Dead in Sin
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Spencer. I'm a pastor in training here with Mill City Church. We're going to be in Ephesians 2, so we made it into chapter 2. We're going to be in verses 1 through 5. We're mostly going to be in the first three verses.
If you have a Bible, I encourage you to open it. We're going to sit in that and just walk through that. If you don't have a Bible, there's a white Bible probably in the seat next to you. We're going to be on page 568. If you don't have a Bible, please take that home. That is our gift to you.
All right, so it was like three or four weeks ago I was preaching, and I tipped this story just briefly. I want to walk more in-depth in it. It is the story of how my stepdad first watched my brother and I. And so basically, my brother, who's kind of, he was five, I was four. I don't really have a really good memory of this. I have it mostly through my stepdad and my brother, so I can kind of write in some of the details here.
But my brother was kind of the ringleader of trouble for the two of us. And he schemed the first time that my stepdad was going to watch us. My mom went to the grocery store. She left us with him. And he schemed and said, well, we should eliminate the threat. Let's stone him.
So that was the plan. I just followed suit. We're going to stone him with rocks. And we're going to see how it plays out. Now, there's some things in context to understand here. Firstly, I didn't really, before then, I don't think I'd been spanked.
I'm not really sure. I don't think that, and the other thing was, is that my stepdad came from a family of spanking. So what my brother had not factored into is there might be retribution for our actions. So we pick up rocks. We start laying into them, calling them every name we can, throwing the book at them. And then we bolt.
So we had not anticipated that he might come after us. So my brother was older than me. At that point, he was faster than me. And I got caught first. And I was spanked. And I don't think I'd ever been spanked like that before.
And I act like I've been murdered. I was in tears. My brother turns around, sees the carnage, and says, at least I'm faster. So he gets upstairs. He makes it to my mother's bed. He goes under the bed.
And my stepdad goes, pulls him out from under the bed, and spanks him. And sits us both in front of him. And basically gives us a speech of how this is not going to go down the way you think it is. At that point, we realized there's a new sheriff in town. Like, this wasn't going to fly. Now, there's a couple things that stand out from that story.
Firstly, was that crazy? Or was it brilliant? Brilliant. Yes. It was both. Like, we laugh about it now.
But that's crazy. Like, the first time you're actually watching someone's kids that you're dating, you spanked them. Like, you may think that's normal. I think that's a little crazy. And it was brilliant. Because he'd made the point.
That wasn't going to fly. From this point forward, stoning was not going to happen in this household. They're still married. They're actually here today. They're still married. Happily married.
The discipline we received after that in the years to come was good for us. There is something really striking about that story. It's the fact that my brother and I tried to stone another human being at ages four and five. Where did we learn that? It's not like my mom read us bedtime stories as kids that had stoning in it. And then she said, you see this?
This is what has happened over the last centuries and millennia. People have stoned other people as his approval. It is a form of capital punishment. No, we like invented a form of capital punishment on the fly. I mean, where did that come from? I see that in my own kids.
Like, we have a two-year-old. And there's actually in our church, we have a lot of ages one to three. And when they get together, part of it's like really cool. It's like, man, our kids are going to grow up together. They're going to hear about Jesus together. This is beautiful.
And then we turn our backs. And it turns into the Lord of the Flies. They start biting and stealing. Then you ask them what went wrong and they start lying. Who taught them that? Who taught them to lie?
Who taught them to steal? Who taught them to bite? Who taught them to act like complete anarchists? Those are questions that our culture is uncomfortable asking. But the Bible has a clear answer for.
It comes from within. That is our nature. And that's what we're going to walk through in Ephesians 2, 1-5. We're mostly going to sit in 1-3. In this section, we're going to see the condition of humanity and how we come into this world. And to be honest, it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable.
It's going to be an uncomfortable look in the mirror at our own nature. But we're going to see how this makes God look good. All right. So we're going to be Ephesians 2, verses 1-5. Starting in verse 1. And you were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of our body and mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved. I'll pray and then we'll dive in. God, thank you for your word. Even difficult passages like this. I pray that we would put our swords down, that we would receive this, that you would speak through me, and that your truth would communicate a beautiful part of the gospel.
