Before Abraham Was, I Am
Download MP3Hello everyone. My name's Thomas Ritchie. I'm an elder here at Redeemer and it's my privilege to get to open God's word with you tonight. Although I will tell you that this is a very difficult passage. It's a heavy passage, it's an argumentative passage, and it doesn't tie up very neatly at the end.
Caleb Chancey:But I think that there's great hope in this season for us in this passage. And so I'm gonna read it now. It's kind of a long passage. It begins in John 8, verse 39. They answered him, 'Abraham is our father.' Jesus said to them, 'If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing what Abraham did.
Caleb Chancey:But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing what your father did.' They said to him, we were not born of sexual immorality. We have one father, even God. And Jesus said to them, If God were your father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here.
Caleb Chancey:I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It's because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.
Caleb Chancey:When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God.
Caleb Chancey:The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.' The Jews answered him, 'Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?' Jesus answered, 'I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory, there is one who seeks it, and He is the judge. Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. The Jews said to him, 'Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, as did the prophets.
Caleb Chancey:Yet you say, 'If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.' Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died, and the prophets died? Who do you make yourself out to be?' Jesus answered, 'If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, He is our God.' But you have not known him, I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day.
Caleb Chancey:He saw it and was glad.' So the Jews said to him, You are not yet 50 years old, and have you seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple. The word of the Lord. Please pray with me.
Caleb Chancey:God our Father thank you for this word. It's a hard word, but there is great truth in it. There is life for us in it. I ask that You would speak clearly now Your words. We cannot ascend up to you.
Caleb Chancey:We depend on you coming down. God, I cannot ascend up to you. If anything true and right will be said today, it must come from you, for it cannot come from me. Oh God, I rest in the sufficiency of Christ. I pray that, through Your words You might exalt Christ even now.
Caleb Chancey:Give us willing ears the ability to hear and open our hearts to receive Your word. In Christ's name, amen. So my hypothesis today that I'm going to start with is that anger is a gift. It's a gift because it shows us what we love and what we value. When something that we love or value is attacked or threatened or insulted in some way, we get angry.
Caleb Chancey:Now it's not to say that anger's always right, it's not. A lot of times anger is sinful. But anger can be very useful as a tool for introspection. It shows us parts of our heart that are otherwise hidden. And Jesus certainly uses anger in this passage.
Caleb Chancey:When this conversation begins, He's speaking to these early Jewish believers. These people who kind of bought into His word a little bit. But we've now read their entire conversation. It takes about 3 minutes from start to finish. And by the end of it, they've literally picked up rocks to kill him.
Caleb Chancey:He is incited tremendous anger. This is not a polite conversation. This is not a clinical debate. They're hurling words back and forth at each other. I mean, it's intense just reading it now, but in the original Greek, it's it's even more so.
Caleb Chancey:Oddly enough, because it's full of pronouns. Greek doesn't require the use of pronouns that often because they're contained inside the verb. And so when the writer or speaker would use them, it's to emphasize something. And here, both Jesus and these early believers are full of pronouns that they're throwing back and forth. I know it's terrible sounding, but they use it to, they use it to emphasize the distance between them.
Caleb Chancey:They use it to imply something negative about the other that they're not willing to just come out and say. So for example, the Jews say, We were not born of sexual immorality. Well, Jesus, we understand the circumstances of your birth are somewhat ambiguous. And Jesus says, I do not have a demon, but it kind of seems like y'all just very well might. They're full of emotion and negative implication, and they're attacking sensitive areas, even taboo areas, in one another's lives.
Caleb Chancey:Why would Jesus do this? Is that your picture of Jesus, this guy who's engaging in this heated debate? That's maybe not His normal mode of communication, although we talk about in our home group that the book of John has been nothing but a series of awkward conversations piled on one after another, and this certainly continues that trend. But Jesus is using anger here to brush away pretense. Remember last week that Joel talked about one of Jesus' preeminent concerns is that people not have a false confidence and half hearted belief.
