Show Notes
Isaiah 43:1-7
Rev. Stephen Lauer
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Now we'll read once more from God's Word.
[00:00:03] Our sermon text again. It's changed from what's in the bulletin. Our sermon text is from Isaiah 43.
[00:00:11] Isaiah 43. We'll read verses one through seven.
[00:00:22] Why are we supposed to pray first? Wasn't I? We'll read and then we'll pray. Since you have your Bibles open, hear God's word.
[00:00:31] But now, thus says the he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel.
[00:00:42] Fear not, for I have redeemed you.
[00:00:47] I have called you by name.
[00:00:49] You are mine.
[00:00:52] When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.
[00:01:02] When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.
[00:01:10] For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
[00:01:19] I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Sheba in exchange for you.
[00:01:27] Because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you.
[00:01:34] I give men in return for you peoples in exchange for your life.
[00:01:42] Fear not, for I am with you.
[00:01:46] I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say, to the north, give up, and to the south, do not withhold.
[00:01:58] Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth.
[00:02:04] Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made, as for God's word, may he add his blessings to it. Let's seek the Lord together in prayer.
[00:02:20] O Lord our God.
[00:02:22] What gracious and wonderful words we hear from you immediately on the heels of terrifying words that we, your people, have sinned, and therefore your judgment is upon us.
[00:02:37] And yet you would have us not be afraid.
[00:02:43] For you are our God, for you are with us. You are our Savior.
[00:02:49] O Lord our God.
[00:02:50] We confess that these are things that we hear again and again and again.
[00:02:55] And we need to hear them.
[00:02:57] But we still have trouble.
[00:03:01] We look to ourselves and we begin to doubt.
[00:03:06] How could you love us?
[00:03:08] We look to our circumstances around us, and they seem to overwhelm us.
[00:03:15] And, O God, we fall again and again into the pit of sin.
[00:03:23] And there we become convinced that we do not deserve anything but your wrath.
[00:03:30] O Lord our God, we ask that you would minister to our hearts today, that your word would pierce them in that way that you alone can do so, that our hearts would not only be cut through, but that you would cut out and remove the doubts, the unbeliefs, the sinful cloud that keeps us from seeing you.
[00:03:58] The Lord Jesus Our Savior, that we might behold you and that we might be drawn to you and that our faith might be restored and that we being drawn to you might have peace.
[00:04:10] Lord Jesus, we know that this you do by the work of your spirit. So we ask, O Holy Spirit, that you would work in us tonight, that both preacher and hearer, your spirit would indwell drawing us to the truth of your word and that you would work in us, that work of new creation, reforming us so that we might be new creatures in Christ, united to him and having full assurance of our salvation in Him. For it's in his name that we pray. Amen.
[00:04:45] Please be seated.
[00:04:47] Every now and then we do things out of order and it's okay.
[00:04:58] There's lots of things in life that we fear. Different times in our lives. Maybe it's different things. Maybe it's grown ups with lots of burdens, children to care for, spouses, maybe parents in their old age that we have to care for. Maybe we begin to fear economic problems as the news trickles in of what the current administration is doing. Tax cuts or new economic bills and stimuluses, these kinds of things. My entire adult life, they've always been something going through the news about the economy, about what the government's doing. And people are always worried, will it work? Won't it work? Are we on the brink of a depression or, or a recession?
[00:05:45] Been through a couple of those in my short life already.
[00:05:49] We fear these things or we're tempted to.
[00:05:52] Maybe it's more relational for you. Do you fear your spouse and losing his or her affection?
[00:06:02] Do you fear people being upset with you? Whether it's people at your co workers or people in your family, Some people are gripped by that fear.
[00:06:12] Others fear illnesses, the big bad C word, cancer.
[00:06:19] That can be terrifying.
[00:06:23] Of course, there's places around the world that have been embroiled in war.
[00:06:28] Some for a few months, some for several years. Some have been at war for centuries.
[00:06:35] That's a terrifying thing.
[00:06:38] Warriors coming through, killing, burning, looting.
[00:06:45] But what's really terrifying, what really should strike fear in our hearts, is what we read in the end of Isaiah 42.
[00:06:58] We read that God poured on Israel the heat of his anger and the might of battle.
[00:07:08] It set Israel, God's people, on fire all around.
