Pornography ‘Setting Moral Standard’ for Young People

From Christianity Today online.

Young people are growing to expect sex on demand and without consequences, a Wheaton professor has warned

William Struthers, Associate Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College, believes that pornography is reinforcing unrealistic and unhealthy views of sex among young people.

“Pornography is a violation of the childhood mind, creating expectations that anybody and everybody is willing to engage in sex on demand and that consent will always be freely given,” he said.

“Pornography is setting a moral standard for young people. They watch other people doing things and put themselves in their place.

Read it all.

This is very troubling on multiple levels. First the addictive nature of pornography has been thoroughly established, along with its destructive effects on relationships. Second, if young people grow up thinking sex is just something couples do or that there are no consequences from engaging in it outside of marriage, they are just simply wrong about the God-given purposes of sex.

I’m not trying to be a prude here. I am worried that if pornography is indeed setting a moral standard for our young people, then it spells real trouble for them if/when they decide to get married. If couples believe that sex is just another commodity and downplay the critical importance of intimacy that must always accompany sex, they will discover that their marriage is greatly impoverished and that doesn’t bode well for the long-term success of their marital relationship.

Been there, done that. Not good.

Fox News: For New York Times, 9/11 Anniversary not Fit for Front Page

From Fox News.

[NY Times public editor Margaret] Sullivan wondered if [the paper’s coverage] was enough. She noted that on the 10th anniversary of one of America’s darkest days, the Times published “an ambitious special section, along with major stories on the days leading up to the anniversary.”

But what Sullivan dubbed “anniversary journalism” often finds little to cover outside of related local events, she said.

“There isn’t always much to say that is original,” Sullivan wrote.

Read it all.

And speaking of radical Islam (see this post), this story is both troubling and sad, although fairly typical of the modern secularist and the politically correct crowd, of which the NY Times is part and parcel (you’ll search long and hard to find any of the mainstream media publishing a story like this). Sullivan misses the point entirely. You don’t have to say anything original. You cover the anniversary because we dare not forget that unspeakable evil still is a very real threat. We are a forgetful people and we must be on guard even as we pray for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as in heaven.

You do not deal with evil by burying your head in the sand or denying it does not exist. If you are a Christian, you deal with evil by taking up your cross each day and bringing the love of Christ to bear on his sin-sick and desperate world. And you work to see that your duly appointed government seeks to see that justice is accomplished.

9/11 is a stark reminder that all of our scientific advancements and so-called progress still haven’t eradicated radical evil and it never will. In fact, if anything, our technology has made it easier for evil to be perpetrated. For it is out of the heart that all kinds of evil come and the forces of evil are only to happy to encourage the process. Sadly, without the love of Christ to transform our hearts, evil needs little help in its effort to bring forth its work from our hearts. That has nothing to do with materialism and/or science. It has everything to do with the transforming love of God in Christ.

Obama Vows to ‘Bring Justice’ to Killers in US Embassy Attack in Libya

From Fox News.

Those who knew Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and the others killed expressed shock and grief Wednesday at the tragedy, which occurred on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Obama and Clinton both condemned the killers, while stressing that the U.S. bond with the Libyan government would not suffer as a result.

“Make no mistake. We will work with the Libyan government to bring justice to killers who attack our people,” Obama said, adding:  “There is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None.”

Read and reflect on it all.

I wholeheartedly agree with the president on this one. Once again, militant Islam rears its ugly head and demonstrates that it is a blight on all humanity. Civilized people do not engage in this kind of behavior. Period. It is to be strongly condemned and the light must be shone on these murderous hate-mongers so that people see them for what they are and duly condemn their actions.

These militants are also a blight on anyone who professes to be a Muslim. To be sure, every religion has its lunatics, along with the secularists and atheists. It is the plight of the human condition. But instances like this happen way too often for anyone to dismiss them as anomalous to Islam. Any faith that fosters and does not work to end this kind of behavior can never be taken seriously by any reasonable person. And for those who claim that militant Islam is not a threat to the West, you had better wake up and smell the gunpowder because given half a chance, these fanatics would gladly bring their party to your front door, figuratively and literally. That this happened on 9/11 is likely no coincidence.

