Show Notes
1 Samuel 6:1 - 7:1
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the word that comes to us in Jesus, for the Holy Spirit who testifies to him and speaks of him and speaks that word. We ask that you would, by the power of the Spirit, bring us understanding and desire and zeal and hearts that long after you.
[00:00:27] Lord. We ask that you would humble us before you as we hear your word this morning that you would encourage us in the strength of your might, the glory of your name, and the promises that we have in you through Jesus. We pray this in his name. Amen.
[00:00:45] Well, you may remain standing. And let's turn to First Samuel, Chapter 6. So I'm going to read Samuel 6, 7:1. Different people will divide this at different places. Obviously some divide this at the end of chapter six. In some of your Bibles you'll see that some people divide it. Divide this passage at verse two.
[00:01:25] It's not really a huge deal one way or another, but we gotta do something. So I'm going to do seven, verse one. So chapter six through seven one.
[00:01:36] The ark of the Lord was in the country of the Philistines seven months. And the Philistines called for the priests and the diviners and said, what shall we do with the ark of the Lord?
[00:01:48] Tell us with what we shall send it to its place. They said, if you send away the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it empty, but by all means return him a guilt offering. Then you will be healed and it will be known to you why his hand does not turn away from you. And they said, what is the guilt offering that we shall return to him?
[00:02:11] They answered, five golden tumors and five golden mice according to the numbers of the lords of the Philistines. For the same plague was on all of you and all your lords. So you must make images of your tumors and images of your mice that ravaged the land and give glory to the God of Israel. Perhaps he will lighten his hand from off you and your gods and your land. Why should you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts after he had dealt severely with them? They did not send the people away and they departed.
[00:02:48] Now then, take and prepare a new cart and two milch cows on which there has never come a yoke.
[00:02:56] And yoke the cows to the cart, but take their calves home away from them, and take the ark of the Lord and place it on the cart and put in a box at its side the figures of gold which you are returning to him as a guilt offering. Then send it off and let it go its way. And Watch. If it goes up on the way to its own land, to Beth Shemesh, then it is he who has done us this great harm. But if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that has struck us. It has happened to us by coincidence.
[00:03:30] The men did so and took two milch cows and yoked them to the cart and shut up their calves at home. And they put the Ark of the Lord on the cart and the box with the golden mice and the images of their tumors.
[00:03:43] And the cows went straight in the direction of Beth Shemesh along one highway, lowing as they went. They turned neither to the right nor to the left. And the lords of the Philistines went after them as far as the border of Beth Shemesh. Now the people of Beth Shemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley. And when they lifted up their eyes and saw the ark, they rejoiced to see it. The cart came into the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh and stopped there. A great stone was there. And they split up the wood of the cart and offered the cows as a burnt offering to the Lord. And the Levites took down the Ark of the Lord and the box that was beside it in which there were the golden figures, and set them upon the great stone. And the men of Beth Shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices on that day to the Lord. And when the five lords of the Philistines saw it, they returned that day to Ekron.
[00:04:36] These are the golden tumors that the Philistines returned as a guilt offering to the Lord. One for Ashdod, one for Gaza, one for Ashkelon, one for Gath, one for Ekron and the golden mice. According to the number of all the cities of the Philistines belonging to the five lords, both fortified cities and unwalled villages, the great stone beside which they set down the Ark of the Lord is a witness to this day in the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh.
[00:05:05] And he struck some of the men of Beth Shemesh because they looked upon the Ark of the lord. He struck 70 men of them. And the people mourned because the Lord had struck the people with a great blow. Then the men of Beth Shemesh said, who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God, and to whom shall he go? Up, away from us. They sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath Jearim, saying, the Philistines have returned. The Ark of the Lord. Come down and take it up with you. And the men of Kiriath Jearim came and took up the Ark of the Lord and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill. And they consecrated his son Eleazar to have charge of the Ark of the Lord.
[00:05:49] Amen. May God bless his word to us. You may be seated.
[00:06:10] Well, the Philistines find themselves in a very difficult situation of their own making, but nevertheless, a very difficult situation.
[00:06:19] They've defeated God's people. They've destroyed their army that fought against them.
[00:06:28] And then, believing that their God or gods had been able to conquer Yahweh, they took the Ark of the Lord and captured it and put it beside Dagon, one of their gods. We read this in the last chapter. Do you remember what happened?