Caleb Chancey:He's worried that people will think that they believe Jesus, but they don't really believe Jesus. And here, through the use of anger and emotion, Jesus clears up exactly where these people stand. They may have called themselves believers at the beginning, but when they pick up the rock to throw at him, they've made clear that no, they're not. There's no more ambiguity in this situation. The line is drawn.
Caleb Chancey:Jesus on one side, these Urshua believers on the other. And the central questions that run through this passage are, Who is Jesus? And who are we? Or who are these people that He's talking to? And that question of identity is the one that I wanna look at tonight.
Caleb Chancey:And going through this passage is gonna require us to ascend up to what I think is the highest point in John's gospel. This beautiful passage, Before Abraham Was, I Am. But it's also going to require us to get down into it's very depths. This is like I said earlier, a difficult passage, and as I was studying for it and preparing for it, Joel gave me a commentary. He's like, Oh, I know this is a hard text.
Caleb Chancey:Here, read this commentary. It'll help you a whole lot. So I opened it up, and the first line about this passage is, This is without a doubt the hardest passage in all of John. And it is. There's no other way around it, so let's jump right in.
Caleb Chancey:Verse 44 of chapter 8 is a verse that has, by misinterpretation, caused a tremendous amount of evil. Much evil, and I'm talking about holocaust level evil has been done by misunderstanding what Jesus is talking about when He says, You are of your father, the devil. Many people mistakenly believe that Jesus is somehow singling out His Jewish audience as being children of the devil. He's not doing that. I'm afraid the truth is much worse for us.
Caleb Chancey:Jesus is saying, I think that all of us are of our father, the devil. Not just these original 1st century believers to whom he was talking. Consider who these people were. They had heard Jesus' words. They were at least partially interested in them.
Caleb Chancey:They kind of believed him. They were going out of their way to seek him out in the temple and hear what else he had to say, but they were not prepared to accept Jesus completely. They were trying to fit Him into their existing Jewish identity. So they had Abraham up here at the top, and then if you remember back to chapter 5, Moses fits in there in the law, and then there's prophets, and they were kinda wrestling. Where does Jesus fall in this whole hierarchy?
Caleb Chancey:But when Jesus says, No, I'm not here, I'm above this. Abraham points to me. They reject him outright. In fact, they're ready to kill him. And I don't really think that we're all that different.
Caleb Chancey:My faith is often very tentative. I don't know if yours is. In fact, I think a good picture to describe me, and this is a little bit ridiculous, but it's like someone who's standing on a dock trying to get into a canoe. And it's like I feel stable where I am, and I'm worried the boat's going to tip over, and so I just kind of gently stick a toe out there, and I'm not willing to put my weight down yet. I wanna keep my weight over what I trust, and I wanna kinda try the boat, but I'm not gonna risk falling in.
Caleb Chancey:And so in that analogy, the dock are these things that we think are they give us security. You know, like our education, or we have a good job, or we're healthy, or we've got a nice family. All these things that we we wanna say, I'm gonna keep my weight over those. But Jesus is, you know, He's risky, and He wants us to give things away, and that's not necessarily the safest thing to do, and he can be a bit embarrassing at times, and frankly it's inconvenient. And so we move slowly and tentatively towards him.
Caleb Chancey:We're not wholehearted in our belief, but we're kinda trying Him out. And in this passage, Jesus is blowing up that whole paradigm. He says, look, you're not standing on some stable dock. These things that you're trusting in, they are no good. You're already in the drink, and you're drowning, and I am your only hope.
Caleb Chancey:For His original audience, the thing that they were trusting in was this heritage, cultural religious heritage of being sons of Abraham. Jesus challenges them on that. He says, okay, yeah. You might be literal children of Abraham. Genetic children down the line from Abraham.
Caleb Chancey:But you are not like Abraham in the ways that matter. Verses 39 and 40 show that Abraham heard God's word and accepted it. While these early believers are hearing God's word, they're seeing God's word in the person of Jesus, and they're rejecting not only His word, but Jesus Himself as well. And it says farther down at the end, Abraham rejoiced to see Jesus. These people certainly did not do the same.
