All My Life

We're going to be looking at the Psalms over the next several weeks and in the summer. And the Psalms are a great book because it's different than any other book. You can't just sit your kid down and tell them the story of the Psalms in 15 minutes. And the good guy wins in the end. And you say, all right, night, night.

It's a story. It's a group of poems that have been collected together that does tell a story. But there's high peaks and there's low valleys, and there's a lot of questions asked. And what's powerful about the Psalms is a. A lot of them are meant to be put to music, or they've been put to music to be sung.

And not only just prayers, but also songs. And I was standing next to Dave, and every time I stand next to Pastor Dave, I always think of this corny pastor joke that was told by one of the pastors that I had growing up that he always said, never trust a preacher that can sing. You can't trust Dave. Do not trust Dave. Because that dude can sing.

For me, though I'm trustworthy, you can trust me a lot. And we have all these different relationships with music, and we like all different kinds of music. And some of you like good music, some of you like bad music. And it's okay if you like bad music. We all have different tastes.

But what the Psalms can do and what poetry and music and. And things that God can take, like art, what he can do, is it can transform our hearts and our minds in a way that is difficult. And we can express things that are difficult to express. It can spark our imagination in a way that's hard to be sparked in any other way. And that's what the Psalms really does for us, is it digs deep into those valleys, and it celebrates those peaks in our lives.

And it asks questions that you may even be shocked as we look at different ones that are even found in Scripture. And it's really meant to display the reality of what can go on in our hearts. And what we want to take this series and do is give you permission of what's going on in your heart, that you can cry that out to God. Good, great, bad, worse. We want to give you permission to cry it out to God.

God can handle it. God can handle the reality of your heart. And we can walk into these doors, into this building, and we can be afraid of people knowing what's actually going on in our heart. And we want to give you permission to not hide what's going on. But be real, at least with your Heavenly Father, with what's going on in your life, that your heart can cry out, that you take this hour or three, that we're going to be here together today.

No, no, I'm just kidding. And you can cry out to God in a way that's genuine, in a way that ask the questions that you need to ask to celebrate him in the way that you need to celebrate him and not hold back from him, because he knows what's going on and he knows the reality of your heart. So we're going to be looking in at Psalm 146 that Pastor Bryce just read while ago. And Psalms is a cool book. And it's long.

It's 150 different chapters. There's 150 different poems that they put together. There's five different books. If you look in your Bible, you'll see, starting with chapter three, it'll say book one. And I think it goes to Psalm 41, I think maybe 42.

And it's broken up in these five different sections. And my brain works backwards. So we're going to start with the end of psalms in Psalm 146. Psalm 145 is the end of Book 5, and Psalm 146 is the start of five different poems that begin and end with the same word, Hallelujah. And you look and maybe your translation says, praise the Lord.

And so we're going to read verse one, Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, my soul. Or Hallelujah, Hallelujah, my soul. And praise the Lord with Hallelujah. What that means, that's one of those words that I went a long time with, like, what does that even mean? We just say it.

And I don't. There's a lot of Bible words that we just say, like amen. Like, what does amen actually mean? But hallelujah is two words put together. It's a shortened form of God's name, Yahweh at the end, yah at the beginning is halal.

And halal means to celebrate loudly. It can even mean to, like, shine a light on. It could be to admire, to praise, or even to act madly or foolishly. And so we are meant to praise the Lord, to boast and to shine and celebrate loudly God and who he is. And it says to praise the Lord, my soul.

This word nephesh, soul, occurs 700 times in the Old Testament and doesn't mean just this secret part of ourselves that's eternal. This is kind of the overarching term that means all of us. It means everything that we are. It can even be used to refer to a group of people, to refer to a person, everything that they are. And so with everything that we are, we are meant to praise the Lord.

We are meant to humble Hallelujah, not hold back different parts of ourselves. And it's a hard thing to think that your logic and your physical body and your heart and your emotions and everything that you are is praising the Lord. That's a difficult thing to do because we like to compartmentalize. And some of us were tempted, and especially us church people, we're tempted to. With our physical bodies, we look like we're praising the Lord, raising our hands or offering something to God like this with our hands, or even bowing our head to pray.