[00:07:17] It's not just war.
[00:07:19] There was war. The Assyrians came.
[00:07:22] Now at this point, Isaiah is looking forward to when the Babylonians are going to come and destroy Jerusalem.
[00:07:29] But the real problem, the really terrifying thing, is not just that it's enemy soldiers invading and death, destruction and all that they bring.
[00:07:38] The really terrifying thing is that God is the one behind it.
[00:07:43] Who gave up Jacob to the looter? Verse 24.
[00:07:48] Was it not the Lord against whom we have sinned?
[00:07:55] God, because of his anger, his wrath against man's sin, handed his people over to the looter and the destroyer.
[00:08:06] That's what we really need to fear.
[00:08:10] In the midst of that fear, we come to our passage, where God comes to comfort his people. He projects through the prophet Isaiah a terrifying destruction that's going to come by the hand of the Babylonians.
[00:08:23] It's already come through the Assyrians. In Isaiah's own day, they had come. They carried the northern kingdom off into exile, scattered God's people all over the ancient near east, all over the Middle east today.
[00:08:38] And Isaiah predicts a day when not just the northern kingdom, but Judah, the southern kingdom, is going to be invaded by Nebuchadnezzar and his armies. And Jerusalem itself is going to be destroyed. And all God's people then, not just the northern 10 tribes, but Judah, also carried off into exile.
[00:09:01] This, God says through Isaiah, this is coming. This is sure and certain.
[00:09:08] Even as God, through Isaiah, predicts this terrifying, fearful future, he says to his people, yes, that's coming.
[00:09:17] But don't fear.
[00:09:19] Don't be afraid. He says it twice in the passage, verse 1, chapter 43, verse 1, fear not, for I have redeemed you. And then again in verse five, fear not, for I am with you. Yes, there's God's wrath, the most terrifying thing that anyone could ever face, and that every person on the earth stands to face. The Bible says, all have sinned. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And the wages of sin is death.
[00:09:53] God's wrath stands against every person on the face of the earth.
[00:09:58] God, in the midst of that, promises to his people those who've come to know and trust him. Christians, he says, do not fear. And that's the message of the passage this evening to Christians. Do not fear in the face of my wrath. Do not be afraid.
[00:10:15] First reason God says that the Christian should not fear is because the Christian belongs to God.
[00:10:22] You belong to me, God says, and therefore you do not need to be afraid of me.
[00:10:29] God's message to Israel was, do not fear.
[00:10:34] You are mine.
[00:10:37] You are mine. You belong to me. He says this in several ways.
[00:10:42] He says it directly. I've called you by name. You are mine.
[00:10:49] But there are several specific ways in which he expresses that Israel belongs to him.
[00:10:56] Israel belongs to God.
[00:10:59] First of all because God created them.
[00:11:02] You might say, by creation, Israel belongs to God. Now here, he's not referring to Genesis creation in the beginning, he's referring to Exodus creation, what the New Testament will call new creation.
[00:11:18] This is what God's talking about in verse one.
[00:11:22] Thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel. I'm the one who formed and shaped you as my people, Israel. I made you into a nation.
[00:11:36] My nation.
[00:11:38] See it again at the end of our passage, verse 7. Everyone who is called by name, My name, for I created you for my glory. I formed you and made you.
[00:11:50] God created a people for himself. He did this in the Exodus. He brought the people of the Israelites out of Egypt.
[00:12:00] There they were enslaved, right serving Pharaoh.
[00:12:05] God brought them out through the Exodus. He saved this people for himself, and then he formed and shaped them into a nation. You see that happening first at Sinai, where He gives them his law, he makes his covenant with them.
[00:12:20] He tells them how they're to live before Him. He. He's ordering and shaping his people to be a nation. His people.
[00:12:29] Then he further shapes them through the wilderness, wanderings and prepares them to enter the land. That's what this is talking about. You're mine because I formed and shaped you to be my people. I created you. You belong to me.
[00:12:45] So don't be afraid.
[00:12:47] Secondly, Israel belongs to God by virtue of redemption.
[00:12:54] God says, I have redeemed you in verse one.
[00:12:58] He's redeemed them. Now, in English, when we hear the word redeem, we don't use it that often, but we think of it in terms of purchasing, redeeming, so that the thing that you have purchased is the thing that belongs to you. Right?