Caleb Chancey:Now I doubt that we in this room base our identity on Abraham, but there's lots of different things that we do. I mean, I listed listed some of them earlier. We might put at the core of our identity our friends, our job, the pursuit or possession of money, Being a hard worker, a smart person, well educated, you might define yourself by your politics, or your citizenship. You might define yourself by your body and its pleasures. You might define yourself by your good works and your religious identity.
Caleb Chancey:Look, a lot of these are good things. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them are. Even a good thing becomes warped and twisted when we put it at the center of our lives. And all of these things are always trying to get into the center. They're always saying to us, I am enough.
Caleb Chancey:I am supreme. I am what matters. Trust me and protect me against all others. That's a lie, but it's a lie that we believe because we're fallen. Our minds, our hearts, our desires, and even our identities are fallen.
Caleb Chancey:That's what Jesus means when He calls us children of the devil. Like satan, we put our notion of truth and right above God's truth. We exalt our desires above His desires. And in doing so, we make ourselves, we treat our selves as being equal with God. In fact, you could say that we are recreating or reenacting Satan's fall, each one of us, anew.
Caleb Chancey:There's a little linguistic clue that confirms this interpretation. If you look at verse 44, it says about Satan, when he lies, he speaks out of his own character. You could also translate that phrase, when he lies as when he speaks the lie. In Greek, there's a definite article in front of the word lie. So this isn't just some lie or any old lie.
Caleb Chancey:This is a particular lie. This is the lie that's at the center of who Satan is, at the center of his story. And that lie is, I think, this. We were talking about it earlier. It's that we're equal with God, or to put it another way, that we treat God as if He were holding out on us, or He were a threat to us, not our savior.
Caleb Chancey:It's bad enough that we believe this lie as we are prone to do, but the consequences of it don't stop at mere belief. Instead, when we believe the lie, when we put that in the center of our hearts, we stop trusting God, we see the fruit of unrighteousness in our lives. Look, we see it in this story. Not a whole lot happens in this story, but it reveals the consequences of believing a lie very clearly. These believers, at first, they accept Jesus, but when this identity, this lie at the core of who they are is challenged, when Jesus says, Being mere sons of Abraham is not enough.
Caleb Chancey:When that's challenged, their response is violence and murderous rage. The lie about the insufficiency of God makes us cling to worldly things, and that makes us do evil. And there's a great example of this, in a book by a guy named Ernest Becker. Ernest Becker wasn't a Christian, he was a psychologist. But so much of what he said reads to me as if he were without knowing it, writing about the gospel.
Caleb Chancey:This text I'm about to read, I can't believe that he isn't talking about John 8. Hear this. This is from his book, The Birth and Death of Meaning. The reality of man's situation is that it is one of despair. Whatever idols man remains rooted to, are idols designed precisely to hide the reality of the despair of his condition.
Caleb Chancey:All the frantic and obsessive activity of daily life in whatever country, under whatever ideology, is a defense against full self consciousness. It is this fundamental falseness at the heart of human striving that makes our world dance so frenziedly to such drowning out music. When one tries with all his heart and might to deny the obvious, he renders himself grotesque. When one tries with all his heart and might to deny the obvious, he renders himself grotesque. And we see that right here in this passage.
Caleb Chancey:It's full of irony that is grotesque. These Jewish believers are looking at Jesus, and when he's challenging them, their response is, We have one Father, God. God is our Father, and you, Jesus, have a demon. Of course they have it precisely backwards. They are talking to the literal son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit, and they are the ones who are under the kingdom of the devil.
Caleb Chancey:Their identity, their eyes are so twisted. They're seeing so poorly that they are staring God Himself in the face and saying, man, you got problems, but I'm okay. They can't see their true condition. Whereas Jesus says in verse 45, the reason that we do not believe Jesus is because He is telling us the truth. If He had told us a lie, maybe we would've believed that.