In Christ's name, amen. Alright, so he starts out, verse 1. And you were dead in trespasses and sins. Alright, so the way that this sentence is structured is that that phrase, and you were dead in trespasses and sins, that is the thesis statement for the next three verses. Everything that follows in the next three verses is going to be a further unpacking of that statement. So to understand this statement a little bit better, we need a little bit of context.
The context of this goes all the way back to the garden. All the way back to Genesis 1, 2, and 3, when God created the world. God created the world, and he created Adam and Eve. And it was good. It was, he gave them the garden that they might enjoy, that they might use their creativity and their gifts as made in the image of God to help make this garden better. And he said, you can enjoy all of this, but this tree over here, this tree of knowledge and good and evil, avoid it.
Don't eat of this tree. Everything else I've given you, you can enjoy. Just trust me, trust my word. Avoid this tree, do not eat of it. And he says in Genesis 2, 16, for in that day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. So, Genesis 3, Satan comes in the form of a serpent and comes and causes them to question God's word, question his goodness, question his character.
And they trust Satan's word over God, and they eat of the tree. Now, when you're reading it, you might be wondering, if you're just reading through, wait a second, God said that they would die. They just ate of it. They don't die. In fact, they live a long time after that. Like, what actually happens there?
So, there's two things that happen. Firstly, physical death is actually introduced to the world. When that happens, it affects all of creation. There is a time clock for everyone and everything at that point. So, they are going to die one day. From dust, they were created.
From dust, they will return. So, that is one thing. Physical death is introduced. But also, they spiritually died in that moment. There was spiritual death that happened. And that, they did this on behalf of the world, because what follows after that is what we see in Romans 5.12, which says, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.
So, from that event, all, everyone, all of us who come from Adam and Eve inherit spiritual deadness. Which means that you're not actually born a Christian. That's somewhat of an understanding of that here in our culture, that you're born a Christian because you're born in a Christian family, or you grew up going to church. And that's not what it says here. It says that you were born spiritually dead. Now, I wanted to double check this to make sure that dead meant what it really meant.
So, I went back and looked at the original language, looked at a definition for it. And the definition I got said to, it says, being so morally or spiritually deficient as to be, in effect, dead. Comma, dead. And they wanted to really make it clear. So, morally and spiritually deficient, absolutely dead. This is not, you show up to the ER, and you just need a little resuscitation.
Like, I watched ER in the 90s, and it seemed like every show, someone was to end up on the table, CPR, resuscitation, they were brought back. This is not that picture. This is like CSI, or Bones, or Law and Order, or whatever show where they are absolutely dead. Spiritually, absolutely dead. Now, Paul further unpacks this in the following verses that come after it. So, he goes in verse 1, And you were dead in trespasses and sins, and then here is the further unpacking, In which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
So, Paul describes spiritual deadness in three ways. And if you've been here long enough, this is going to sound familiar. He says, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, that's the devil, and following your flesh, the passions of your flesh. We say the flesh, the world, the devil. And Paul has a different order here. He says, the world, the devil, your flesh.
The rest of our time today is going to be walking through that, is unpacking what that looks like. All right, so he starts out, In which you once walked, following the course of this world. Spiritually dead people follow the course of the world. That is our nature. This is just practical human nature. They do social conformity experiments all the time.
And to test, how do people actually follow the crowd? And there's some that are really funny, and there's some that are actually really, really dark. One of the funny ones that I saw recently, I watched this video. This video is from a show called Brain Games. And basically, they put these actors in a doctor's office. And they're sitting in a doctor's office waiting room.
And then a person, a test subject, she comes in, and she sits down. And then a bell is rung. And all the actors stand up. And she looks around like, what's going on? They sit back down. Bell rings again.
They stand up. And you can tell she's starting to get uncomfortable. And they sit back down. By the third bell ring, she stands up with them. She had to go with the crowd. And then they do it over and over again until they start taking people out of the room.
The actors go to see the doctor. They leave the room. And it's just her by herself. And they ring the bell. And she stands up. And she sits back down.