As those of us who call ourselves Christian, in addition to praying for the families of the innocent victims who were murdered, we must also pray that God will turn the dark heart of their murderers so that they repent of their wickedness and turn to the Lord to be saved. This is seemingly an impossible thing, but with God all things are possible. We may find this kind of praying distasteful but our Lord commands us to pray like this nevertheless. Doing so does not negate our desire to see these murderers brought to justice. Rather, it signals our desire for all people to have a saving, healthy, and vital relationship with the living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to become the truly human beings God created us to be. May it be so, even for these murderers.

What Faith Looks Like (and Why You Should Care)

Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 14B, September 9, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125.1-5; James 2.1-17; Mark 7.24-37.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning I want us to look briefly at what the biblical writers mean when they talk about faith. There are really two sermons related to faith to be had from today’s texts but mercifully, I am only going to preach one because one of the topics is fairly self-evident—that is, how we are to treat the poor and how this is a reflection of our faith. So I will only state the obvious and do it quickly. Our faith in Christ should always manifest itself in our caring for the poor because as the writer of Proverbs reminds us, they too are made in God’s image and are every bit as valuable as the Bill Gates’ of the world. In other words, how we allocate our resources, both financial and otherwise, are powerful indicators of who and what we ultimately put our faith in. And I would be derelict in my duty if I did not remind us that Scripture consistently warns of dire consequences for those who misuse the resources with which we have been blessed. As people living in the richest nation in the history of the world, I humbly suggest we pay close attention to this and put our money where our mouth (and hopefully our faith) is.

The other topic, faith and how it relates to healing, is much more complex and so merits the bulk of our time this morning. Is it true, for example, that when our prayers for healing apparently go unanswered it means we lack faith? The issues around this question are real and complex, made even more difficult by our limited perspective on what constitutes real healing, and can be faith breakers for us. So let us see what today’s lessons can teach us.

Every one of us can relate to the Syrophoenician woman in today’s gospel lesson. We all know someone who has been chronically or desperately sick or dying—I know several of you are dealing with issues and loved ones in your life like this right now—and in our desperation to find healing for them (or ourselves) we are open to almost any possible solution. This is what is happening in today’s gospel lesson. Here we see a Gentile woman who has caught wind that a wandering Jewish miracle healer is in town and she takes a huge risk by going to see Jesus because Jews and Gentiles usually mixed as well as oil and water do. But at the moment this doesn’t matter to the woman because she is desperate to find someone who can heal her sick daughter. This traditional animosity between Jew and Gentile helps us understand the somewhat shocking interchange (at least to our ears) between Jesus and the woman. She pleads with Jesus to heal her daughter but Jesus at first apparently rebuffs her, reminding the woman that his mission is first and foremost to his own people, the Jews. But the woman’s faith would not let Jesus’ response deter her. Notice that she doesn’t argue with Jesus. She simply says to him that whatever it is Jesus has, there’s surely enough to go around, even if it is just the leftovers.

If you are looking for an operational definition of what James is talking about in today’s epistle lesson when he talks about faith expressing itself in behavior, look no further than this woman. Notice carefully her belief that Jesus could heal her sick daughter, i.e., her faith, led her to risk humiliation and rejection to find a cure for her daughter. This is faith in action and irrespective of what or who we put our faith in, it will always drive our behavior and cause us to behave accordingly. In this case the woman’s faith would not let her take no for an answer and Jesus rewarded her faith handsomely by healing her daughter. The woman’s faith had overcome her fear of being turned away.

And of course people today still have this fear of being turned away when bringing their deepest sorrows and troubles to Jesus. Sure, on one level we might believe that Jesus can bring about miraculous healing (miraculous from our standpoint, that is, because if God really is omnipotent there is no such thing as a miracle cure) but we worry that we or our loved ones are unworthy or that Jesus might turn us away for some reason or another, and so unlike the Syrophoenician woman we don’t even try to bring our troubles and sorrows to Jesus. We let our doubts and fears overrule any faith we might have that Jesus can bring healing for us or our loved ones.