[00:13:14] So Israel belongs to God because God has redeemed them.
[00:13:18] How has he redeemed them? How did God redeem Israel?
[00:13:23] The idea here in verse one, when he says, fear not, for I have redeemed you. You are mine.
[00:13:31] It's the same idea that you have when Boaz redeems Ruth. If you remember the story of Ruth and Naomi, they come back to Israel after spending some time in Moab, and they have nothing.
[00:13:47] Their husbands have died and they've lost the family property.
[00:13:52] They have nothing. And there's no man to care for them. There's no man to marry Ruth and give her children and carry on the family name.
[00:14:01] They don't have their property, their inheritance, and there's no man to care for the family. And so that the family inheritance would continue to be passed down.
[00:14:10] But Boaz Ruth's relative, comes along, and he obligates himself to redeem Ruth.
[00:14:20] He marries Ruth and then he goes and he purchases the family property so that Naomi's descendants and Elimelech's descendants might continue to possess the land, that inheritance that God had given them, like Boaz for Ruth. God here is saying that I have redeemed you, Israel.
[00:14:47] He's saying, I came and made myself like your relative.
[00:14:53] I bound myself, I obligated myself to you in covenant to redeem and save you and to give you an inheritance.
[00:15:02] And because I've done that, you belong to me. You are mine, so don't fear.
[00:15:09] Thirdly, God says that Israel belongs to God because he's put his name on them.
[00:15:17] You see that in verse one.
[00:15:20] I have called you by name. He gave them a name. Israel means he who wrestles with God.
[00:15:27] You're my people.
[00:15:29] There's all sorts of things that come from that name, but they are God's people. He has named them.
[00:15:36] Not only did he name them, but he put his name on them.
[00:15:42] He gave them his name when he made his covenant with them. He told them his covenant name, I am Jehovah God.
[00:15:50] He especially revealed it to them when he bound himself to them in covenant.
[00:15:55] And then in number six, at the end of number six, he tells the priests, Aaron and his sons to do something very interesting. He says to them, bless the people.
[00:16:07] And as you bless them, you put my name on them.
[00:16:12] And you know that blessing. Jehovah bless you and keep you. Jehovah causes his face to shine on you and be gracious to you.
[00:16:19] Jehovah, lift up his countenance on you and give you peace three times over. God says, you put my name on the people as you bless them. What is happening there?
[00:16:31] There's lots of things that are happening, but one of them is that Israel belongs to God. And so God puts his name on Israel.
[00:16:39] What do you do with things that you have made or that belong to you?
[00:16:45] You put your name on them so you don't lose them. Or if someone else finds them, they know, oh, this coat belongs to Jimmy.
[00:16:52] And so that's what your mom does when she sends you off to school. She puts your name in your coach, put your name on your lunchbox, right?
[00:16:58] So that everyone knows that this belongs to Jimmy.
[00:17:02] God put his name on his people so that they would know and everyone would know that they belonged to him.
[00:17:10] Israel belongs to God. And he says, therefore, do not fear the Christian, because belongs to God.
[00:17:19] First, by redemption, Jesus came and took on our human nature.
[00:17:26] And when he did so, he made Himself our relative, our kinsman, Redeemer. He took our flesh and blood and he obligated Himself thereby to redeeming our flesh and blood.
[00:17:41] The Christian belongs to God because Jesus has redeemed you flesh and blood, and you are His.
[00:17:51] The Christian belongs to God by virtue of creation. Again, not Genesis creation, but like Exodus, new creation in Christ Jesus. He takes you and he makes you new.
[00:18:05] He reshapes you, reforms you to be like Himself.
[00:18:10] We talk about sanctification, where God, through Christ, by His Holy Spirit, is renewing, remaking us to be more like Jesus, renewing us in the image of His Son. The New Testament says he's doing that for us individually and he's doing that for us corporately, as one body of Christ. The whole church is Christ's creation, new creation. If he made us or remade us, we belong to Him.
[00:18:40] Finally, we belong to God because He put his name on us. You, dear Christian, bear not just the name of Christian, you bear the name of the triune God.
[00:18:51] God put his name on Israel in the Old Testament. He put his name on you. You are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
[00:19:00] Again, lots of things there, but among them, God is saying, you're mine.