[00:06:45] The God, the idol fell down before the Ark of the Lord, face down in a kind of bowing posture. They pushed him back up. He falls down again. This time they find him in the morning with his head cut off and his hands cut off, organized on the threshold of the temple or wherever he was. On top of that, they are experiencing plagues.
[00:07:10] They are experiencing tumors or boils. Some translations call it hemorrhoids. There are various ways of talking about this. Translators aren't entirely sure what was happening, but unpleasant and frustrating and difficult.
[00:07:27] In addition, these mice are mentioned here. There's different suggestions as to what was going on with the mice. Perhaps there were mice that were destroying the fields. If Dagon was a God of grain and prosperity and the mice were herding crops, that would maybe have been what was going on. Other people suggest that there's connections between the boils or the tumors in the mice, like bubonic plague or something like that.
[00:07:55] Somehow, though, the Philistines are making this connection in their head that. That the mice and the tumors are bad and they're hurting them. And it's because of this God, a God that they thought they had beat, a God that they thought their gods had beat, but he clearly is not beat.
[00:08:19] This God that they think they have been able to control is destroying them and hurting them and judging them for their wickedness. The glory of the Lord departs Israel. But that doesn't mean that God disappears.
[00:08:36] God is not a God of our imaginations. He's not a God of our desires or our hopes or our dreams, in the sense that he is generated from us and simply ceases to exist once we stop dreaming him up.
[00:08:54] He is who he is. Just as these chairs are here, whether you're here or not, God is here. Whether we are here or not, whether we Pay attention to him, ignore him, try to control him. He is who he is. And we see that. And the Philistines are experiencing that here in our chapter.
[00:09:15] It's been a tough year for the Philistines, seven months so far. We read that the ark was in the country of the Philistines, affecting everyone. The big cities, the rural cities, the lords themselves seem to be affected as well, and they're getting frustrated. In the last chapter, we read about how the ark was sent from town to town of just making things worse for themselves.
[00:09:43] And so the Philistines then call for the priests and the diviners and said, what shall we do with the Ark of the Lord?
[00:09:54] Right? The government was not able. The civil government, we could say, was not able to solve this problem. And so now they're turning to religious leaders, they're turning to people whose job it is to be able to divine, we sometimes say, or determine the connections between the spiritual and the physical realm.
[00:10:21] How magic works, how to tell the future, how to unlock things, how to undo curses, how to create curses, all of these sorts of things. These are people whose job it is to be sensitive to the immaterial world which exists and. And to make determined nations by it so that we can live and be effective in our lives.
[00:10:50] Well, what do they say as they turn to these diviners and these priests? What shall we do with the Ark of the Lord? Tell us what with what? We shall send it to its place.
[00:11:02] They offer a suggestion in verse three, but notice there's a certain amount of hesitation in it.
[00:11:08] They say, if you send away the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it empty, but by all means, return him a guilt offering. Then you will be healed and it will be known to you why his hand does not turn away from you.
[00:11:21] Right? So sounds like a lot of confidence so far. Right? Here's what you gotta do. Do this, do this, do this. They continue.
[00:11:29] They ask, well, what is this guilt offering that we need to return? They sense that there's something owed to this God, right? There's a guilt offering that needs to be paid. The Philistines sense that they have done something wrong and they need to repay, that they need to atone for that. So they ask, what's the guilt offering? The priests and diviners answer about the tumors and the mice. There's some logical connections, right, According to the number of the Philistines and the plague. And they talk about these things. But then as we get to the end of this section, it says, perhaps he will lighten his Hand from off. You and your gods and your land.
[00:12:10] So there's a sense of hope, right? A sense that we don't know totally what's going to happen. We can't control him. He's obviously big and powerful. Perhaps this will happen then. Very interestingly, as we continue to summarize this and recall this, in verse six, they talk about the Egyptians.
[00:12:30] They're like, we've seen this before, right? We're not just shooting in the dark here. This is not a God you want to mess with. We saw what happened with the Egyptians. We saw the plagues. We saw how they hardened their hearts and it destroyed them.
[00:12:48] The Egyptians and these Philistines had had conflict with one another. They knew about the difficulties of Pharaoh and his chariots. And they knew that Pharaoh had been destroyed.
