Matthew 2024

The pharisees got together.

1 of them, an expert in the law tested him with this question. Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law. Jesus replied, love the lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself.

All the law and the prophets hang on these 2 commandments. While the pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, what do you think about the Messiah? Who's son is he? The son of David, they replied? He said to them, how is it then that David speaking by the spirit calls him lord?

For he says, the lord said to my lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet. If then David calls him lord, how can he be his son? No 1 could say a word in reply. And from that day on, no 1 dare to ask him any more questions. I'm 1 of the elders here, Chris Tilly, and, yeah, very good to be here, especially if it's your first time with us this evening.

There's some faces I don't quite recognize. So hopefully, I'm, you know, not insulting anyone. I just haven't noticed you before, but it has been known. And we're here tonight to answer a very important question. In fact, the most important question, what is most important to god?

And, actually, I'm writing saying it for once, because it's right there in the passage. What is most important to god for what a question? Right. Let's pray and then, let's get into it. Father, please help us now.

Please help us as we as we look at your word. Please expose our hearts, let them be examined, let us see where we are, when we stack up against this passage, let us see our own motivations let us let us see ourselves very, very clearly here, and let us see the lord Jesus even more clearly. We pray this in your name, amen. Well, we've been going through Matthew 22 for quite some time now. So if you're if you're new, or you haven't been around for this whole series, I'm gonna start just by giving a bit of a recap.

So I know there are quite a few people in the room that haven't been around for all of it. A bit of a a a story so far, just so that we're we're back up to speed with exactly what's going on because we're in the thick of this pitched battle, of wits between Jesus and the Jewish leaders. So if we if we wind back to the beginning of this little section, it really starts when Jesus comes into Jerusalem and enters the temple, and he doesn't like what he finds there. He found that despite his exterior glory and promise, it was in fact nothing more than a money making scam, a bit like a national trust or English heritage site. It looks like it's gonna be fun, but in the end, you're left severely lighter.

In the in the wallet and often disappointed. So he gives, so so so he shows a rare glimpse of the authority that he wields and his zeal for his father's house And so he starts flipping over tables and driving the the scammers out. It's supposed to be a house of prayer. And he gives a picture of this in a in this poor unsuspecting fig tree that he comes across And he curses the fig tree because from a distance, it's full of in full leaf. It looks so promising.

But upon closer inspection, there's no fruit whatsoever. And this is what the religious leaders are like, says Jesus. This is what they are like. So the religious leaders, the sadducees, and the pharisees confront Jesus asking him by what authority he does such things. And in response, they get 3 parables.

The 2 sons, the tenants, and the wedding banquet, all of which expose their empty words, their refusal to serve god, and their rejection of his invitation. And they know that these parables are about them. So they come back with their own 3 pronged attack. A series of questions designed to trap Jesus in his words and discredit him really what they're trying to do is goad him into saying something so inflammatory that they can have him arrested, or completely discredited. So they start flexing their theological and legal muscles.

So first up, you get the pharisees, take their shot with a question about paying taxes, an incredibly loaded question because they're trying to get him into hot water with the authorities of the day, the Romans. And Jesus responds with actually, I I wrote down here an obvious answer, but actually, it's a genius answer. Caesar's faces on the coin. Give it to him. It belongs to him, but god's image is imprinted on you.

So you give yourself to god. Second, the pharisees haven't been silenced momentarily. The sadducees, who are the other ruling sect, come and ask about marriage at the resurrection, because they don't believe in the resurrection, so they concoct this ridiculous story about a woman with 7 husbands who all die and say, well, Jesus, who's she gonna be married to in heaven? Which 1? They ask, they think it's ridiculous, so they ask a ridiculous question.

And, and, and Jesus responds by asking, have you read the scriptures? Have you read the scriptures? Do you know what you're talking about? God is the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, all of whom are dead, but are spoken about as being alive. God is not god was their god.

Basically, what a stupid question, sit down and be quiet sadducees? And that brings us to where we are tonight and to our first point, point number 1, the attack law. They come with the law. The pharisees are back up again. Now the pharisees and the sadducees didn't like each other at all.

