Intro to the Psalms: Meditating on God’s Word
Download MP3Before we open up God's word together, I have just a a couple of things, I want to talk to you about. First is this, the elders here at Redeemer, they have been gracious enough to give me a sabbatical, and so this will be my my last Sunday preaching here, for 2 months. I will be gone for the next 2 months, and, and they've just been really kind, to give that to me. And so we're gonna be, departing from Mark, and the church will be going through a different series for the next 2 months. I would love for you to pray, for me.
Joel Brooks:I certainly will be praying for you during this time. So that's the first thing I wanna tell you. The second is this, a couple of weeks ago, my oldest daughter Caroline, she got married, here in the church, and I got to walk her down the aisle. And, right as the as the bridesmaids are coming down, and Caroline and I are in the east room, they're getting ready. Actually, I took her outside, and, I walked her around the church.
Joel Brooks:And just for a special little moment between us, and so we would come and we would walk through these doors. And one of the things that Caroline said was, dad, did you ever imagine this? And I said, I did. I I imagine, I I mean hoped and and imagined that you would get married and that I would get to walk you down the aisle. And she goes, now I mean, did you imagine this?
Joel Brooks:And we're at the front steps of the church. I'm gonna get emotional. Sorry. That's awesome. I'm about to go on sabbatical, and I tell you, you pinned the emotions down for a long time.
Joel Brooks:It'll be ugly for the next week. They're all everything I've suppressed for years is about to come bubbling out. But, she she meant, no. Did you imagine this? The church.
Joel Brooks:And she's about to walk into to a room filled with all of these people, this church community that she's been a part of that has just loved her and poured into her over all these years. And I said, actually, I did. I I imagined that the Lord would would build this. And she said, God's been so kind. I was like, God's been so kind.
Joel Brooks:And then we open the doors. I I say that too because even as I'm heading off, gosh, rain is I gotta stuff it in for one more day. Even as I'm heading off to sabbatical, there's a there's a little bit of sadness to it because you guys are my family, and you guys have meant so much. You mean so much to me. And, and I I look forward to returning in a couple months.
Joel Brooks:I hope so. After the last service, elderly lady, she came up to me, it was her 1st Sunday ever at Redeemer, and she just looked at me and she said, I really enjoyed the sermon. Then she put her hand on me and she goes, I hope they keep you. There's something I don't know. I hope so too.
Joel Brooks:Anyway, so we are gonna be going through the Psalms for the next 8 weeks, so if you want, you can go and turn to Psalm 1, and and also have Psalm 2 there. We're likely not gonna be able to go through Psalm 2, but, I'll talk in a minute how they do go together. And before we read Psalm 1, let me just give you an introduction to the Psalms. It might surprise you to know that a third of the old testament is actually poetry. The old testament, it starts off with some historical narratives, but then it then it moves into poetry.
Joel Brooks:You've got books like Job, Song of songs, Lamentations, and actually, the prophets are almost entirely poetry. This is also one of the reasons, at least for me, that I find them confusing. I don't know about you if you can remember back when you were taking poetry in your English classes, but poetry's hard. It could be really confusing. It's dense.
Joel Brooks:Every word matters. The placement of all the words matter, and it's the same with Biblical poetry. The prophets chose to write that way because they wanted to to pack a whole lot into a very beautiful way that could be memorable. And, of course, you do remember these lines from the prophets. And also, the Psalms try to do the same thing.
Joel Brooks:The largest collection of poems that we have in the bible is the book of Psalms. It is a collection of 150 poems, and these poems have served as the hymnal or the prayer book of God's people for the last 3000 years. John Calvin, he actually thought the Psalms were so important, he actually preached on the Psalms for over 500 Sundays straight. We're gonna take 8. So we're not gonna quite do that, but but the Psalms do deserve our attention.
Joel Brooks:There's a reason that if you were to go to the bookstore right now and try to purchase just a New Testament, you would have a very hard time doing it. You'll likely only find the New Testament and Psalms. They'll attach Psalms to the New Testament. I have never come across the New Testament and Genesis, or the the New Testament and Isaiah, as great as those books are, but it's the New Testament in Psalms, because the Psalms are our prayer book. And actually the Psalms are quoted in the New Testament more than any other book in the Old Testament.