Then other people come in. Just random people walk in. This guy walks in. He sits down beside her. They ring the bell. She stands up.
Sits back down. And he looks at her and goes, what are you doing? And she's like, I don't know. I just, there are people in the room. And they're just, they're standing. And I think we're supposed to be standing when the bell's rung.
Next bell rung. They both stand up. And one by one, they bring people into the room. And each one of them does the same thing. They look around for a second. And they all start standing up.
That's our nature. We follow the crowd. That's a part of our fallen human nature. Now, the way that plays out in everyday life is maybe you work at an office where there's always like one person in your office that's just obnoxious or annoying or frustrating. And everyone has that in their office. And everyone, it's just easy to make fun of them.
It's easy to crack jokes when they're gone. It's easy to slander them. It's easy to gossip about them. You're like, I don't have that person in my office. Think about it. I heard this radio commercial recently that said everyone's got a Dave in their office.
And they just made the point about, like, don't hire a Dave. Use our hiring service. You have a Dave in your office. And they're just easy to make fun of. And what happens? Everyone starts piling on.
And then finally you start joining in. Because you follow the crowd. It's our nature. This happens even in the church, I see, when it comes to watching TV and movies. Please. Like, we shouldn't watch as Christians everything that comes on TV.
Everything that comes on Netflix. Everything that comes on HBO. Every movie that gets released. We should use discernment. Now, I'm not saying you just watch VeggieTales on PBS. All right?
I think there's a lot of value in being discerning and looking at art and how different artists and different musicians and different filmmakers do things. I think there's a lot of value in that. But it doesn't mean you get to watch every single thing because everything you watch is not going to be good for your soul. It's not going to be edifying. And what I see happens is when one of those shows is a little bit edgy and everyone's watching it. What do you do?
You want to see if anyone else is watching it. Is anybody else watching? Are our church watching? Does somebody else in our community watch it? You get on Facebook when it comes out. And it's like, oh, everyone else is watching it.
I feel a little bit justified. I can watch it too. We justify our actions by following the crowd. This happens in practical things like cheating on your taxes, which almost happens seemingly universally in our culture. Everyone likes to point at the top 1% on Wall Street, shifting money around, moving stuff around, hiding money from the government. But I used to wait tables.
I used to serve coffee in the service industry. What is common in the service industry? You don't report cash tips. They don't track that. You don't have to report your cash earnings. That's cheating the government.
And Jesus says, pay to Caesar what is Caesar's. It was funny because I used to listen to people who would rail on the 1%. I'm like, but you do the same thing. You just do it on a much smaller scale. We follow the government. And what happens is when new people come into a job like that, someone, you don't have to report your cash earnings.
You're good. And it's like, oh, okay, we're good. We justify our actions. We follow the crowd. And I could keep going down that list. And you may be thinking, nah, I'm different.
Now, you don't know me. I'm a nonconformist. I walk in that doctor's office. I'm sitting down. I ain't standing up. You may think, oh, no, I wouldn't make fun of Dave.
I wouldn't do any of those things. I don't conform. And that's a little bit of my heart when I hear stuff like that. I like to think I wouldn't conform. And I could go down the list and you might combat everyone. And here's what I'd say.
I think that you have misunderstood and underestimated how much the world has influenced your views on money, on power, on sex. I think that you've really misunderstood and you've underestimated how much the world has shaped your views. And honestly, you might be a little bit self-righteous to think that you are that much better than everyone else that you would not conform. But that is our nature. We conform to the world. So Paul makes that point.
Following the course of this world. And then he gets to the next part. Following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. All right, so here's where Paul starts to get offensive and he starts to step on toes. He says, you follow the course of this world and you follow the devil, the prince, the power of the air. That's who he's talking about there.
Now, in order to understand this, we need a little bit of context to understand who our enemy is. He's referred to as the devil. He's referred to as Satan. Satan comes from the Hebrew word for adversary. He's also called the tempter, the evil one, the accuser, the father of lies. And there's he has all kinds of names.