They were they were both in the ruling elite of Israel, but, they were diametrically opposed on all sorts of issues, and and they were natural enemies of 1 another. The sadducees didn't believe in life after death, whereas the pharisees based their entire belief system on making themselves ready, to meet god through their own works and through strict observance of the law and and that kind of thing. And so rather than congratulating Jesus on his humiliation of the sadducees, they were more bothered at Jesus' rising star than the decline of their enemies. Matthew Henry, an old an old commentator, made this observation that it's pharisaical jealousy that we are upset when truth is being said by someone else. And it's not us.

And especially if we don't like them, we should just be happy that the truth is being spoken regardless of who it's being spoken by. So he's basically saying there's a little pharisee in all of us. Anyhow, they launch their next attack. The third and final attempt, and that brings us to today's passage, and the third round of questions to try and trip Jesus up. And this time, they're not taking any chances.

They're not mucking around. They bring up a champion. They bring up their best and expert in the law, 1 of their best legal minds. Perhaps where everyone else has failed, the champion can do the job. Now I don't know if, if you've ever come across a true expert in their field, but they are fairly few and far between.

So many of us think we're experts on things. You know, I can think of quite a few. But actually, the ones who are very few and far between, they're a rare bird. So to bring out a legal expert, to face Jesus down means they're bringing out the big guns. They're desperate and they want to discredit him.

The problem though with bringing out your best is if you best get defeated, you've got nothing else. You're done. So the stakes are high. Credibility is on the line for everybody here, who is gonna come out on top. Now being no expert in the law myself, I decided I should probably do a bit of research, before diving headlong into this.

So I turned to the only person who could help with such a clot, a, a, a, a task, a true fount of knowledge, My good friend, Chat GPT, which is a great tool when you're researching stuff like this, because who else knows this sort of thing? And my conclusion was this, at the end of quite a long conversation 1 night with Chat GPT. We were on first name terms by the end. Did you know right? If you call ChatGPT a name, it responds more favorably to you.

I found this out here. It's incredible. Anyway, my conclusion was this. We're obsessed with laws and rules. I mean obsessed humanity is obsessed.

And you think, well, that sounds weird because I don't really like rules and laws, but we're obsessed. Did you know? Best estimate, the amount of laws and rules ever created. By governments, legal systems, religions, so on and so forth, well, chat GPT does, best guess, tens of millions. It it didn't wanna be any clearer than that.

It wanted to be quite hedges bets a bit. Tens of millions of rules for living, tens of millions. In England alone today, this is more pertinent for us, do you know how many laws govern you? When you get out of bed in the morning, and you step out your front door, you know how many laws govern you. 200000.

You have 200000 ways to go wrong every single day. You don't even know about most of them. The lawyers don't even know about most of them. It's impossible. It's a really good reason not to get out of bed at all.

In contrast, god gave his people 613 laws. Only 613. Compared to our 200000, that's a mercy. Is it is it not 613? So who's obsessed with law here?

Problem is we're so obsessed with law and so were the pharisees that what they would do is they would take 1 of god's commands, 1 of his laws, and then they would fence it in with a bunch of other laws. To to help you not break the original law. So from 1 law, you end up with 20. I think what? Just 1 was 1 was enough.

Thank you. So for example, and this is a fairly obscure law in the old testament. There's a there's a law that says you cannot cook a kid goat in its mother's milk, fairly obscure law, but it is a law. Now I'm not gonna go into what that's all about. That's for another time.

But what the pharisees would do with that, they they would go don't cook a kid goat in its mother's milk. Okay. What we're gonna do is we're gonna separate all milk and dairy. They can never be together. They must never be in the same place, and that's a law that we're gonna we're gonna put in.

And it stands to this to this day. Some of us were unauthentic earlier this year, and when we got to the site, there were a group of Orthodox Jews on-site, and it was it was revealing as to how this all plays out in a real life a real life scenario, because they had that sort of stuff going on in the kitchen. They had to get their own caterers in who did everything kosher and observed all of these rules and regulations, but not only that. 1 day, I went into the toilet. I was like, What the heck are all the lights off?

What's going on here? And I went to turn it on. So I said, no. No. No.

You can't turn the light on. So I put how am I gonna aim? How's this gonna work? No. No.