But it doesn't. Sometimes it's not accurate of what's going on in our heart, and sometimes our heart is right where it needs to be, but we just don't feel like our physical body's tired or hurting. Sometimes we have questions or doubts that's keeping us from praising God and to be in the moment of worship. And what praise the Lord my soul means is that everything that you are, everything that you are is praising God, not holding anything back. And we hope that we set you up to do that through this series that you can dig into the things that you are experiencing within your heart.

That moves you to a place where you can praise God with all that you are. Continues. In verse two, he says, I will praise the Lord all my life. I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. And this poet, he's expressing a desire to praise God until he has no more breath, until everything that he's done in his life is in the rear view mirror.

And with his final breath, he's going to sing a celebration of who God is. I don't know about you, but when I think about the end of my life, like it's. There's a lot of things that I may be thinking about. And it's a challenge to me to think that with my final breath I'm going to be able to take that breath and use it to sing to God. And what the psalmist is wanting to move us to in this poem, what it's meant to help us think about is that with that final breath that we can take it and use it for the thing that matters most in our life, the thing that points it.

It orients ourselves at the end of our life and to point it towards God and to speak truth. About who he is to him, about him. But that's a challenge. You look at that phrase, all my life. I don't know about you, but maybe brushing my teeth I've done all my life.

No, take that back. I still brush my two year old's teeth. And well, he kind of. Anyway, there are various. My point is there are very few things that we do all of our lives.

Think about it. What's something that you've done your whole life? That's a nearly impossible thing to think that you are doing something your whole life. Cause so many things change and so we adjust with those changes. And probably your parents brushed your teeth and now you hopefully are brushing your teeth.

But there can come a time where physically you're not able to brush your teeth and things change and we react to those. And so to sing and to state and to proclaim and to write in a poem that all my life, this is what I'm going to do is a tough, tough task. So many of those things do a fashion. I've been thinking about this, right, Preparing for this sermon. I used to know what was cool.

Used to about 2005, if you asked me what was cool, I was confident. And somewhere around 2011, I started thinking, I don't know what's cool anymore. People started saying things and dressing a certain way. I was like, why are they doing that? And young people often remind me now, like, oh, they're doing that because that's cool.

I'm like, okay, well, I've lost it. I've completely lost the ability to tell what's cool. But there was once upon a time where I thought my whole life I was going to be able to tell what was cool. My mom was here, first service and I would look at my parents and think, they don't know what's cool. I know what's cool and I'm going to know what's cool my whole life.

I'm never going to lose that ability. And yet here I am standing before you, saying the words I'm saying and the clothes that I'm wearing. That is probably not very cool to the young people in the room. Y' all can tell me later. Write it on your connection card.

Whether or not, you know, quality of certain restaurants, they change throughout your life. We went to this restaurant with some family friends that bragged about it. It was their favorite from childhood and had been around for a while. That restaurant was no good. Maybe at one point it was, but at that point it was not good.

There are certain situations with Your finances that change over time. And you may feel, you may think it right now, in this season of life, I'm confident in my financial situation and my whole life, I'm going to be confident. Life happens. And that sureness and that security that you feel with your money is probably going to change. There's some family loss and loved one loss that happens that really impacts and challenges this statement of all my life, I'm going to praise the Lord.

There are negative things that happen where you maybe in a season of life say that my whole life, I'm going to Hallelujah. My whole life, I'm going to praise God. And then we hit hard times, whether it be loss, whether it be financial insecurity, and it challenges in our core, within our heart, and it's tough for us to find what we need to find to cry out to God. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

We're going to be looking at the rest of this that hopefully challenges us and refocuses our hearts. And we can look at this tough task of saying hallelujah my whole life, praise the Lord with all that I am. Because we go through these difficult seasons and the temptation is when we go through difficult times that we blame God for those difficult times that we look at him, we say, why are you allowing me to go through what I'm going through? And kind of subconsciously and maybe explicitly maybe you have communicated this to God and I want you to change your thinking about this. You say to God, or you implicitly say to him, God, if you deliver me these things in my life, I will praise you.