But is it realistic to expect Jesus to perform a healing miracle for us or our loved ones or at least be open to the possibility? On the one hand we all know or at least have heard about cases where God apparently violates the expected order of things to bring about what we would call a miraculous cure. But we also know cases where faithful people have prayed for healing, miraculous or otherwise, and the healing does not come. Instead, the disease continues unabated and/or death occurs. Are we to conclude that Jesus has turned those folks away and does not care about them or their needs? Does this mean that those folks don’t have the faith needed for Jesus to act and that only folks who have their prayers for healing answered have real faith? The short answer to these questions is no. Nobody knows why God answers some prayers for healing while apparently saying no to others. And if you ever find someone who claims to know why Jesus does or doesn’t act to heal, run like crazy because that person is a liar.

But before we look at the answer to these questions more fully, we need to look at what today’s gospel lesson tells us about Jesus and his healing miracles. The first thing we notice is that Jesus was telling the woman he had not come to be a traveling medical missionary. Rather, he had come to announce God’s kingdom to God’s people, Israel, and to invite Israel to follow him so that they could be God’s light for the world to bring God’s healing love to bear on his sin-sick and broken world. In other words, Jesus’ primary mission was to invite Israel to be the blessing God had promised Abraham they would be (cf. Genesis 12.2-3). Jesus in effect was telling the woman that he could not let her personal need distract him and keep him from going to Jerusalem to complete his saving mission on Calvary.

To be sure, Jesus healed the woman’s daughter as well as many others, all signs of the promised new creation where God will finally and fully heal all his children, both Jew and Gentile alike. And to be sure, faith was intricately involved in those healings. But if we think about this for a minute we quickly realize that those Jesus healed constituted only a tiny fraction of those whom he could have healed. This isn’t because Jesus only cares about some people but not others. It’s because he didn’t have time or the opportunity to cure everyone who needed curing. After all he was human like us, and as we have seen, he didn’t come to be a medical missionary and miracle worker. He came to bring peace and reconciliation between God and his wayward and rebellious people. The healings were simply advance signs of God’s promised Messianic Age where all who are in Jesus the Messiah will be healed. It is critical that we understand this. Otherwise, we are always going to be left wondering why Jesus healed some, but not all.

This brings us back to our questions about faith and healing. As we have seen, no one can explain why God chooses to answer some prayers as asked and not others’. But what our lessons remind us is that faith is always expressed in what we do (or refuse to do) and that it is intricately related to healing. And this reminds us that we have to believe Jesus has the power to heal us and our loved ones. If we do not believe this, we really cannot claim to have much faith in Christ in general.

Of course, to have this faith, we must know Jesus, not just know about him. We get to know Jesus through reading and wrestling with Scripture, through talking and listening to Jesus regularly in prayer, and through regular interaction with God’s people. Scripture reminds us what Jesus can do and has done. Prayer gets us focused on Jesus so that he can help us get to know him in and through the power of the Spirit. And interacting with other faithful Christians allows Jesus to give us the much-needed human touch so that we can further experience his risen Presence and faithful love for us.

As for having Jesus answer our prayers for healing, much depends on our willingness to see healing above and beyond its physical aspects. To be sure, none of us wants to suffer or see our loved ones suffer and so it is natural for us to ask Jesus for healing and for us to worry about and grieve over them. But what if the answer to our prayer is no? While none of us knows why some of our prayers for physical healing apparently go unanswered, this doesn’t mean that Jesus cannot or does not bring needed healing. Think about it. When human sin entered the world, it brought death with it. We all must die one day. Even the people Jesus healed, even the two he resuscitated from the dead, eventually got sick again and died. It is the fate of all of us. So even the most spectacular physical healing is temporary at best, much as we desire it.

But when we know Jesus and through him, God’s faithful love for us, we are open to deeper kinds of healing that we or our loved ones might also need. When we really know Jesus and have faith in his blood shed for us, death is something we no longer have to fear. As Paul wrote the Philippians, for him it was better to die and be with Christ. But he realized that Jesus needed him to continue to be an apostle to the Gentiles (cf. Philippians 1.21-24). So instead of bringing physical healing, our Lord might bless us with peace about dying and/or relieve us of the anxiety we feel. John Wesley, the old Anglican priest who started the Methodist movement, used to say that one of the marks of a Methodist was how well he or she died. By that Wesley meant that faith in Christ obliterated our fear of death and brought a sense of peace that passes all understanding, even when death was imminent. Jesus can heal us in almost limitless ways and if we see that our prayers for physical healing are not being answered as we have asked, our faith allows us to trust Jesus enough to ask him for the kind of healing he sees that we really need.