It's the Sabbath. You can't turn what does turning a light on have to do with the sabbath? Well, because you're not allowed to make fire on the sabbath. I'm only turning on a flipping light switch. So, no, but that's electricity.

It's like fire. I was like, what is going on? That's where this sort of legalism goes nonsense, nonsense. And so by Jesus' day, there are potentially, potentially thousands of laws and commands. In addition to god's original 613.

And the question from this expert lawyer to Jesus is, which is the greatest Jesus? You're such a great teacher which is the greatest commandment of all? Now there is potentially a lot of danger in this question. You get this sort of question wrong, and Jesus could be opening him himself up to some pretty serious legal charges. Remember, this is a lawyer he's talking to, and they are gonna whatever he answers, they're gonna have a load of things ready to trap him back in.

And take him further and further down the rabbit hole and end up in a legal situation very quickly. It's a it's a it's a tricky situation. And what I think they are expecting him to say or hoping he doesn't say is probably something like Well, it's the first commandment is the most important. That's the greatest law of them all. The first commandment being you shall have no other gods before me, because let's face it.

If you say anything, is more important than having no other gods before god. It's blasphemy, and it's punishable by death. So there you go. The trap is set the attack begins, and point number 2, the defense. Love.

The defense is love. Jesus replied, and it might come up on the screen behind us. Love the lord your god, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself.

All the law and the prophets hang on these 2 commandments. Love is the answer. Not law, love. Love is the answer. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus gives them 1, and then gives them a bonus.

But neither of them, surprisingly, are in the 10 commandments, which you would have thought are, like, up there as the main guiding laws of the land. And these 2 commands aren't even part of the 10. Instead, he gives 2 commands that if properly obeyed will mean we've kept all of god's law and listen to everything that the prophets have said. He doesn't put additional burdens on us. He simplifies and lightens the load and says it's actually all about love.

If you think it's about law, you've missed point, it's all about love. The 2 places that he quotes from are deuteronomy 6 first 5, love the lord your god with all your hearts. And the Viticus 19 do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor is yourself, I am the lord. All the law and the prophets hang on these 2, says Jesus. Love the lord your god with every fiber of your being, and love your neighbor as you love your self.

It's interesting, isn't it? That the 2 commandments Jesus picks out are the 2 commandments that it is definitely and obviously impossible for us to keep. Definitely and obviously impossible. Near enough, all of the others, we could have a pretty good go at keeping on our own strength or sorry. Let me rephrase that.

We could have a good go at telling ourselves we can keep them on our own strength. And we could make arguments for how we've kept them. So for example, I've never cooked a kid goat in its mother's milk, and I don't intend to. Anytime soon. But bit more seriously, we've never murdered anyone, and I don't intend to murder anyone.

I mean, we've never I don't think anybody in this room has ever murdered anyone, and probably never will, hopefully. We can do that. We can, well, many keep themselves from adultery, although more fatal at that than murder, but it's doable. It's doable. Right?

I can avoid eating pork if I want to. I don't know why you would, But you can. It's definitely the if you're gonna keep 1 meat, it has to be pork. I'm not gonna talk about that right now, but you can come and argue with me afterwards. If you're if you think differently, you're wrong.

So just know that before getting into that debate. I'll tell you what I can't do, though. I cannot love god with all my heart, soul, and strength. I might want to, but I can't actually do it. I can't actually do it.

We don't love god, not like this, not with all of our heart, all of my heart, everything in there, that our our desires, our emotions, our would be so captivated by god that our heart would never wander or or or or or start yearning after other things. That our willpower always leads us to do acts of love for god. That our heart beats for the lord and is roused by thoughts of him and how we can offer acts of love and service to him that our own bodies would never betray us and our hearts wouldn't be captivated by another, even for a moment. All of our soul, your entire soul, the very core of your being, that that when we go to our innermost parts, to our deepest thoughts and desires, our most private places that nobody else is allowed into, the things that really make us who we are, that that what we find there isn't rot and decay and things that we would rather never see the light of day. But what we find there is a vibrant love for the lord at the very core of our being that our soul rests in and is restless for him and him alone.

And all our strength, that everything god has given us, our physical strength, the strength of our determination and discipline for him would never waver even for a moment, a split second. And yet personally, some weeks, I can barely even stay awake whilst listening to his word preached. That's how weak I am. Right here in this room, and that's not a comment on your preaching brothers. It's it's only my own weakness.