Caleb Chancey:But because of our nature, our fallen identity, we are so wrapped around a lie in our hearts that we reject the truth. We are bent, and He is not, and we reject Him. Again, Paul says in Romans 125 that we have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and have worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forevermore. And then Paul teases out for the rest of that first chapter of Romans, all of the fruit that comes of believing that lie. When we believe and trust in things apart from God, our life spirals out of control.
Caleb Chancey:We break God's law. When we believe that God is a threat to our identity, instead of viewing Him as our savior, we will paradoxically, but certainly make ourselves His enemies. We'll break His law. We won't be able to keep it. Take a moment and think about the things that you base your identity on.
Caleb Chancey:What things have you placed so close to the center that you obey them instead of the Lord? Or here's a helpful exercise. How would you complete this sentence? Man, my life is really hard right now, but at least I have What? What is it that you run to when things are hard?
Caleb Chancey:What what is that thing that when you wake up in the middle of the night, you draw comfort from thinking of it? Everything else might fall apart, but at least I have this. That may be a very good thing. For most of us it probably is a very good thing, but it is not an ultimate thing. It's the thing you have to watch because it's the one that's in danger of becoming the little g god in your life that you bow down and worship.
Caleb Chancey:There's one more part of our identity that we see in this passage. And it comes out of a question that Jesus asks. And it seems like a rhetorical question. He says, Why do you not understand what I say? That's a question as a parent I feel like I ask my kids 10 times a day.
Caleb Chancey:Why are you doing this? Why don't you understand? Why can't you just do what I tell you? They don't have an answer for that. But Jesus gives us an answer, and it's a theologically profound answer.
Caleb Chancey:He says, Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. Alright, we're going to detour into Greek one more time here because it's really rich. Jesus uses 2 different words. One word in the question, one word in the answer.
Caleb Chancey:He says, you cannot bear to hear what I say. Why do you not understand what I say? That's a very casual word for talking. It's just you don't understand what I'm talking about. The words that I'm using.
Caleb Chancey:But He uses a very different and heavier word in the answer. It's because you cannot bear to hear My Word, My Logos. And Logos is a really important word that runs throughout the book of John. If you harken back to the introduction, John starts this book by saying, In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He's talking about Jesus as the Logos.
Caleb Chancey:And so when Jesus says, Here, you cannot bear to hear my word. He's talking about, You can't bear who I am. I don't mean to be flippant, but it's like Jesus is saying, You can't handle the truth. I'm putting myself out here with you, and you simply lack the capacity to handle it. That notion is reinforced in verse 47.
Caleb Chancey:And it makes clear that the problem here is our identity, not the functioning of our ears when it comes to hearing God's word. He says, whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God. We are not of God, and so we're incapable of hearing His Word. And as we heard last week, we need to hear His Word.
Caleb Chancey:Abiding in His Word sets us free. And as He says in verse 51, keeping His Word means that we won't see death. We need His His word for freedom and life, and yet we're incapable of hearing and bearing it. So this is what the week that we celebrate hope in Advent. And here's what we know about our identity.
Caleb Chancey:It's based on a lie about who God is. Because it's based on a lie we do evil things. Especially when that false identity is challenged. And 3rd, we are incapable of hearing or bearing the very word that would set us free. The one thing that we need is the one thing that we cannot have, and our position is hopeless on our own.
Caleb Chancey:Thus our hope is that we are not left alone. Jesus says in verse 42, I came from God, and very simply, I'm here. He's standing in the temple courts and He says, I'm here. This is the place where people come to meet with God, and I am God standing right here. I come from God, and here I am.
Caleb Chancey:He goes beyond just saying that He came from God. Usually when Jesus wants to talk about Himself, He doesn't say too clearly exactly who He is. He resorts to analogies or metaphors. He'll say, I'm the light of the world, or I'm the good shepherd, or I'm the narrow gate. Or He'll give us a parable that will explain who He is without exactly stating it in just so many words.