[00:19:06] You're mine. So that the world will know that you belong to God, and so that you will know that you belong to God. And you do not need to be afraid.
[00:19:16] Do not fear, dear Christian, you belong to God. He will preserve you, protect you, keep you. You're His.
[00:19:27] Secondly, you need not fear, dear Christian, because God is with the Christian. That's the second promise that you have in this text.
[00:19:37] God says to Israel, fear not, I am with you.
[00:19:42] Fear not, I am with you.
[00:19:46] Now, if you read the Old Testament, especially the stories of Assyria coming and carrying off the northern kingdom of Assyria, coming and trapping Hezekiah and the Israelites. And like a bird in a cage.
[00:20:02] That's what the Assyrian king says. He says in his records, he says, I had Hezekiah trapped like a bird in a cage as he besieged Jerusalem. You read these stories, and it doesn't look like God is with his people.
[00:20:17] You read the story of the Babylonian army coming, and this time not just besieging Jerusalem, but destroying it.
[00:20:26] The arrows of the Babylonians come fly over the walls. Their siege engines come up and they knock the walls down.
[00:20:35] And then the army pours into Jerusalem. And as they pour into Jerusalem, they rape, pillage, plunder, and they burn.
[00:20:45] They burned Jerusalem to the ground. The archaeologists have gone and they have dug up the char layer, and it is thick from when the Babylonians burned Jerusalem.
[00:20:57] You look at what Isaiah predicts. There he poured on him in the heat of his anger, the might of his battle, it set him on fire all around.
[00:21:08] The fires burned in Jerusalem, and it did not look like God was with his people.
[00:21:15] It often doesn't feel like God is with us, but God promises that he is with his people. They couldn't see sometimes that God was with them. We sometimes struggle to see that God is with us, don't we, as we go through trials, difficulties, and particularly when we feel God's wrath against us for our sin. Is God with us? We ask. God says, I am with you. Do not fear, he says. He speaks here in these verses to the Israelites in language that they should be familiar with and understand in verse three.
[00:21:54] If I were to paraphrase verse three, I would do it this way. God is saying to Israel, his people, you know me.
[00:22:02] You know who I am.
[00:22:05] You don't need to be afraid.
[00:22:10] I am your God.
[00:22:13] I am Jehovah. I gave that name to you when I bound myself in covenant to you at Sinai.
[00:22:22] I gave you my name, Jehovah, so you would know who I am.
[00:22:29] God did something greater for you when he put His Son on the cross.
[00:22:34] In the blood of his Son, dear Christian, he sealed the new covenant, the everlasting covenant that cannot be broken.
[00:22:45] And because of that, you know that you have God and He has you, and he is with you always.
[00:22:52] Nothing can break his covenant and his promises. You say, my sins.
[00:22:59] How can God be with me when I'm such a sinner?
[00:23:05] Pastor, you don't know my sins.
[00:23:09] Look at what God says to his people here in Isaiah. He knows their sins.
[00:23:15] That's why he sent the foreign invading armies against them.
[00:23:19] And yet he says, I am with you.
[00:23:24] Look at verse three. I am the Lord, your God. I'm the One who's bound myself to you in covenant.
[00:23:31] I am the Holy One, the Holy One of Israel.
[00:23:40] It's as though God is saying, yes, you know that you are sinners. I know that you are sinners.
[00:23:47] And I am the Holy One who cannot tolerate sin.
[00:23:52] So I came to be your savior to save you from your sins, the thing that kept you and me apart so that we could not be together. I could not be with you. You could not be with me. That was your sin. I'm the Holy One. You are sinners, but I came to be your Savior. So that we could be together.
[00:24:13] Do you see what he's saying?
[00:24:15] I am your God. Yes, I'm the Holy One. But I'm also your Savior.
[00:24:24] God did this for you, dear Christian, in his Son on the cross there. He took your sin away. And he made it so that he could be with you and you could be with him.
[00:24:34] And nothing could break that covenant bond that Christ Jesus sealed in his blood.
[00:24:40] Your sins are gone, and God is with you.
[00:24:44] But we look, don't we, not to the cross. We look to our circumstances.
[00:24:50] We look to our sins. We look to the trouble we're facing.
[00:24:54] And we say, how could it be?
[00:24:57] Everywhere Noah looked, what did he see?