I don't love god like that, not even close. I I I would love to I want to, but I don't. That's the reality. We don't love god in line with the requirements of the first commandment that Jesus says is the greatest. You know what else we can't do?

We can't do the other thing he said either. Love our neighbors, and that really is shorthand for everyone that we are in contact within our lives, like we love ourselves. Now, I some of us may be wracked with self loathing of some kind, or find ourselves completely unlovable. I don't know if that's you. I'm sorry if it is.

However, regardless, we all still love ourselves because love is not actually an emotion. Love is not actually a feeling. Love is an action. Love is an action. And so I know that we all love ourselves because none of you are sat here naked.

You've all clothed yourselves this morning, which means you've all gone out and bought the clothes. You've done things for yourself. I'm guessing we've all eaten today, so we've fed ourselves. We've fed our bodies. We have done loving acts for ourselves.

We wash ourselves, don't we? Although judging by some of the smells, some more than others, but that's a different matter. But for the majority of us, we think far more highly of ourselves than we ought to than we have any right to. And our version of self love is a very twisted kind of self love. It's, it's it's narcissism at best.

We tend not to think of other people quite so highly, do we? If we're gonna be completely honest with with ourselves. We are very good at whispering sweet nothings into our own ears, telling ourselves how we were right, how well we've done justifying our own actions. Yeah. You did you did okay in that situation, Chris, they were totally wrong.

And they deserve what they got. For the most part, we are great lovers of ourselves, deeply concerned with our own needs, our own wants, our own lives, and putting ourselves first. But we're not so good at loving other people like that. You know, marriage and, and parenthood, you know, if you haven't experienced either or 1 or both of those yet, then they are great levelers to discover how selfish you really are. So when when it's 5 in the morning, and I can hear my 2 year old from the other room going, daddy, daddy.

Wanna cuddle. And all I can think is just go back to sleep. Just go back to sleep. Maybe if I lie here for 30 seconds, Bernadette will go and do it instead. That that would be the ideal solution here.

Or the washing up. I don't know if you've seen that. There's a little comedy sketch about a guy whose girlfriend is at her wits end. And he comes in and he's like, let me I wanna show you something. This coffee table, put anything you want on it.

And go to bed. And when you come here the next day, it's gone. Washing up everything. It's back in the cupboard, clean, dry, gone. And she's like, oh my goodness.

It's ridiculous. I do that with the washing up. It's great. If you leave it long enough, it just disappears. It's it's incredible.

And I this is how I love the people closest to me. So imagine what I do or rather what I don't do, for people that aren't so. Aren't so close. Love, a good definition, a biblical definition of love that the lord Jesus lives out every single day, is giving yourself for the good of others, and we are terrible at it. Now you might be sat there thinking, but I do do some nice things for people, and that's okay.

If you do, good for you. Well done, keep going. We might be able to do it in an erratic kind of way, but in the end, the person we're most concerned with is ourselves, and we don't extend that to other people as frequently or as intensely as we should. If we're honest, we're we're we're mostly pretty apathetic to other people's needs, aren't we? Mostly, most of the time, except for those rare occasions when we can break out of that apathy, the opposite of love.

Loving others is serious. The apostle Paul puts it like this Karl if you can get that up in Romans 13, and this relates directly to keeping the law, let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love 1 another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet. And whatever other command there may be is summed up in this 1 command, love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor.

Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. Love is the fulfillment of the law. And so to keep this command to love your neighbor, to keep this command to love the lord your god is to keep the 10 commandments. To keep the commands to to love the lord your god with all your heart and soul and strength means you will have kept commandments 1 to 4 of the 10. You shall have no other gods before me.

Well, I love you with everything I've got lord. I have no other gods before you, but we do. We always let other things get in the way of god. You shall not make for yourself an image, and yet even good things in our lives become an idol. Even family can become an idol.

You shall not misuse the name of the lord. And yet, when our words and our lives don't match and we bring the lord's name into disrepute in front of outsiders, we've misused god's name and brought disrepute on it. Observe the Sabbath by keeping it holy and yet we don't rest in the lord Jesus Christ. We don't rest in his covenant promises to us, and we're always reaching and restless. And the same with 5 to 10.