We could never do this if our prayers were based entirely on empirical evidence because life is entirely too unpredictable to develop the kind of faith we have been talking about. We can only develop faith if we really know our Lord and his love for us, and trust that his will for us is better than our hopes and desires and limited perspective on the situation. We don’t get this kind of faith overnight and some of us unfortunately never develop this faith at all because our faith is tied to only one answer to our prayers. But if we come to know our Lord and trust him in everything, we will be able to more readily see his healing in our lives.

Please do not misunderstand. I am not suggesting that we should not pray for physical healing for us or our loved ones or jump for joy when those prayers apparently go unanswered. Neither am I suggesting that we should long for death because death is the ultimate evil and poke in God’s eye. What I am suggesting is that our need to be healed runs far deeper than any physical healing that might or might not occur, and Jesus can and does offer that kind of deeper healing if we have the eyes of faith and the wisdom of Scripture to see it.

And as James has reminded us, our faith must always find an expression in what we do. So what kind of faith do you have? Is your faith strong enough to conquer your fears so that you go to God in prayer even if you are anxious that God may not answer you as you’ve asked? Do you know the love of Christ so well that even if your prayers for healing are not being answered as you hoped that you can change up your prayers and ask Jesus to show you how best to pray for yourself or your loved one?

I don’t say any of this as an exercise in theory. I have been battle tested myself. Four years ago this past week I walked into the ER of Lutheran hospital in Fort Wayne, IN. I had been told my mother had become unresponsive at the rehab center where she was recovering from a second round of back surgery and had been transported there. Having had chaplain experience, as soon as I walked into her room, I knew it was over. I didn’t even bother to pray for her physical recovery because I knew she was beyond that point and concluded it was her time to die. It took her three days and she didn’t die an easy death. But I could not have gotten through it had Jesus not answered my prayers to help me endure what I had to endure. And Jesus did not disappoint. He sent compassionate nurses to minister to my mom. He gave me a wife who ministered to mom in ways I simply could not. And then on the third day when I was about emotionally worn out, Jesus sent two hospital chaplains to refresh my beloved and me.

Did it turn out for my mom as I had hoped and desired? Of course not. Jesus chose not to heal her through the two surgeries she had. But through it all, despite appearances to the contrary, I knew my mom was in Jesus’ care and that she was headed for better place to be with Jesus and ultimately to the new creation where she will never suffer or be sick again. That didn’t make those three days any easier, but Jesus helped me transcend that awful moment in time. Jesus brought healing and hope to me in the midst of death and decay. That’s why I can still pray for healing today and preach a sermon like this. And when by God’s grace you have the faith to experience Jesus’ healing power in your life, especially when you desperately need it, you will also know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Fox News: UT Backs Professor in Battle with Gay Blogger

This is really troubling and scary stuff. The militant homosexualists, as with any militants, are hellbent to stifle any dissenting opinion, even opinion based on legitimate research. These folks will resort to anything and if they are successful, we will pay dearly for it. If you care at all about real education and pursuit of knowledge, if you care about your basic freedoms, especially of thought and conscience, you had better pay attention to stories like this and be prepared to stand up to these bullies before it is too late. This isn’t Chicken Little falsely claiming the sky is falling. This is the real deal and the very foundation of our nation is at stake.

From Fox News.

The University of Texas-Austin is backing a sociology professor who came under withering attack for a study that found children of same-sex parents are more likely to be depressed or on welfare than kids raised by heterosexual couples.

The school launched an inquiry into Professor Mark Regnerus’ peer-reviewed work last month after a New York-based blogger attacked him for a controversial paper which compared the adult lives of people raised by parents in same-sex relationships to those raised by parents in traditional marriages. The study found several differences, including some that were potentially negative. But an inquiry by the school found Regnerus used sufficiently scholarly methods, university officials announced this week.