Joel Brooks:And if you look at the life of Jesus, he is always quoting the Psalms. So when the religious leaders rejected Jesus, he quotes, for instance, from Psalm 118, that the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. When Jesus wanted to give proof that he was the son of God, he quoted from Psalm 110, which is a really mysterious Psalm about King David, who's talking about His Son, yet calls His Son, the Lord. When Jesus was on a cross, and He wanted to express His deepest pain and anguish, He quoted Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Joel Brooks:So Jesus knew the Psalter so well, that literally when you poked him, he he bled the Psalms. It was his prayer book, so perhaps it should be ours. The book of Psalms is actually, it's sectioned off into 5 separate books. So within the book of Psalms, there are 5 books of Psalms. Each of these 5 books resemble the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah, And each of these books concludes with a joyous doxology.
Joel Brooks:Actually, the 5th book, the final one, the whole thing is a doxology, because that's where the Psalms are moving us towards. This explosion of joy and praise in the end. I I could talk to you a whole lot more about the structure of Hebrew poetry, and you know, the parallelisms, and the merisms, and chiasms, and and all that. Even, a lot of the Psalms, they even get a little Southern Baptists, and do some acrostics through. There's a lot you can learn about the poetic elements of the Psalms, but I have found the best way to really understand a Psalm is to just read it.
Joel Brooks:That's the best way to understand poetry, is just to dive in and begin slowly, prayerfully reading through it, and so that's what I want us to do with Psalm 1, and then if we have time, we might look a little at Psalm 2. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, who stands nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in the law of the lord, and on his law, he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water. They yield its fruit and its season, and its leaf does not wither.
Joel Brooks:And all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. This is the word of the lord.
Joel Brooks:Pray with me. Father, we thank you for your word, and I pray that in this moment, we would delight in it. We'd meditate on it. Lord, my words mean nothing, but your words are life. So would you speak to us?
Joel Brooks:Pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the sweet name of Jesus. Amen. So Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 both act as introductions to the entire psalter.
Joel Brooks:One of the reasons we know that these 2 belong together is Psalm 1 begins with talking about blessed is the man. Psalm 2 ends with blessed are all. So Psalm 1 begins with a pronouncement of blessing, Psalm 2 ends with a pronouncement of blessing, and these act as the book ends, to both of these Psalms, letting us know that they are to act as a unit, And in Psalm 1, we learn how to read the Psalms. Psalm 2 teaches us who the Psalms are ultimately about, in which they're ultimately about the Messiah. And so together with these 2 Psalms, you see them as kinda the gateway to the rest of the book, and so what I want us to do is at least just walk through Psalm 1 line by line, and then maybe we'll say a few brief things about Psalm 2.
Joel Brooks:So Psalm 1 begins with the words, blessed is the man. Now the word blessed, it can mean satisfied. It means happy. It's the feeling you get when you receive a Chick Fil A sandwich, and you get that, and the person, the cashier gives it to you, says, have a blessed day. And there's this warmth over you of receiving this blessing.
Joel Brooks:We might actually translate it as this. It's the good life. Blessed means the good life. So the man who enjoys the good life, well what does he look like? Well we read next, he, he walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.
Joel Brooks:Here, we're given 3 different names for different types of evil or sin. You have the wicked, the sinner, and the scoffer. Each of these have a slightly different nuance there. You have first the wicked person. A wicked person is one who considers evil to be good.
Joel Brooks:Then you have the word sinner. Sinner in Hebrew literally means, misses the mark. And so the sinner is the person who understands God's perfect standard for us, but then goes astray of it. Misses the mark. And finally, you have the scoffer.
Joel Brooks:This is the one who actually mocks the righteous. The one who mocks those who delight in doing good. Each of these words, they give us this slightly different nuance, concerning sin or evil. They're all worthy of a study, but I don't want you to miss the main point of this verse, which is this. The psalmist is describing someone who is growing increasingly comfortable with sin.
Joel Brooks:The psalmist is describing someone who's growing increasingly comfortable with sin. Do you see the progression that's there? This person starts off just walking with the wicked, walking with sin, but then soon stops and is standing with it, and then finally settles down and sits with it. And by the end, this person is just perfectly at home, sitting on the couch with sin. The blessed man, however, chooses not to get comfortable with sin, instead we read this in verse 2, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
Joel Brooks:Verse 2 is the key to the entire book of Psalms. It's the key to this Psalm, and it's a key to all of the Psalms, so whatever you do to highlight that, start, underline it, you know, whatever it is, to know that's important, do that. The blessed man delights in God's law. Delights in God's instructions, meditates on them day and night. Now meditation is not something that comes easy to our generation.
Joel Brooks:We actually don't like being alone with our thoughts. I read a study that took place 10 years ago. It was with a 1,000 different people, and they they brought each individual into a room by themselves, and where they sat them down in a chair and said, you have 15 minutes to sit here, and we'll give you 2 options as to what you could do. 1st, you could just sit here and be alone with your thoughts. 2nd option is there's a button here.