If you make my life smooth, I will praise you. If my kids follow you and they maintain the faith that I want them to have, I will praise you. But if they walk away from the faith, I want this certain career path. You give me this certain career path, I will praise you. If you get me through this difficult situation, I will praise you.

And what this psalmist is writing saying, no matter my whole life, I will praise you. In every season, I will praise you. In the peaks of life and in the valleys of life, I will praise the Lord. I will. Hallelujah.

We're going to be continuing in verse three and asking the questions, well, in those dark valleys, where do you turn? In those dark valleys, the psalmist states in verse three, do not put your trust in princes and human beings who cannot save, who ultimately are powerless. When their spirit departs, when their life is over, they return to the ground. And on that very day, their plans come to nothing. Blessed Are those who help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in their Lord, their God.

We can look at. It uses the word princes. And a lot of us, we look at certain political movements or political figures, and we attach our hopes to that. And we attach even, like, our emotions. We attach how we feel about the future to people who ultimately have a limited amount of time that they can do something.

Just being in office, they have a limited amount of power. They probably aren't telling us the truth about pretty much everything. And yet we still attach our hopes to that. And when it doesn't go our way or they make a decision that we don't like and we disagree with, we are downtrodden because of that, because we put our trust in it, in people, in a way that we're supposed to only put our trust in God. That's a hard thing for us to wrestle with because in our flesh, we want to trust in things that we can see, that we can easily tie with what's happening in real time.

And that's just not the way God works. A lot of ways. A lot of times he's working on something that we can't see, that we can't track. He's working on people's hearts. He's working on us in a way that we probably can't really see in the moment.

Some of us, we. And this is a hard teaching, but we look at our relationships, whether it be a spouse or a parent or even a mentor, and we have this passion for that relationship that really competes for a passion for God. And we trust in that relationship to deliver something that only God is supposed to deliver. And there's some codependency in relationships that is really unhealthy. And it drives you away from friendship.

It drives you away from where God wants to lead you in your life and the purpose that he has for you and the way that you're supposed to navigate your job. And you can take relationships and turn it into something that's really an idol. We can take money. If you're playing South Bridge bingo, this is. Get out your bingo card.

This is where you can mark off my Arkansas reference. In Arkansas, there's not a whole lot of money. And moving here, that's something that we noticed right away was there's a lot of money in this area. I don't know if y' all know that there's a lot of money compared to Arkansas, at least it's all relative. But compared to Arkansas, there's a lot of money, and it's so easy to take money and to trust in it in a way that gives us this feeling of security.

And that even though everything else may be changing, I got some money in my pocket. My financial future is looking good. We can trust in it in a way that not only causes us to trust in it, to make us feel good about our future, but also it becomes like our identity. And you start to mess with that, and your financial certainty starts to become more uncertain. Man, it.

It can rock you. I remember when Carrie and I were starting to first put our money together, and we got a financial advisor, and he started putting money in certain places, and we started trying to make some headway and progress. And I. When we first got married, I pulled into the parking lot after our honeymoon to get Carrie's car, and I had $7 to my name. Fortunately, Kerry had some money, so that was only part of my motivation for marrying her.

And we pulled it. And I just remember being so broke. But over the course of time, that number in your bank account goes up and you start to feel a little bit more secure about what's going on with your money. Well, when we started kind of putting money in different places, we made a decision we didn't realize that we made. And a year or two goes by, and it came to our attention, and there was some money wasted that I felt like could have been used in other places.

And I knew that this is where I knew I was in trouble. I'm not a numbers guy. And I knew the amount of money that we spent on that, and I knew the amount of money we could have made, and I knew that to the dollar. And it rocked me. It took me a little bit, but after about a week of talking to some mentors and trying to figure out what to do about it, I realized I had placed my trust and dependence on my financial decisions.

And when I realized that, I realized that I had taken that away from God and I was treating my money like I should have been treating God. And that rocked me to my core. And the psalmist is trying to get at of like, what are you trusting in that's meant to be only for God? The kind of trust and security that you should only put. Where are you putting it elsewhere, because it needs to be redirected to where it's supposed to be.