We look at Isaiah 14 and we have reasonably from that in a passage in Ezekiel that Satan was once an angel of God and that he wanted to be like God, rebelled against God with other angels and was cast down into the earth. And those angels became demons. And from that, ever since, his whole goal has been to undermine God's rule, to undermine God's reign and destroy the fabric of God's creation. That's been his role. And Adam and Eve, when they sinned against God, what they did was they joined forces with the devil, trusting his word and his ways over God. And they became sons of disobedience.
And we have inherited that same sons of disobedience, seeking to defy the king, the ruler of the universe. We became sons of disobedience. And that is the story of Eden playing out over and over and over again. And here's the deal. There's no neutral ground. The Bible makes it clear.
You're either a child of God or you're a child of the devil. Now, when the Bible says that, culture goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I heard we are all children of God. I've always heard that. I think I heard Michael Jackson sing that once. We are all children of God.
And Paul says, no, no, no. You were born as sons of disobedience. Or in the end of verse 3, he says, children of wrath. Or as Jesus says in John 8, like your father, the devil. So we need adopting out of that family.
That's why when we started this series, we started in chapter 1 and verse 5, the picture of adopted as sons points to this right here. You are adopted out of the family of Satan into the family of God. And that's one of the reasons why I love adoption so much. I came from a church before this that there's a lot of adopting going on. And I think of one specific instance where this family adopted this girl. She was given up for adoption as a young baby.
Ended up in the foster system. It was eventually adopted by this family. Not the family from my church, another family. And that family was a bad family. And they, like they wouldn't let her, they would take their kids they had the old fashioned way. They'd take those kids to Disney World and they'd leave her behind.
Just making the case, you're not like our other children. And so she inherited through the foster system, through this family. She inherited all kinds of bad habits and all kinds of problems. And then this family in our church adopted them. Adopted her. And they adopted her and the first thing this dad did was he looked at her and he said, You are my forever child.
This is your forever family. You're not going anywhere. Pack your bags. We're going to Disney World. All of our kids go to Disney World. So they took her to Disney World.
And you think that story would have had a magic like bow wrapped at Disney World. No. That trip was all, it was, it was rough. She acted out. She was frustrated. And she had reason to be because she inherited all these bad habits, all these bad things from these former families.
And then over the next year, they started to unpack the gospel with her. And one of the coolest things that I've ever seen was when she got baptized. Her dad baptized her. And I got to hear her testimony read. And she connected the dots that she'd been adopted out of a bad situation, out of a bad family, into this new family. And how that was a reflection of the gospel.
It's one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to see. Because with a new family comes new ways, comes new joys. And that's God's appeal through Ephesians, through the scriptures. That you be adopted into his family. Because his family is better. And with his family comes new ways that are better.
And sure, you bring some baggage with you. That's honestly one of the reasons that I love our church so much. I love our church so much because many of you have professed Jesus in the last couple years. And have been brought into this family. And you might come in on a Sunday. And you might hear someone drop an F-bomb.
Or get in an argument about something. Or like hear a vulgar joke that you might not hear in a church that's all well put together on the outside. And we have people from other churches that come from well put together on the outside churches. They come in here and I feel like they get a little bit uncomfortable. Now, we should grow in maturity. We should correct those things.
But I love the rawness of our church. Because it shows that people are being adopted out of this. That every person that we baptize. And we're going to celebrate baptism next week. Every person we baptize is one more person that we're celebrating. They're not in the family of Satan anymore.
They're in the family of God. And that is why I love being here. So Satan has a grip on those who are dead. And then Paul walks into our sin nature. So verse 2.
The spirit does not work in the sons of disobedience. He transitions to verse 3. Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh. Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. Spiritually dead people carry out their desires of their flesh. I mean, there's a lot of parallels to zombies.
Like, I love zombie movies and TV shows. I just do. Like, I think part of it is because they're really basic. Like, zombies, they wander, they eat people. Like, that's a pretty easy enemy to figure out. They wander, they eat people.
In some movies and TV shows, they're faster. In some, they're slower. But basically, that's what they do. They made this one movie once where the zombie fell in love with a human. And their heart changed. And everyone hated it.
And it was terrible. And no one, and it lost lots of money. Because we don't want our zombies to do that. We want them to wander and eat people. It's really basic. It's really simple.