Caleb Chancey:A lot of times, He'll call us to look at an image or a reflection instead of staring directly into the sun, but not here. This is one of the few passages where Jesus draws Himself up to His full height and says exactly who He is. The Jews are pressing Him about how He relates to Abraham, and He says, Abraham, rejoice to see my day. And the Jews say, You're not old enough to have seen Abraham. And Jesus says these words, the clearest statement of His divinity in the whole gospel, Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.
Caleb Chancey:Before Abraham was, I am. There is, I think, only one way to read these words. Jesus is using the Old Testament name of God for Himself. He is saying, I am Yahweh, the Lord I am. Alright, what he's saying makes no grammatical sense apart from that.
Caleb Chancey:Before Abraham was, I am. It's not a proper sentence. What He's saying is that He is the eternal, omnipotent God who made and rules the world. That is who Jesus is, and make no mistake, that's who Jesus claims to be. Do not try to make Him something smaller or less.
Caleb Chancey:Nice people, good teachers, wise men, do not stand up and say, I am the God of the universe. And it is simply not a legitimate interpretation of the Bible to strip away Jesus' divine claims and trying to hang on to a nugget of human wisdom. Right? That's what these early believers were trying to do. They were trying to say, We're gonna fit you in to our existing paradigm, but when you claim divinity, we reject that outright.
Caleb Chancey:Right? Because they understood very clearly what Jesus was saying. They started picking up on it. You can see that in verse 53. They say, Are You greater than our father Abraham who died?
Caleb Chancey:Who do You make Yourself out to be? And when Jesus answers, I Am, they recognized instantly that He was using the name of the Lord, that He was claiming divinity, and their response was to pick up rocks and try to kill them. Now that's the rhetorical climax of the passage, right? That's the high point, and it's certainly the most beautiful part of the passage. But I think where it goes from here is very interesting, because it's this terrific anti climax.
Caleb Chancey:They pick up stones to kill him, he announces that he's God, and then he hides himself and disappears. Nothing happens. There's no resolution. It's tempting to say that Jesus escapes, but I think that has it precisely backwards. God does not escape from us.
Caleb Chancey:No, the picture here instead, remember, He's standing in the temple. He is God's presence focused in one place, standing at the temple where He would come to meet with people. This is God's presence in the temple. And the people reject Him, and God's presence leaves the temple. He disappears.
Caleb Chancey:He goes out. The picture here is not Jesus escaping. It's Jesus backing away from us. Withdrawing. Saying, oh, you've got Abraham.
Caleb Chancey:That's what you want? Fine. You have Abraham. I'll leave. It's what Romans 1 calls being given over to the desires of your heart.
Caleb Chancey:It's what Isaiah talks about when he says, On that day, let your collection of idols save you. The picture here is of Jesus letting us have. He's saying to us, Thy will be done. We were offended when He called us out. We were offended that he challenged our identity, and so he left.
Caleb Chancey:That's exactly where this part of the story ends, and I think it's fruitful for us to pause here for a minute. We're not going to stay here too long, but especially the beginning of the Advent season, think about if God were to withdraw Himself. Imagine the world where He doesn't send His Son to save us from our sins. Do you recognize your sin? Can you consider them now?
Caleb Chancey:Think of the things that you've loved instead of God. Consider the things that you've put at the center of your life and bowed down to. Imagine if God left you loving those things. If God had to wait for us to choose Him, how long would He wait? How long would He have to wait?
Caleb Chancey:Or as I've thought about for myself this week, I put myself in the shoes of these Jewish believers, and this guy shows up and he's challenging everything that I believe about myself, and I'm enraged, and I pick up a rock and then he's gone. And I'd be disappointed that I didn't have the chance to throw something at him, but I would feel a little vindicated that he lost the argument and had to run away. And I'd be, you know, Get out and stay out. How long would it take for me to drop that rock and to go looking for Him? And I think the answer is that I never would.
Caleb Chancey:I think that we never would. That's not who we are. That's not our nature. We are by nature God's enemies. We would not seek Jesus if He did not seek us.