Read and reflect on the whole ugly thing.

On Keeping Our Means and End Straight

From the archives. Sermon delivered on Sunday, August 30, 2009.

Lectionary texts: Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“For it is from…the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:22-23). With these words, Jesus cuts to the heart of the human condition, wouldn’t you say? Have any of you been guilty of one or more of the above “dirty dozen” that Jesus lists? I know this will come as a shock to you, but I am a multiple repeat offender, much to my shame and dismay. And if any of you are thinking at this point, “Well, I have only committed one or two of those sins,” or “I look like a saint compared to Fr. Kevin,” if your particular sin isn’t pride, you just might want to add that to your list because only pride drives us to compare our righteousness and shortcomings with others.

Jesus, of course, was responding to criticism lodged against his disciples by the Pharisees. To our ears, and with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, this criticism sounds trivial and petty. But to the religious authorities of Jesus’ day, among whom were the Pharisees, this was no trivial matter. For them, the issue of ceremonial washing had nothing to do with hygiene. Instead, it was a human tradition that had developed centuries before to help remind the Jews that they were God’s elect, God’s chosen people, and therefore they had to keep themselves separated from others to avoid being defiled or contaminated by them. Ceremonial hand washing was one way to do that. It seems that they had forgotten the second part of God’s promise to Abraham, that God would bless them so that they could be a blessing to others (Genesis 12:2-3). Now before we get all uppity about this, I would remind us that we as Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church have not always been a blessing to others despite enjoying his many blessings. You see, the beat of the human condition goes on.

And true to the human condition—which usually gravitates toward getting it wrong or taking something good and distorting it into something bad, like ceremonial washing—came the mistaken notion that holiness, being God’s called out people, was a result of doing external acts. In other words, one’s works made one holy and righteous. Consequently, many of the traditions and ceremonies practiced by the religious authorities in Jesus’ day had been turned upside down. You see, the religious leaders had confused the means (the various traditions) and the end (personal holiness), and Jesus called them on it.

In challenging the Pharisees and their traditions, Jesus was not condemning religious traditions and practices as such. What he was challenging was the notion that engaging in the traditions makes folks holy. In other words he was telling them (and us) not to confuse our means and our ends. Jesus reminded his adversaries (and us) that our root problem is internal (who we are), not external (what we do). When Jesus said that evil intentions come from the heart he meant that they come from within our very core personalities. Folks in the ancient world used the term, “heart” to refer to both mind and the essential person, not just feelings. The problem, Jesus tells us, is us. Change the heart and you will change what you do. But here’s the catch: By our own power we are unable to change our hearts! We are trapped!

Now despite the claim of some that we humans have made much progress over time, the truth is that while our science and technologies have gotten more sophisticated, the human condition has essentially remained unchanged. Want proof? Who among us does not know folks, either personally or vicariously, who collectively have committed each of the “dirty dozen” Jesus listed? A quick read from last week’s news can just about cover the whole list. We may be more sophisticated in how we commit our sins these days, but the fact remains that we all still commit them, and that hasn’t changed since the Garden of Eden.

At this point some of you might be saying to yourselves, “Wow, Fr. Kevin! What an uplifting sermon! Preach it, baby!” Hang with me, please, because Good News is on the way. For you see, what is impossible for humans to fix is not for God (Mark 10:26-27). God knows that we humans cannot fix ourselves, even though we spend a lot of time trying to fix each other, and from all eternity has had a plan to address the problem of our sinful hearts. He has taken on our flesh, lived among us, died a terrible and cruel death on our behalf so that his holy and perfect justice could be satisfied, and given us our one and only chance to live with him forever. In Christ’s death, we are declared as “not guilty” in God’s eyes. This is what the NT writers mean by being “justified.”

But the Good News doesn’t stop there because Jesus has promised to send us his Holy Spirit to help us in our daily struggles and to transform us to become more like him as we await his Second Coming to finish the redemptive work he started on the cross (see, e.g., John 14-16; 1 Corinthians 6:19; 2 Timothy 1:14). All of this is a free gift of grace and it is ours for the taking if we but accept it by faith. For you see, God knows we cannot make ourselves holy; the problem of sin is too deeply rooted in us, it is an inoperable cancer so to speak, and so he has acted decisively on our behalf to do something about it.