And that's why we love to show the walking dead. I mean, they wander, they eat people. There may be complex storylines that happen on the outside. But the zombies are pretty common. They're just walking dead, fulfilling their nature. And the picture that Paul paints here is that we were all once walking dead.
We were. I mean, we're just a little more complex. Zombies wander and eat people. We have a lot more complex things going on in our nature that we default to. Like stealing. Like lying.
Hurting other people. Lust. Pride. That is why when you leave kids in a room by themselves, it quickly falls apart. Because left to their own nature, that's what they do. And when I hear a common pushback on that, part of me goes, Well, do you have kids?
Have you seen them in action? This is what they do. This is also why when anarchy happens in other cultures, when the government breaks down, some of the worst atrocities in human history happen. You think of Rwanda. 500,000 people. Genocide.
You think of Sudan. Close to a million people dying. You think of when the UK quickly pulled out of Pakistan and India, split the country just rudely across a line, and a million people killed each other. When the government breaks down, anarchy happens. And so mass rape, mass murder, some of the worst things happen. Now, some people in our culture might say, but those are foreign cultures.
We in Western culture, we wouldn't do that. Paul's got a word for you in Ephesians 2. We're going to get to prejudice and racism coming up. But at this point, it's important to know. I mean, just plug. Watch The Walking Dead.
You don't have to watch the whole show. My wife doesn't like it. Watch The Walking Dead. When society breaks down, even in American culture, we'll do the worst things. It happens when you're alone at your house, and no one's watching, and you've got your phone out, and you're scrolling, and you click on a video link, and you watch another video, and you keep scrolling through porn. Your flesh says, nah, just keep going.
Just do it. No one's watching. No one's here. Just do it. It happens when you're alone in your thoughts. Think of the thoughts that go through your head, and think of where those come from.
Think of when you might compare yourself to others and think, man, I think I'm honestly just better than them. I think I'm honestly just better than my spouse. I think I'm honest. Or how we manipulate situations in our head. If I do get this person to do this, and get this person to do that, and they follow this, then the situation works out in my favor. You can go on and on down the list, left to our own devices, left to our own thoughts.
That's what we do. I mean, even our good deeds are corrupted by selfish motives. Like you give to an online cause nowadays, what happens when the money clears? A little box pops up and says, would you like to share this? On Facebook? On Twitter?
On Instagram? Or if they're annoying, on Google Plus? Because nobody uses Google Plus. And they want you to share it. And you first look at it, and you're like, ah, that seems really self-centered. I'm not going to share this.
And then you think about it, and you're like, wait a second. It's about the children. And you know what? How are people going to know about this cause if I don't share it? It's about the children. It would be morally wrong for me not to share this.
No, people need to know that I gave to this. They need to click. I'm a good person. I mean, philanthropic organizations, they know that most of the giving is about yourself. I mean, that's why you can't go to a college or a school that doesn't have a building named after it. People don't just give to that.
They've got to have their name attached to it. Even our good motives are tainted by selfish ambition. And you may think as we've walked through some of this that, man, this cannot be that big of a deal. And I'd say the Bible says that you've severely underestimated your sin. The Bible says that our sin is cosmic treason against the king of the universe. And it earns us death, and it earns us hell.
And the reason why we don't take it seriously is because we have our flesh saying, no, it's not that big of a deal. The world is saying, no, this isn't that big of a deal. Satan is whispering into our hearts, no, it's not that big of a deal. And Paul is saying it's absolutely a huge deal. At this point, you're like, man, Paul, I like chapter 1. It was encouraging.
You flip to chapter 2, and Paul is a downer. He is negative. Like, what? And then he, like, doubles down on it in verse 3. He goes, and we're by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. And you're like, man.
Even in Romans 3, he makes the point in verses 10 through 12. He says, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside.
Together they've become worthless. No one does good. Not even one. And he makes the point, if you think you're put together, if you think you're killing it, that you're crushing life, you're not. You were all jacked up. You're all by nature children of wrath.
That's humanity. That's what it means to be humane. Like, when I hear people in this political, crazy season that we're in, when I hear people from the left call out the right and say, that person's inhumane. Where's the humanity in their speech? Where's the humanity in their position? I hear people from the right going, where's the humanity in their positions in the way they vote?