[00:13:01] And ultimately the people did leave. God was victorious.
[00:13:06] And so they come up with this plan, right? They come up with a plan about the golden tumors. Gross, I have to say. And the mice. And they were going to put it in this box, and that's going to be the offering to the Lord.
[00:13:20] Then they come up with this very interesting plan.
[00:13:23] They're going to make a cart, right? A new cart. They're going to take two cows. And two facts about these cows, they've not been trained to carry a cart before. They've never been yoked before. And secondly, they have babies, they have calves. They're milk cows. They say, right, these are mom cows that are feeding their babies. And like most mothers feeding their babies, they want to be close, they want to be together. But they're going to shut the calves away so that the cows will do, if all goes according to plan, a very unusual thing. They will not go to their babies. They will somehow be able to take this cart, and they will take it to a very particular town. So it's a test, right? They're saying, this is the ordinary way. They know what would ordinarily happen. And so they're setting up this extraordinary thing.
[00:14:24] Then send it off and let it go its own way. And watch.
[00:14:30] I find something a little bit humorous about these cows walking and these lords of the Philistines following these cows.
[00:14:38] But anyway, they go off to the land, and there at the end in verse nine, by saying, we shall know that, sorry, if it goes up on the way to its own land, to Beth Shemesh, then it is he who has done us this great harm. But if not, then we shall know that it's not his hand that has struck us. It has happened to us by coincidence.
[00:15:01] So you can tell that these priests and diviners, they've got a plan, they're trying to think it through, but at the same time, they don't fully know. They don't fully know that this God will be appeased if it is him. And secondly, they're not even 100% sure that it is Him. They say, well, if he comes, they're kind of hedging their bets a little bit. It would be embarrassing as a priest, as a diviner, you know, this is your job to sort of. Here, here's this great test. Do it. And then you'll know, or you'll get rid of the problem, which is what is being asked. They're saying, solve this problem, right? And they say, we'll do this and you'll know, but if it doesn't work out, you know, then we'll know it was by coincidence. Well, that's not exactly what the problem.
[00:15:46] That's not the problem they were asked to solve, is it? They were asked to solve the problem of the tumors and the ark and these kind of things.
[00:15:54] So anyway, they do this, and it turns out it works.
[00:16:02] The Lord guides these cows lowing the whole way with the priests or probably watching, but the lords specifically watching as the. As the.
[00:16:15] This cart, the Lord being the driver, we could say, drives back to the land, to Beth Shemesh.
[00:16:27] And there. There's a certain amount of rejoicing that happens on the part of the Israelites, but also we see something that is somewhat dark.
[00:16:40] It's probably a little bit difficult to understand what happens next. Let me try and explain it.
[00:16:47] We read in verse 19 that he struck some of the men of Beth Shemesh. And it gives a reason why, because they looked on the Ark of the Lord.
[00:16:58] Now, there's a couple things to think about.
[00:17:01] First of all, the Ark of the Lord was normally somewhat veiled, and that's where it had been previously. And it is typically kept in the tent of the Lord, in the temple of the Lord. It was kept in the most holy place, and only the high priest would go in there. And just once a year. Some of these developments were later, but there were things that were going on similar earlier on this. Holiness is separateness.
[00:17:31] Holiness is distinction. And so people treating holy things without a sense of separateness, without reverence and honor, and these kind of things are a problem. It's one reason the Philistines are experiencing what they're experiencing now. It probably was somewhat impossible for the people of Beth Shemesh not to look at the Ark as it's coming their way right there it was.
[00:17:58] Some translators address this, or commentators address this issue by looking at the words that are used for. They looked upon the Ark of the Lord and suggest that something is happening more than just like, oh, look, the ark's coming back. But this looking is more like gawking. This looking is more like I kind of imagine a. A carnival, right?
[00:18:24] Pay your dollar and come and see, right? This sort of making a spectacle out of it, treating the Lord and the Ark of the Lord irreverently.
[00:18:39] It would have been an amazing thing to see the ark returning in this way. But the proper response is, of course, repentance and worship.
[00:18:50] They do sacrifice these cows and burn and use the ark to do that. There's some question as to whether or not this was exactly the right thing. Typically, cows that were sacrificed were supposed to be male. They were supposed to happen in certain places at certain times and these kind of things.