[00:25:01] Water.
[00:25:04] Everywhere the Israelites looked, what did they see?
[00:25:08] The Red Sea and walls.
[00:25:10] Everywhere the disciples looked, they saw a storm threatening to sink them and their little boat on the Sea of Galilee.
[00:25:20] Everywhere Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego looked, they saw fire.
[00:25:28] That raging furnace burning 10 times hotter than normal. Everywhere they looked, they saw burning flames.
[00:25:38] But Jesus was in the ark, holding that ark up so that it wouldn't sink in the flood waters. Jesus was there holding back the walls of the Red Sea so that his people would pass through on dry ground.
[00:25:53] Jesus was there on the boat, calming the wind and the waves.
[00:25:58] And Jesus was that fourth person that Nebuchadnezzar saw walking around in the fiery furnace.
[00:26:06] And those three friends of Daniel came out, and they didn't even smell of smoke.
[00:26:14] And Jesus is with you.
[00:26:17] No matter what you face, no matter what you go through, Jesus is with you.
[00:26:22] And you do not need to be afraid, dear Christian.
[00:26:27] He says, I will never leave you or forsake you, dear Christian. You do not need to fear because you are precious to God.
[00:26:39] It's a third reason God gives in this text for why you do not need to fear.
[00:26:45] God paid a price for Israel. You see it there in verse three and verse four in the Exodus. Israelites were wicked sinners. They deserved to die. They deserved every firstborn of every family to die. And really everyone deserved to die. Because they were all wicked sinners. They were under a sentence of death.
[00:27:07] But God didn't take the Israelites. He didn't even take the firstborn of every Israelite family.
[00:27:13] He took the firstborn of Egypt.
[00:27:17] God took the Egyptians as his ransom.
[00:27:21] They paid the price instead of Israel.
[00:27:27] God was, as it were, ransoming Israel.
[00:27:32] And the price that was paid was paid with Egyptian blood.
[00:27:41] God says, you're precious to me. I'm willing to give whole nations for you, Israel.
[00:27:46] But to The Christian, he says, you are precious to me. I redeemed you.
[00:27:52] I paid a price for you.
[00:27:58] We hear this. And if we're honest with ourselves, if we look within and we hear God say to us, you are precious to me, there's not a one of us that can say, yes, that's true. I must be precious. If we look in ourselves, do we see anything of worth or value?
[00:28:20] We say, no, I'm a sinner.
[00:28:24] You say, it can't be true that I'm precious to God.
[00:28:29] Not only am I a sinner in the general sense, I explore all kinds of sins in the darkness of my heart. Even when I'm not being led away into sin out there, my heart pursues sin.
[00:28:45] Guess what?
[00:28:47] God knows.
[00:28:48] He knows everything you've done. He knows everything you'll do. And he knows the darkness of your hearts.
[00:28:56] And he doesn't point you to yourself to determine your worth and value.
[00:29:03] He says, you are precious to me.
[00:29:08] You are precious to me.
[00:29:12] Look to my son.
[00:29:14] That's what he says.
[00:29:17] You are worth more than anything in the world. And I will give my son and his precious blood to purchase you.
[00:29:27] We tend to look inward when we think about our worth and value.
[00:29:30] Don't ever do that. God never tells you to do that. He says, look to my son.
[00:29:37] That's the price. That's the value I place on you, dear Christian.
[00:29:46] God told Israel in Deuteronomy 7, I didn't save you because you were great or because you were good or because you were anything like that.
[00:29:56] I saved you because I love you.
[00:30:02] God saves the Christian because He loves you. That's the basis and ground for his choosing to save you and pay the purchase price of the blood of His Son.
[00:30:12] See that there in verse four. Because you are precious in my eyes.
[00:30:16] God honors you and he says, I love you, and therefore I will pay a ransom for you.
[00:30:25] Look to His Son to see the cost, the price, how precious you are. And then look to God and His love as the ground and basis for why he chooses to save you.
[00:30:36] Are you precious? Yes. Not because of you, because of Jesus, His Son, and because of the eternal fountain of that love in God himself.
[00:30:46] So do not fear. You are precious to God, and He has proved that to you by putting his own Son on the cross.