This is love your neighbor as yourself. Honor your father and mother. Well, if you love your neighbor, you'll honor your father and mother all the time. Hands up in this room who's done that. Always.

Never dishonored your father or mother. You shall not murder. Okay? There's some hands twitching to go up here, but Jesus says if you've ever been angry and hated, you've murdered in your mind. So we're all murderers.

According to Jesus. You shall not commit adultery, but you've never desired someone in a way that you shouldn't. You shall not steal, but we all want things that aren't ours. You shall not give false testimony, but we lie and distort and exaggerate, you shall not covet, but we're always comparing ourselves against those around us, aren't we? The 2 greatest commandments are the 2 we fail at most miserably, and everything else crumbles with them.

That's why they're the 2 greatest because they sum everything else up. Charles spurgeon, great nineteenth century preacher, in London said, all the 10 this is great. All the 10 commandments, like 10 great canons are pointed at you today. For you have broken all of god's statutes. All of god's statutes and lived in the daily neglect of all his commands.

Did you hear that? The law points at us and says you've broken it every day, all of the law, all the time. God's law exposes and condemns us, and this is what the pharisees are all about. And it condemns us because Jesus says, we are utter failures as lovers. If you love me, if you love like you are supposed to, then you will have obeyed all of the other commands because you will have just done them It's a given that if you are loving properly, you will just do all these things or not do these things as you're supposed to.

As it is, we fail to love and so they stand against us in condemnation. And that's not to say that the law is a bad thing. The law in Galatians is is called our guardian. Before Christ, as it showed us our sinful state in order to drive us to repent, in order to show us our sin, and drive us to turn to god. That's what the law is there for.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us at god's mercy, and it leaves us needing a lover to show us the way to love. It leaves us needing a lover to fall in love with, and that lover is none other than god himself. John famously says, for god so loved the world that he gave his 1 and only son, very, very famous verse that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. You could reread that as saying for god so loved the world, that he loves us with all his heart, soul, and strength.

For god so loved the world, that he loves us like he loves himself. For god so loved the world that he gave us, Jesus, is 1 and only son. So that's the defense, the love point number 3, the counter attack. While the pharisees were gathered together, Carl, I think we can get this up. Yep.

Jesus asked them, what do you think about the Messiah? Who's son is he? Oh, it's son of David, they replied. We said to them, how is it then that David speaking by the spirit calls him lord? For he says, the lord said to my lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

If then David calls him lord, how can he be his son? No 1 could say a word in reply. And from that day on, no 1 dared to ask him any more questions. So here and this is all part of the same conversation, that's why these 2 passages go together. We get a change in the direction of the argument.

It's a bit like when a battle line starts to break and the soldier can feel the opportunity to press the advantage. Jesus having defended his position against assault after assault takes down the enemy champion and then goes on the attack. And we'll see this unfold over the next few weeks. This section here, just the beginning. What follows next is 1 of the most stinging and incisive attacks that he launches against the pharisees.

And in many ways, it's almost like the culmination of all of his warnings about them and their teachings. And he doesn't hold back, but that's for the future. It starts here. Whilst they are all gathered together, I love that. I love that.

He doesn't wait to try and pick them off 1 by 1. He waits until all his enemies are gathered together, and then he goes for them. He meets them head on and takes them all together in 1 swoop. Here's his question. What do you think about the Messiah?

Whose son is he? Why on earth are you asking that Jesus? It's been bugging me for the past couple of weeks, and it's caused me no end of trouble because it's easy to preach both parts of this passage in isolation from 1 another. It was quite difficult to preach them together, but it's very pertinent that they are preached together. What do you think about the Messiah?

Throughout the throughout their histories and the scriptures, the Jewish people have been promised a Messiah or a savior. Same thing. And quick as a flash, because the Faracies have obviously done quite a lot of thinking on this over the years, they give their answer. Son of David, they replied. Now you can have some sympathy with this answer because or at the very least you can understand how they've arrived at this conclusion, because they're thinking of texts like to Samuel where god promises David an everlasting dynasty.