[00:19:12] So something's odd going on here.
[00:19:15] As the narrator tells us what's happening, he's giving us clues to help us to see that the people of Beshemesh are struggling in some ways knowing how to accept this and sinning as well.
[00:19:31] And in that, we are reminded of how this story began.
[00:19:35] When the Lord defeated his own people and left Israel, we saw that Israel was not in control of the Lord.
[00:19:45] Israel brought the Ark of the Lord to the battlefield, saying, yeah, we've got our top gun here. We've got this power that we can control, this power by which we will be able to defeat our enemies. And God essentially tells us all, you're not going to control me.
[00:20:01] I am the Sovereign One, I am the glorious One, I am the king. And in the context of First Samuel, which is leading up to the installment of God's king over Israel, these are very, very important lessons to learn.
[00:20:20] God is the king. God is in control. God is the Sovereign One, the Glorious One. He must be respected. He must be obeyed. He must be submitted to. And no nation or king or animal or anyone will stand in his way.
[00:20:42] The glory of the Lord is on display here in 1st Samuel 5 and 6 and 4 and 5 and 6 and will continue to be on display as well.
[00:20:55] And one of the ways that we're seeing the glory of the Lord here is in the punishment of people who are not honoring Him.
[00:21:05] Sometimes in our lives we experience suffering and pain. Sometimes very difficult and very intense, sometimes more just like a spiritual malaise, sometimes as intense as terror.
[00:21:21] These challenges that we feel, the suffering that we experience Jesus tells us is not always directly connected to our sin.
[00:21:34] Sometimes God brings hardships into our lives because he's just training us. He wants us to learn. He's teaching us to trust Him.
[00:21:45] But it's also true that sometimes God does discipline his people. And we could maybe say, punish those who are not his people because of their sin.
[00:22:00] We see examples of that here. Israel, the Philistines, the Philistine Lords, and we have other examples of that in Scripture.
[00:22:08] This is a reminder to us, as we consider the discipline of the Lord and the wrath of God, that we cannot just ignore Him.
[00:22:18] He's real, he's powerful, he's strong. He can bring a plague upon a people. He can kill an individual. As Hannah said at the begin in our prayer, he kills and he brings to life as well.
[00:22:35] The power and the glory of the Lord cannot be rejected without consequence.
[00:22:41] Now, earlier I told you in the earlier part of the service, I had us thinking about Providence. Remember, in Providence, God exercises his authority over all things. And sometimes it's ordinary and sometimes it's extraordinary. Sometimes he uses means, and sometimes he goes against means or goes above means.
[00:23:04] I want you to think about this with regard to discipline. The Lord's discipline in your life.
[00:23:10] Some of the consequences that we experience in our lives, we talk about as natural consequences.
[00:23:19] What do we mean when we use that phrase? Well, if I get super angry and I smash my hand through the wall and now I've got drywall to fix and my hand hurts, and maybe I've got a broken finger or something like that, we say that's natural consequences, right? When you get really angry and you throw your hand through a wall, you're going to hurt and you're going to have to fix something and you're going to be embarrassed. Natural consequences.
[00:23:48] Here's the thing I want to ask you. Are natural consequences outside of God's providence?
[00:23:57] No.
[00:23:58] When we say natural consequences, as Christians, I'm not exactly. We can analyze culture some other time. But as Christians, when we say natural consequences, we want to remember who the God of nature is, who the God is who set up all ordinary things so that when you hit drywall with your hand, it hurts.
[00:24:20] When you are looking at your phone and you crash into a pole, when you. And you can add on and on and on.
[00:24:29] When we sin, we experience consequences frequently.
[00:24:35] Often not as many as we deserve.
[00:24:38] Perhaps never as much as we deserve, but we experience those nonetheless. Now, when that happens, we have an opportunity to do exactly what the Philistines did.
[00:24:49] We can learn from it we can repent, we can say to the Lord, thank you for these consequences, thank you for this discipline. And we turn to the Lord in repentance of our sin.
[00:24:59] Unfortunately, some people, when they think about natural consequences, they think about it in exclusion from God as those sort of like natural consequences over here. And then surprise tumors are kind of.
[00:25:13] Those are a God thing. And this is not a God thing. They're both a God thing. One is extraordinary, one is ordinary.