[00:30:55] Finally, do not fear, dear Christian, because God will find the Christian. That's the fourth and final reason we find in this text for why we should not fear God in His wrath. God will find the Christian. Israel was afraid of being scattered. Look at verse 5 and 6.
[00:31:15] Here you find that the Israelites are scattered to the north, south, east and west. That's what the Assyrians did with the northern 10 tribes. They came and they carried them away deliberately.
[00:31:27] They wanted to obliterate Israel as a nation so that they wouldn't have an identity anymore. They resettled them in other places of the Assyrian empire.
[00:31:36] Babylonians came, and they did the same thing with the southern tribe of Judah.
[00:31:42] By the time of the New Testament, you find there are Jews all over the Mediterranean, all over the Middle East. They have been scattered to the four winds, as it were.
[00:31:52] And that was a terrifying thing for the Israelites.
[00:31:57] It's put a picture of us being lost in our sins.
[00:32:04] Are you lost, scattered, as it were, in your sins, in some dark corner of the world where you say, God can't possibly find me here?
[00:32:19] Have you strayed? Are you straying right now?
[00:32:24] Perhaps God has allowed you to stray away from him.
[00:32:28] And as that distance has gotten greater and greater spiritually, you may say to yourself, I don't feel near to God. I cry out to him, and I don't think he hears me.
[00:32:43] You see this sometimes in the psalms.
[00:32:46] God, why are you far off?
[00:32:51] We stray. God's people, it seems sometimes as though we're scattered to the four winds.
[00:32:58] God says, don't be afraid.
[00:33:00] I will find you and I will gather you to myself.
[00:33:04] That's his promise there in verse 5 and 6. I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west. I will gather you. I will say to the north, give up, to the south, do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.
[00:33:23] You know where we're going.
[00:33:25] How does God gather you?
[00:33:28] He sends the Great Gatherer who comes and calls himself the good shepherd.
[00:33:35] The shepherd comes and he seeks the lost sheep. Right? There's 99 sheep. There's one that's strayed. And he goes after him and he finds him, and he puts him on his shoulders and he brings them home. How does Jesus do this?
[00:33:50] The Father said to the Son, these are my sheep, those whom I've loved from all eternity, go and fetch them. Gather them and bring them for me.
[00:34:02] And so Jesus came. He took on human nature and he went to the cross so that he could pay the purchase price for his sheep.
[00:34:12] I'm the good shepherd. I lay down my life for the sheep.
[00:34:17] And then he goes, and through his word, he retrieves every single one of those sheep. There's not one sheep that Jesus died for that. The Father gave to the Son that Jesus won't bring to himself by his word and spirit.
[00:34:31] Jesus says, all that the Father has given me will come to me, and I won't cast any of them out.
[00:34:39] The Christian does not need to fear because there is no place that we can scatter, no dark corner of this world in our sin that we can fall into where Jesus won't find us and bring us home.
[00:34:53] We do not need to fear because God has delivered us in Jesus. Son, let's pray.
[00:35:01] O Lord our God, we give you thanks and praise for we were hopeless, like Israel, over and over again, falling into idolatry. Our hearts are black and there is no sin that we will not pursue.
[00:35:21] There is no darkness that we will not try.
[00:35:24] And the result is is misery.
[00:35:28] We're discouraged, we're weary, and we despair.
[00:35:32] And then we read in your word of your wrath against sinners and we feel utterly hopeless.
[00:35:38] But our God, we thank you that where there was hopelessness, you brought hope through your Son. We thank you that in him there is no more need to fear, but he stands beckoning us.
[00:35:55] Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. O Lord Jesus, we come.
[00:36:01] Give us that rest.
[00:36:03] We thirst as we go about the desert of this world. We thirst for you.
[00:36:10] Give us more of yourself.
[00:36:12] Give us more of the freedom that you have purchased for us.
[00:36:16] That we might be free from all of this sin.
[00:36:19] That we might have the joy not only of knowing you and delighting in your presence, but the joy of serving you.
[00:36:28] That we would know what it is to love our brother and sister.
[00:36:32] That we would have the delight of serving and helping one another.
[00:36:38] And that we would know your smile as a father smiles upon his children. That we would feel that our hearts knowing that you are pleased with us, not for our own sake, but for Jesus sake. For you have received and adopted us in him, and we are yours and you are ours. Help us to know this more and more truly that we might serve you.
[00:37:03] In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