And sometimes when we get in those situations where we are trusting in things that ultimately are going to fail us, that ultimately have limited power when that comes to an end, and we, whether it be a political party or a politician or whether it be our money, or whether it be our career path or family, and our family falls apart. Ultimately, we are tempted to blame God for those things. Man, it's a tough place to be. It's a tough place to be. Jeremiah, he's given these words from God when prophesying about what's about to happen within the nation of Israel.

The kingdom split. Their enemies are on the horizon, and they're going to be carried off into captivity. Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. The Temple is going to be destroyed. The Temple is a place where they derive their identity.

They trusted in the presence of God being among them because they could look at the temple in the city of Jerusalem and trust that God was with them, because that represented the presence of God within their nation. So when their enemies come and that temple is destroyed, man, it rocks their world. And Jeremiah is given this prophecy in 17, chapter 17, verse 5, said, this is what the Lord says. Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the Lord. They were trusting in people.

They were trusting in something physical that never was meant to be where they placed their trust. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands. They will not see prosperity when it comes. They'll miss it. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.

But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes. Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

Jeremiah receives this word and he's encouraging the people of Israel to ask themselves, where are you? Where are you turning to in those dark valleys? Because a dark time is coming and you need to know where to turn. In dark valleys, we need to turn to the one that can actually do something about it. Your money can only do so much.

Your loved ones can only do so much. Your favorite politician can only do so much. But there's nothing our God cannot do. Blessed is the one who trusts in the God of Jacob. When dark times come in the valleys, when terrible things are happening around you, you are going to be like a tree that's planted by the stream.

When the drought comes, you're going to have what you need. And when your world is falling apart, you can be the kind of person that says, I trust in God and he has given me everything that I need to endure everything that I need to say hallelujah in Psalm 146. Go back to verse 6. It says, he is the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything you know, he remains faithful to forever. He upholds the cause of the oppressed.

He gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free. The Lord gives sight to the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow. But he frustrates the ways of the wicked. This psalm is meant to be this consoling thing for those exiles that were strangers in a strange place, that had their freedom and their identity stripped from them when they're in exile in Babylon. And they can look to this, and no doubt among them they were hungry people. No doubt they had loved ones that were killed.

No doubt that they felt like they had been abandoned. And they were enduring this terrible situation because of these wicked people that wanted to inflict pain upon them. And yet you see where this is meant to be a prayer to help them point back to the one that they're supposed to trust, that God is the maker of everything, that he's the one that delivers people from difficult times and those darkest of valleys. He's the one that can actually do something about getting you out of that valley. And yet we trust in all these different things.

We look at all these different competitions for our affections and our trust and. And we think, well, maybe I can trust in that. Maybe that's the thing that's going to get me out of the dark valley. We need to turn to the one that can actually do something about the situation and the valley that we find ourselves in, the maker of heaven and of earth and the sea and everything in it. What he did centuries later, after this psalm was written, that he sent Jesus, his only son, fully God, fully man.

And he stepped into our reality and he endured the human life. And we're going to fast forward to Luke chapter 4. When Jesus shows up, he delivers what Psalms was promising in a way that really shocked everyone. In Luke 4, chapter 16, it says, he went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And on the Sabbath day he went to the synagogue, as was his custom.

So he went to their worship service, something that we would project of what we're doing right now. And he stood up to read. And the scroll the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. This is early on in his ministry, early, early days in his ministry. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written, the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of the sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. He is reading words from Isaiah 60:1, the same themes that we find in Psalm 1046that are meant to carry hope and peace for people in dark valleys. Then he rolled up the scroll and he gave it back to the attendant, and he sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began by saying to them, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

And he's marking this moment to say these words that you've been reading for centuries now, that you've read in dark valleys, that you even read. Whenever Jerusalem was rebuilt and the temple was rebuilt, you prayed these prayers in your homes. You sung these songs in the synagogue. But today is the day where it actually is coming to life. Today is the day where I'm fulfilling these and being fully God and fully man.