[00:25:24] This is important to remember for all kinds of reasons. In thinking about the providence of God, particularly in our lives, but especially as we focus in and zero in on the discipline of the Lord.
[00:25:37] When we experience natural consequences, should we just ignore God's involvement in that and not repent or submit to him or seek forgiveness? No.
[00:25:51] Those are opportunities for repentance and growth and trust and strengthening our faith as much as as the tumors are with the Philistines. And we must remember that God sometimes does bring extraordinary consequences in our lives as well.
[00:26:12] When the Corinthian church was not.
[00:26:17] Was getting drunk at the Lord's Supper and pushing people out of the way and showing partiality within their services, God said, this is why some of you are sick and even dying.
[00:26:31] It's not a natural. I don't think it's a natural consequence to, you know, treat the Lord's Supper poorly and then die.
[00:26:41] This is an extraordinary thing of the Lord. Ananias and Sapphira, when they lied to the Holy Spirit and then were put to death by God, this was an extraordinary thing.
[00:26:53] We should pay attention to those, even as the Philistines do, looking at the Egyptians and saying, you don't want to do that.
[00:27:01] There's something about the passage here that's warning us, that's warning Israel, warning all of the world, God's covenant people and all those who are outside.
[00:27:11] You must obey the Lord.
[00:27:15] You must obey the Lord. And in his providence, as he works these consequences in our lives, we must pay attention.
[00:27:24] We must not harden our hearts. We must not ignore him or try to control him or placate him in foolish ways.
[00:27:41] When we think about our own sin, brothers and sisters, when we think about the sins of the Philistines and the Israelites, we quickly learn something. We're not alone in our struggle here.
[00:27:52] We are all born in sin. We are all committing sins. And as the Bible tells us, we all come under the wrath of God.
[00:28:05] He's righteous, he's holy, he's glorious. His kingdom is perfect and forever. Of course we're going to come under His Wrath, of course we're going to come under his discipline.
[00:28:21] So what do we do?
[00:28:23] You might think that the solution to the problem of disobedience is obedience.
[00:28:30] And that does make a lot of sense. It is what he wants. He's a righteous God and he wants righteousness. The problem is that we can't obey and our hearts don't want to obey and our minds are confused about it and we're lied to all the time and we believe the lies and we're in this big, big personal mess.
[00:28:54] This is what we're coming up on Reformation Day. This is what Martin Luther experienced with many, many saints have experienced when they try to take serious the law of God and pursue it zealously and continually, find that they come up short again and again, not only because of their own faults, but to look at it from another perspective, because of the greatness of God, the glory of the Lord, and his awesome, perfect holiness and righteousness.
[00:29:31] Paul experienced this and talks about this in Romans 7. This frustration of wanting to do the right thing and not being able to do it and knowing what he's supposed to do, but then not doing it, and back and forth and back and forth. Who will deliver me from this body of death?
[00:29:49] Who?
[00:29:50] Not me.
[00:29:53] Luther said, not me. I can't. Paul said, I can't.
[00:29:57] Every saint eventually comes to the place that says I can't, and then trusts the good news that he can.
[00:30:07] And that's the message of the Gospel. And that's what God is teaching us in 1st Samuel. He's preparing us and teaching us that we need a glorious king to rule and take this place that we were supposed to take in the beginning, a place Adam was brought into the glory of God. He was given this position of honor to rule over all God's people and, and all of creation. And he failed in this.
[00:30:40] He made him an image bearer. He was bent to live this life in the kingdom and because of his sin, all things fell apart.
[00:30:48] He was kicked out of the garden, ejected from the kingdom and made to suffer the curse, an actual effective curse that affects us still today.
[00:31:02] A curse that he could not work himself out of, but a curse that God promised he would solve. And he did.
[00:31:10] He did by sending the Son of David, who we'll hear about eventually.
[00:31:17] He sent by sending Jesus, who is not just this great, powerful, glorious, righteous king, but he was and is and always will be God as the Son of God. Jesus came into this world to bring together God and man.
[00:31:43] He does it in his own person, having two natures divine and human. And he does it in a relational way and in a mystical way as he unites human created people to Himself as the head of a body, as a head is united to a body. Jesus comes into this world as God remains. God becomes man and reconnects us.
[00:32:22] He gives to us his own righteousness so that we would be perfect.