Or Isaiah chapter 9, where it talks about a child from David's line will rule with justice forever, pretty big texts, or Jeremiah 23, a right just branch from David's line will reign as king. Or ezekiel that we've just been doing recently, god will set 1 shepherd in chapters 34 and 37. My servant David over his people. But in the same way that their understanding of the law was distorted because they hadn't understood or practiced love. Their understanding of the Messiah is distorted because they hadn't really read the scriptures or perhaps more accurately.

They twisted the scriptures to fit the view of who they wanted the Messiah to be. Which is a second king David. They wanted a political and military ruler, someone who could make Israel great again, take on the Romans build a spectacular temple, assert their dominance over the surrounding nations, and and and whilst they're kind of correct on the son of David line of thinking, they'd overlook to keep pieces of scripture that Jesus is very quick to point out. Psalm a hundred and 10. A Psalm of David himself.

And in the Psalm, David in the spirit says, the lord says to my lord. Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a foot stall for your feet. Jesus' argument to them is who is David talking about here. The Messiah cannot be the son of David, as you say, because we actually knew all the sons of David, and they weren't very good. So how can David's lord also be his son?

Because David is a king, and what or who is higher than a king. Whom can a king call lord. Only a greater king or a god is who a king can call lord, but not his son. A king would not call his own son lord. And look at how this lord that David talks of is described sits at god's right hand, makes enemies his foot stall and much, much more if you read the rest of Psalm a hundred and 10.

What we have here is the lord talking to the lord. God talking to god. God, the father, talking to god, the son, Jesus, and what is the father telling the son to do? Take your throne. The Messiah as per the Scriptures is none other than the son of the living god and the descendant of David rooted firmly in history, which Jesus is if you go and read the opening of Matthew, you get the whole genealogy all the way through.

He is a son of David in that sense, but he's the son of god. He's the lord that the lord was talking to. And the pharisees, they hadn't understood their own scriptures, and Jesus painfully exposes them. They they they read the scriptures and see rules instead of love they read the scriptures and see earthly rule over heavenly rule. They read the scriptures and they see another David, a man, a human rather than the son of god.

A man, a human, and god with human skin. Fully god, fully human. They read the scriptures and they completely missed Jesus. And that's the tragedy of this passage. The lover of their souls is standing right in front of them, reasoning with them, opposing them in their error.

And they can't recognize who he is. They don't recognize him. If you read the scriptures and you miss Jesus, then you've missed the greatest lover you could ever hope for. You've missed your lord, your your hero as we were hearing this morning. You've missed him.

Jesus is the only 1 who keeps all of god's commandments because Jesus is the only 1 who loves god with everything he has, and he's the only 1 who truly loves people. You read through the gospels and you see a lover. You see a lover of people of all kinds of people with the most unlovable people. The most despised and rejected people in society, and you see Jesus again. And again, and again, giving himself for the good of others.

You see him reasoning with his enemies, patiently, graciously, loving them, trying to bring them round. And he does it so much so. He loves so much that he would he would leave his throne in heaven, and he would come down here to this mess of a world and he would endure pain and shame and suffering and hell for them on the cross. God would die for you and for me. That's who the Messiah is.

It's a religion says obey the law to be saved. That's the pharisees way and be careful because there's a pharisee in all of us. Jesus says, be loved by me and live to the fall. It's very different. Finish with 1 John 4 10 if you can get that up, Cole.

It says this, and it's just a nice summary of this whole this whole thing. This is love. Not that we loved god, but that he loved us. And sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Let's pray.

Father, we, we beg your we beg your forgiveness that we are so limited in our ability to to love anywhere near the requirement that you set out with every fiber of our being to love you and to love other people, and we don't do it. We struggle. We we We may try from time to time, but we fail and we fail and we fail and we fail. And so we thank and praise you so much that you and your great wisdom and mercy and grace decided to love us. Decided to be the 1 to break the cycle of sin and death that you sent your son, the lord Jesus, to take our place on a cross ending that that that downward spiral that humanity was locked into with sin and self love and ignorance of you.

We thank you that you reach into this world. You show us what love is, and you change people's hearts. Thank you so much for the lord Jesus Christ. He is a he is a jewel beyond description beyond price. He is our greatest ally, our best friend, and the lover of our souls.

We do thank and praise you for him, our men.