse
15 says, so then brothers stand firm and hold to the traditions
you were taught by us, either by spoken word or by letter. See, that’s the apostolic ministry
that we now have in our, our Bibles. And then in verse 16
and 17, you get the benediction. May our Lord Jesus Christ himself
and may God, our father who loved us and gave us eternal comfort
and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish
them in every Good work. You know, you could write that
verse down and stick it on your fridge and ripped out of context. You
would never think this is the church under the Antichrist or
the church under persecution. You say, Oh, God loves me warm
fuzzies. And it looks cute on your mirror, something like that.
This is a pretty serious benediction, a pretty serious blessing. So
how do we, what’s the encouragement? The encouragement is from the
rest of the passage, don’t be shaken in mind. Encouragement
from the rest of the passage. These are things we looked at
last week. Don’t be alarmed. So be comforted be established
Don’t let the spirit, the false spirit, don’t let the pseudo
or the fake letters, you know, with Paul’s name come. Don’t
be deceived. What does he simply say? Remember
what you have been taught. Now, what does that assume? That
assumes you’ve been in church. That assumes you’re in the word
and under the word. That assumes that your mind is
being transformed by the word of the living God. And then there’s
the, Other way to stand firm. There’s the other way to be encouraged
in this time. It’s from second Timothy three,
Paul says, avoid such people that might mean turn off the
TV. You know, channel 16 is what
I always called it. Have y’all been reading the scandal from
the Christian television network? Lot of bad stuff. Lot of bad
stuff. And it’s all related to the list
from 2 Timothy chapter 3. And so if we’re to avoid such
people, we probably need to stay away from such things. All right.
So what are we supposed to think? How do we live in light of these
hard things? Well, remember, we live in the
world. with all its teachings, all its tuggings. We also live
where the devil lurks and seeks to deceive and destroy and devour. But we also have our own sinful
flesh. We also have remnant sin. And
we love Turkish delight because it looks good, it tastes good.
And who would not turn down a buffet? Who would never turn out a never-ending
mail order? You know, every Tuesday you go
out to the door and there’s more Turkish delight. Well, here’s
the thing to take great encouragement in. I’m going to let Paul have
the last word here. After he’s given that list, 2
Timothy 3, bad times, Timothy, he says this, all who desire
to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted while
evil people and imposters will go on from bad to worse, deceiving
and being deceived. But as for you, Timothy, as for
us, Covenant Press folks here in Burlington, continue in what
you have learned, continue in what you have firmly believed,
knowing from whom you have learned it. And how from childhood, this
is Paul talking to Timothy about his grandmother and his mother,
you have been acquainted with the sacred writings. This is
why children being raised in the fear and admonition of the
Lord is important. You’ve been equated with the sacred writings,
which are able to make you wise for salvation. All scripture
is breathed out by God. See how simple it is. You know
this verse. All scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable. All scripture is breathed out
by God and is for teaching and reproof and for correction and
training and righteousness that the man of God may be complete,
equipped for every good work. Back to the Bible. back to church,
back in the word, back into what you remember, back into what
you’ve hidden in your heart. And the fake stuff may be big,
nasty and all around you, but it won’t bother you because you
are firm in the faith and God is blessing you. Let’s pray that
that would be so. Lord, help us to cut out the
fat, to cut out the fluff, and to eat the whole goodness of
the scripture so that we can live well for you and we can
ignore what is evil, what is fake, what is false, will only
lead to destruction. Help us, we pray, and rescue
those who are caught up in it. We ask in Jesus’ mighty name.
Amen. We want to