[00:32:29] And he takes away all of our sin and all of the wrath and all of the suffering. And he bears it on Himself in the cross in only a way that God Himself could.
[00:32:43] And because it's God who is the glorious human king over his people, we're saved.
[00:32:59] God is not fooled by our half hearted attempts to kind of obey or kind of atone for our sin.
[00:33:10] It does nothing.
[00:33:12] But he has done everything.
[00:33:16] And when we put our faith in him, he guarantees by his own life, by his own word, that we will have life. He provides for us a path not just to Beth Shemesh, where He went, but to heaven where he went.
[00:33:36] Jesus ascended up into the heavenly places and prepares a place for us. We are saved. He provides for us a path of life to the kingdom. And in the kingdom of God sovereignly, gloriously showing us his power, expressing this rule and saving us.
[00:34:00] So how are we saved?
[00:34:04] We're saved not by trying to ignore or placate or control God or figure out the sort of deep magic by which we might either manipulate him or handle him or anything like that.
[00:34:19] We just receive this gift that he's given.
[00:34:23] We receive this gift, we receive his power. We put away our own pride, our strength, our weakness, our disobedience, our foolishness, and receive from him his life, his strength, his holiness, everything. We don't aim just to do better, but to become like him by receiving him, by abiding him all through the work of the Spirit and the Son.
[00:34:56] And so as you look at your own life and the providence of God in it, recognize your own life and the providence of God in it, recognize both the natural and perhaps if it were to happen, the supernatural things that happen don't relegate any part of it and say, well, this is a God thing and that's not a God thing, it's all in Him. He's working in you. He's showing you things, he's showing you things through other people's lives. And if you look at your life and you feel and you notice the consequences for your sin, if you are experiencing in any way the heavy hand of God may be a surprising thing to say. But listen to the Philistines and don't be like the Egyptians.
[00:35:43] They were smart in that.
[00:35:46] Don't harden your heart, but trust him and receive the things that he is saying.
[00:35:54] Receive Jesus. He is the way, the truth, the life. He is the path of righteousness and the glory. Through him, God restores fellowship with us.
[00:36:06] Learn to give the Lord your sin and walk daily in fellowship with him, in prayer, in obedience, in hope, and most importantly, in faith. Let's pray.
[00:36:20] Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, we are saved, all to the glory of God alone. Lord, we ask that you would be glorified in the great and awesome works that you do among the children of man, among the Jews, among the Gentiles, in this place and in that place. Lord, your work is evident as we read about the things that you have done in the pages of the Scriptures, in the recorded works of history.
[00:36:55] We ask that you would help us to learn to not be foolish and ignore the things that have been revealed and spoken.
[00:37:08] Lord, humble us in our sin.
[00:37:13] Help us to see the many ways in which we are wrongly fighting against you and how foolish and a losing battle that is. Help us to see it now so that we may not see it on the Day of Judgment and come under your eternal wrath instead. Lord, open our eyes. Open the hearts of every soul here this morning that we might learn to rest in you and receive eternal life.
[00:37:46] Lord, we pray also for your word that continues to go out to the nations. We thank you that your word is effective and powerful.
[00:37:58] We ask that you would spread it all over and that you would use us to do that as well. As we ascend missionaries from among ourselves as we give money and support the work of others as we lift up your work and your will and your people in our prayers, we ask that you would help us to be co laborers in this effort and that you. And that as we see you at work, we would rejoice at seeing your awesome power made evident in the saving word of Christ.
[00:38:40] And we pray for our missionaries and in both here at home and abroad as well. And we pray particularly this morning for the church in Thousand Oaks. We thank you for Caleb Smith and his faithful work there over these last several years. And we rejoice with them that they are soon organizing as a new and separate congregation. And we ask that you would encourage them and strengthen their elders, strengthen Pastor Smith and let this church be a bright light and be active in planting new churches by the power of your grace.
[00:39:17] Lord, we also pray for your work in East Asia we ask that this would be good and strong work. That those who are serving there would be faithful and able and that you would bring many more to salvation.
[00:39:36] Lord, we submit these and all of our needs and all of our various callings to you. We ask that you would build up our faith in you that we might glorify you now and forever. Our chief end. And may it be enjoyable. We pray in Jesus name, Amen.