He goes on to, you can read later. He frees people from demon possession. He heals the blind, he calls the disciples. He transforms people's lives, and he rocks the Jerusalem to its core and forces their hand, fulfilling prophecy and going to the cross, being labeled a blasphemer, being labeled a sinner, where he was put next to a murderer. And the people of Israel said, we would rather you kill Jesus and set this murderer free.

And Jesus, fulfilling prophecy in that, steps in, never sinning, never blaspheming, fulfilling the law, steps in and dies on the cross, fulfilling prophecy that was told. And he paid for your sin on the cross. The reason he did, you may think, well, why did he do that? He did that because we all struggle, we all fall short. We all know what we're supposed to be doing with our life in terms of morality and right and wrong.

And we can argue about the details of that. But if you're really truthful about yourself, you miss the mark. You aren't the person you know you need to be. And if you have questions about that, ask your wife or your husband, ask your kids. If you're perfect and it's this hard thing the law sets before us, this perfect standard that is meant to be met by us, was not meant to be met by us.

It's meant to show how we. We can't meet it, because it ultimately points to Jesus, who then shows up and does meet it. But then he Pays for where you fall short on the cross, where you've struggled. He never struggled. The sins that you deal with on a daily basis, he felt that temptation and never gave into it.

Where you wish that you were a different person, he was that different person. And he went to the cross because he loves you and desperately wants you to have a relationship with your Creator, your heavenly Father. And he makes a way for that to happen. He makes a way for you to live the life empowered by the holy, not your power, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. And he makes a way for that through the cross.

But that's not where he stopped. You see, he fulfills this prophecy and setting prisoners free, giving food to the hungry, giving sight to the blind. But when Jesus dies and is put in the tomb, three days later, he comes back out of it, resurrected. Defeating death, paying for your sin, but also defeating death. When we look at the difficult things that we mentioned earlier in our life that can cause us to be like man, I can't praise God right now.

I can't Hallelujah. It's too hard. It's too difficult. And just like poems and art and songs and music, it's meant to help transform our imaginations and to even increase our faith in God and help us to think and believe things that. That are hard to think and believe.

Apart from allowing God to speak through those words and that music and can transform our imaginations, something else can impact our imaginations, and that's death.

If you've experienced loss of a loved one, you know that can mess with you. When you hear news about those kids in Texas that are washed away by the floods and tragically passed, that messed with me. To know that this world is that broken, that life can get that dark.

I can't imagine what those parents are going through that deep valley that they must be in. And that's because death, we look at it and it separates us from our loved ones. It also causes us to question our own morality and really challenge our faith and say, what is after life? Is God going to make good on his promises?

How can God allow this tragedy to happen? Death can rule our imaginations in a way that few other things can. And what Jesus does is he dies. God in flesh. His heart stops beating, his lungs stop breathing, and he goes to the grave as dead as dead can be.

And his friends and his family, they grieved for him. And they were in a dark valley. Read it. They were deep in a dark valley asking these questions like, what does this mean? How can this have happened.

But what Jesus does is he comes back to life. And when he comes back to life, he delivers victory over our sin, but he delivers victory over our death. And when you trust in that and you believe in that, that victory is yours. And when you are living in that victory, your life can be falling apart. And we are so focused and trusting so much in God, your Creator, that loved you so much that he sent Jesus.

When death comes knocking on your door, when tragedy comes right in front of your face and you gotta deal with it, he gives you everything that you need to look and trust in him. And in that moment, you can hallelujah. No matter how hard of a situation it is, you can trust that you can praise him in that moment. And Paul, he talks about this and talks about our struggle with mortality. And in his Letter to the Corinthians, he takes two different scripture references, one from Isaiah, one from Hosea, and he makes his own poem.

He makes his own song.

Verse 55 of 1 Corinthians 15 says, Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death, it's sin. And the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ and your.

Your political party. Nothing can deliver that. But Jesus, nothing can deliver victory over the big bad thing in all of our life that looms large over our life, that makes us look at our world and say, man, how broken is our world? Because death looms large over all of us. And Jesus steps in and he makes it look real small.