I'm looking back and I'm like, this is humanity. This is humane. This craziness, when the fabric of political correctness or whatever was holding our culture together before ends, this is humanity. This is who we are. Left to our own devices. This is what we do.
And it's a bleak picture that Paul paints here. I mean, think of everything that he's got here that is stacked against us. I want you to just take a second and absorb this. That we come into this world with a sinful nature that seeks to rebel against the God of the universe. That you come into this world as a conformist. Conforming to the patterns of this world.
Conforming to the ways of rebelling against God. Conforming to the people. Conforming to the people. Conforming to the people. Conforming to the people. That you come into this world as a son of disobedience.
As a daughter of disobedience. And the family of the evil one. That is a bleak picture of what we come into. And then Paul says, but. Verse 4. But God.
Being rich in mercy. Because of the great love with which he loved us. Even when we were dead in our trespasses. Made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved. And he comes in with the good news of the gospel.
But God. Who is rich in mercy. Who is rich in kindness. Who is rich in grace. Because of his love. Not our own.
Because of his love. Made us alive. Made us alive. Together with Christ. Together with the one. Who came into this world.
And did not follow the patterns of this world. Who was tempted in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights by Satan. When Satan was attempting to father him. And bring them into his family. He said no. My father's ways are better.
And he took that record of perfection to the cross. Where his flesh was ripped open. Where his body was broken. And where he was placed in an empty tomb. And when he resurrected from the grave. What happened was.
He made a way for us to be made alive. For the first time. To be made alive. That he hindered the power of Satan and his kingdom. Bringing it to his knees. That he made a way for us to be alive.
And the picture that follows. Is that God comes in. And he scoops us out of our mess. He brings us out of death. And brings us into his family. And makes us alive.
And gives us a perfect righteous standing before him. This isn't a picture of. We do some good works. We meet God halfway. No. He brings the dead to life.
Which means we have a new picture here. That God made us alive. So if you are in Christ. If you trust in him as your only hope. You're no longer dead in sin. You're made alive in Christ.
You no longer have to be a conformist. And follow the world. No. Like you can follow Jesus. That you're no longer a son of disobedience. That you're a child of the most high king.
That you're no longer a slave to your flesh. Obeying it. As that is your master. No. We have a new master. Who is much better.
And we have the freedom to say no to sin. And to say yes to Jesus. So. For believers. Verse 1 through 3. Is a picture of who you were.
It's not a picture of who you are. Now we still carry the stain of sinful flesh. And we're still going to struggle. We're not yet perfect at all. But that is not.
That was a picture of who you were. And we have a new picture of who we are. That we are made alive. Now I'll close with this. If you think. That you've been made alive.
By anything else other. Than belief in the finished work. Of what Jesus has done for us. Like if you came in today thinking that. I'm a Christian. Because I was born to a Christian family.
I'm part of a Christian culture. I've been in church my whole life. If you came in today thinking that. I think that. I get to God by being a good person. By living a good life.
By doing good things. And I'm going to be okay. Paul's message for you here. Is that if that's your understanding. Of the gospel. You are probably still dead in sin.
And the appeal that he makes. Is being made alive. Coming to this family. It is much better. Be made alive. Band's going to come up.
And they're going to close us. In a song. We're going to sing about the cross. And the cross is where this journey begins. The cross is where Jesus went. To die for us.
So that we could be made alive. And as we sing this song. Just take a moment. To ask God. Do I actually believe this? Do I actually believe.
That I'm made alive solely by Christ? Or if I believe. And place my faith. And other things. And our hope for you today. Is that you would see that Jesus is better.
That God's family is better. That you would trust in him. And from this day forward. You'd be alive. Let's pray.
God thank you. That though this picture is bleak. That we have so much. Staffed against us. That you didn't leave us there. That you didn't leave us in our sin.
That you did not leave us dead. That you came. God I pray. That we would believe that as a church. I pray. That if anyone.
Is feeling the weight of conviction. About that. That they might believe today. And be made alive. Amen.