If we understand this simple but profound truth, that sin is deeply rooted in us and we are helpless on our own to overcome it except by the help of the Holy Spirit living in us, we are beginning to get our means and end in proper order. If we want to live with God forever, we must first accept by faith his free gift to us in Jesus Christ and then be humble and open enough to allow his Holy Spirit to live and work in and through us to help us put to death those things which defile us and make us unacceptable in God’s sight.

So what would be an appropriate response to this free gift of God to us? Imagine you got the gift of your dreams. What would be your response? It would likely be one of profound gratitude toward the giver and you hopefully would want to do anything in your reasonable power to please that person for giving you the gift. This is precisely what James is telling us in today’s epistle lesson. He reminds us that God is unchanging and ever Good. He tells us that God has given us a priceless gift of Jesus Christ so that we can live with him forever, even when not one of us deserves it. And what should be our response according to James? It should be a changed life, a life pleasing to God, a holy life.

Here is the critical point I want you to see. James is telling us (and Paul and our Lord Jesus himself would agree) that our faith must translate into action, by what we DO. But our DOING does not make us holy. God has already done that in Christ and is even now working in us to root out our sin and transform us into his likeness. We DO out of love and gratitude for God for what he has done for us. For example, if we profess to love our spouses, that love would not translate into beating them every day, would it? Instead, we would seek to make our spouses happy by doing things we know that are pleasing and wholesome to them. Likewise we should live our lives for the One who loved us and gave himself for us out of love and gratitude for what he has done for us.

This emphasis on holy living, is very Anglican, BTW. If you go back and read any of the great Anglican theologians’ works, you will see this common thread of holy living running through their writings. Like our Lord and James, they understood we are far too corrupt to ever earn God’s favor. Instead, they understood that God has already taken care of the problem of human sin. For those of us who have accepted God’s free gift, our gratitude should be manifested in changed lives and good works, i.e., in a life that is pleasing to God.

In today’s world of anything goes, this, of course, is not an easy thing to do. For example did you notice in the “dirty dozen” that three of them were related to sex? Given the increasing permissiveness of our society, it doesn’t take too much of an imagination to predict the kind of reaction we will get if we profess publicly a biblical standard of sexuality, one that advocates abstinence outside the context of marriage. Try it sometime. You will likely be branded as being narrow-minded, a prude, or worse. But if we intend to live a holy life, one pleasing to God, we must be prepared to live counter-culturally and according to God’s standards, not our own, something that is never easy to do in any day or age.

So what does all this have to do with fellowship, you ask? Just this. While it is true that only God can transform us and heal our evil hearts, the fact is we are flesh and blood and need human support as he does so. Thankfully God understands this and has given us small group fellowship as a means of grace to help him work in and through us to transform us into the beings he created us to be.

When we submit to small group fellowship we allow ourselves to be held accountable to one another and God can use this accountability to help us grow in grace. For example, are we encouraging each other to read our Bibles and pray daily so that we have a better understanding of what it means to live a life pleasing to God? If we are, then we do not pray and read the Bible daily because we “have to,” but because we want to so that we can better understand the mind of God for us and our lives. Are we teaching each other and learning the principles of holy living? Are we helping each other in our struggles and temptations and celebrating our victories together? Are we consoling each other in our defeats and losses? Are we asking each other what God is calling us to do in our daily lives, and whether we are following his call? These are some ways that can help us keep our means and end straight and grow in grace. And an even more fundamental question to ask ourselves is this: do we love God enough to even want to do any of this? The extent to which you answer this question honestly will give you keen insight into the nature of your relationship with the Living Lord.

Make no mistake. It is Christ and Christ alone who has the power to heal and transform us. There is nothing we can do that will change our hearts inclined to evil except to appropriate the free gift that is given us in Jesus Christ. He has taken care of our future by taking on our flesh, dying for us, and giving us his Holy Spirit to be with us so that he can help us become more like him. He has also given us small group fellowship to help remind us that he is doing all that for us so that we can keep our means and end straight. That’s good news folks, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.