Caleb Chancey:Our hope in this passage is that Jesus does not withdraw and stay gone. He doesn't announce His divinity and then leave to gather an army and come back and crush us. That's not what He does. He withdraws, but He returns. In fact, there's a very parallel passage in John 18, when again Jesus is confronted, this time by soldiers who've come out to arrest Him.
Caleb Chancey:And the soldiers are asking after Jesus, and Jesus again uses the name of the Lord. They're looking for him and Jesus says, I am He. And it's striking in that story, because everybody falls to the ground as soon as he says those words. John emphasized it. He says, As soon as he says, 'I am He,' everyone fell down.
Caleb Chancey:And it is to those people, those soldiers lying prostrate and backing away, that Jesus delivers Himself. He hands Himself over and surrenders to these evil men who've come out to kill him. When Jesus says, I am, he is not merely expressing God's power. He is also expressing the fullness of God's character, and our hope is that God is always coming after His own. Our hope is not in our nature, but it is in God's nature.
Caleb Chancey:Even though we've hated Him, even though we have rejected His truth and believed a lie, God loves us and He comes after us. As we turn from looking at this difficult passage and we turn towards this table that's set before us, I wanna look at a passage as a bridge. It's in the old testament. It's a place where God talks about, and he uses a lot of the same language that Jesus uses in John 8. This is in Isaiah 46.
Caleb Chancey:I'm gonna start in verse 1, read through verse 4. Their idols are on beasts and livestock. These things that you carry are born as burdens on weary beasts. They stoop, they bow down together, they cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity. Listen to me, o house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel who have been born by me from before your birth, carried from the womb.
Caleb Chancey:Even to your old age, I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, I will bear. I will carry and will save. We, on our own, cannot bear God's word. We cannot bear his law, and we stoop down because it's a burden to us, but God will bear.
Caleb Chancey:He has always carried us and He will save. In Jesus, He has born on Himself what we could not bear. He took our sin and our death, and He did so to give us new hearts that could hear and that could receive His word and be free and live. Even though He was the eternal I Am, He took our sins on Himself, so that we might be adopted out of the family of the devil and into His royal household. That was the purpose of His life.
Caleb Chancey:Instead of withdrawing, Jesus came here. He came to this earth to knit Himself into our flesh and save us. And so now we turn to this meal that He gave us to remember His bodily and spiritual sacrifice on our behalf. It says this in 1st Corinthians chapter 11, That on the night that Jesus was betrayed, He took bread and when He had given thanks, He broke it saying, This is My body, broken for you. In the same way, He took the cup after supper, and He said, This cup is the new covenant.
Caleb Chancey:It's my blood, shed for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of me. For as often as we eat the bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. And we're gonna do that tonight. We're going to proclaim his death through observing the Lord's supper.
Caleb Chancey:And we're gonna take in this way. If you could form 2 lines and come up, we'll have 3 stations here at the front. Just break off a piece of the bread and dip it in the wine and take. When you're done, you can go back down these outer rows to your seat. This is a family meal.
Caleb Chancey:It's a meal for all baptized believers, all those who've placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Let's not be rushed. We have time tonight to think on the things that we've trusted and repent of those, and to give thanks that God has delivered us even when we would not would not turn to Him. That He turned to us. And more than that also, to ask ourselves the question in this Advent season, What child is this?
Caleb Chancey:Who is this Jesus that comes to us? How can we possibly plumb the depths of His mystery and His beauty? Take time to think on Him, and come and receive what He's offered us freely. His own body and blood. Please pray with me.
Caleb Chancey:God our Father, You have loved us endlessly at great cost. Though we were Your enemies, though in fact we did kill Your Son, You were at work for our good. God, we rejoice that Your love has overcome our brokenness. We rejoice that Your life is stronger and has swallowed up death. God, I ask that You will take those parts of our identities that are twisted and that chain us to sin and to death.
Caleb Chancey:That you will break those chains. That in place of our hearts of stone, You will give us hearts of flesh, that we will live our lives on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. In whose name we pray. Amen.