And he gives you victory. When you breathe your last breath and you have placed your faith in Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit within you. And when you breathe your last breath, you take your next breath and eternity with your Heavenly Father. You close your eyes in death and you awaken. You awaken into eternal life.

And so when death comes knocking on your door, when tragedy comes, when hard times, when dark valleys happen, really what that is, is God working and bringing you back to the peak and delivering you victory over those things, because death has no sting anymore. Sin is now powerless in your life, man. But we can trust and so many other things. But there's only one thing that you can trust in. And it gives you victory over death, gives you victory over sin.

When you trust in Jesus, you can always hallelujah. Always.

What's keeping you from saying hallelujah?

Maybe you've never trusted in Jesus. I want to explain this real clear, because we can use words so much that they lose their meaning. And so I want to put it in a way that hopefully is helpful when we say, have you trusted in Jesus? Have you believed in Him? Have you been saved?

What we're talking about is that you've depended on Jesus to give you something that nothing else can give you, that you depend on the work of Jesus, the life, the death, and his resurrection to overcome. Where you fall short, where you've missed the mark, where you sin, where there needs to be justice delivered. Jesus had justice delivered upon himself and he took your punishment.

And when you succumb to death, what Jesus offers you is this victory that when you die, if you have your place, your faith in him, you have eternal life, you're going to be with him forever. If you depend on Jesus and say, I know that money won't get me there. I know that being good enough won't get me there. It's only Jesus. When you do that, the Holy Spirit comes and he lives within you and he gives you the power to live the life that you've been created to live.

Have you depended on Jesus like that with everything that you are? Have you trusted? Have you rested? Have you depended on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus? For those of us that have, what's keeping you from saying hallelujah in this season of your life?

Even though you have the Holy Spirit within you, that flesh can creep up and you can start trusting in things that you know you should be trusting God in that way that you've misplaced your trust. You've taken things that are ultimately God and have been given it to other things. Maybe you're in a deep, dark valley and you're really questioning, how can God get me out of this? How can I endure what I'm experiencing in that moment, in that season, in that valley, you still have victory over death itself. You still have victory over where you fall short.

And God has given you His Holy Spirit and he's made good on the promise that he will never leave you nor forsake you, that God is with you. In that valley.

A couple of years ago, I was experiencing one of the darkest valleys of my life.

And I was really having a hard time dealing with it. I remember just laying in bed, just really struggling with what was going on. And I was just talking and being raw and honest, crying out what was going on in my heart. And this truth just hit me. The phrase I know came to my mind.

I was acting as if God, my heavenly Father, the Maker of heaven and earth, the One that knew me before anything, the one that Redeemed my life, that saved my life, that transformed my life. I was acting as if he did not know what was going on.

God knows the dark valley that you find yourself in.

If you trust in Jesus, he's there with you. If you have the Holy Spirit, he's there with you in that dark valley, and he has given you everything. And we probably know people that are in terrible situations, and yet with their whole life, with everything that they are, they are saying hallelujah. What's keeping you from saying hallelujah in your life? Because even in that dark valley, God is right there with you.

He knows what you're going through, the worst thing that can happen to you, the things that cause us to doubt, the things that cause us to question.

He's given us victory over those. Believe in that anew this morning and give him your trust, give him everything that you are and say hallelujah. Let me pray for you, God. I ask in this moment that we can take the words that are about to be sung, the prayers are about to be prayed, that whatever we need to do to praise you with all that we are, I ask that through the power of your Holy Spirit, we're able to do that.

Whether we need to shout questions, whether we need to confess sin, whether we need to just get down on our knees and talk to you in a way that we haven't talked to you in a while, whether you need a shout, Hallelujah. I pray that you help the people in this room feel their permission to do that.

We look at your greatness. We look at your goodness. We look at how you meet us in the dark valleys. And we praise you for those things.

And don't let anything take away the things that are keeping us from doing that. Help us to trust you in a way that helps us see how you're providing for us, helps us see the victory that we have over sin and our death in a way that transforms our hearts and our minds this morning, we ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.