Joel Brooks:You can push it, and it will cause you pain. You won't receive a nasty electric shock if you push this button. The choice is yours. So for 15 minutes, people would sit there, and and what they found is, on average, people push the button 7 times in 15 minutes. I mean, I would have pushed it once.
Joel Brooks:I mean, curiosity there, I kinda wanna know, but but it was a nasty shock, but what people found was they would rather receive that pain, because it was less than the pain of sitting alone with your thoughts for 15 minutes. Now, Christian meditation, however, is is is not like that. It's it's not being alone with your thoughts. It's actually inviting the Lord into your thoughts. Christian meditation is not an emptying of the mind, it's a filling of your mind with scripture.
Joel Brooks:The word meditate is the Hebrew word, hagah. Say, hagah. Hagah. Just wanna make sure you're awake. Okay.
Joel Brooks:It's the word hagah. It's it's not the most common word in scripture, and it's translated a lot of different ways. For instance, in Psalm 2, that word, how the nations or the people are plotting against the Lord, that word plot is the word hagat. So word meditate here. But it's used at times to describe the cooing of doves.
Joel Brooks:One of my favorites is, it's used to describe a bear, after it's killed its prey, and it's eating it. It's like, you know, and I don't know what a bear sounds like, when it's I've never been that close, as they're eating their prey, but you know, they're just It's just making some kind of little noise, quiet noise. Sometimes in the Bible it's translated as murmuring, And the reason we have it is translated meditation here, is because back when this was written, there was no such thing as silent reading. Everyone would read out loud. So if you were to walk into a room where everyone was reading, you would actually hear this murmuring as everyone is quietly reading to themselves softly.
Joel Brooks:So to meditate on God's word is to read it, and to reread it, and to ponder it. This word law here is the Hebrew word Torah, and it doesn't just mean the first five books of the bible. The Torah means instructions. So you are pondering and reading God's instructions. If you want to get live the good life, you read God's instructions for the good life.
Joel Brooks:After all, God created us so he would know the instructions for how we should best live. I want us to stop right here before we go any further and just see if you've noticed something so far about just these few verses. They're not prayers. This is the prayer book of the bible, but actually, the first psalm is not a prayer at all. The first psalm is actually a meditation on meditating, which should show you the place that meditation should have in our prayer life.
Joel Brooks:When I was in seminary, I once took a class on prayer. It was called the transforming power of prayer. I mean, I was really excited. Thought I'd learned to know whether pray in tongues or something. I mean, I I was I was really excited about this class.
Joel Brooks:Love the professor. I went in there and the class, and I was really disappointed. Because it was set up just like a normal classroom. I was saying, this is prayer. I mean, I was expecting, you know, maybe a rug, some candles, incense, maybe some cushions on the grounds, because we were gonna be doing a whole lot of praying, and I was ready to take mine up a notch, But instead, this professor who I greatly respected, he just kinda read a lot of scripture that day.
Joel Brooks:And just kinda talked about prayer. Afterwards, I was pretty disappointed, but I thought, okay. It's syllabus day. You know, sure we weren't gonna deep dive into prayer. Next class will be different, but it was the exact same.
Joel Brooks:We just kind of talked about prayer, read a lot of scripture, read some of the Psalms. It bothered me so much that, me and my incredible wisdom and humility, I went to go talk to the professor, and I I said, hey, I thought this was gonna be a class on prayer. That's that's why I signed up. Why why aren't we praying? And he wisely said this.
Joel Brooks:I've never forgotten these words. He goes, perhaps, we should first let God start the conversation. Perhaps, we should first let God start the conversation. It's what meditation is. It's letting God start the conversation.
Joel Brooks:You you know, the person who initiates a conversation, in many ways, has power over that conversation. If after the service, you wanted to go talk to somebody, and you went up to him or her, whatever you you first whatever subject you introduced is gonna be the topic. So if you wanted to talk about politics, you'd end up talking about politics. If if the first thing you talked about was, you know, Taylor Swift, you're gonna start talking about Taylor Swift, or how Taylor Swift shapes politics. You know, you you the possibilities are endless, but whatever topic you introduce, that's gonna set the tone in the topic.
Joel Brooks:It can be changed later, but that steers the conversation at first. Meditation is letting God steer the conversation. He starts it. We don't just come to him and just blurt out our problems, or blurt out our praises. You will find Psalms like that.
Joel Brooks:It's it's fine and good when that happens, but but not here, this one. Meditating on scripture is a deeper and a more transformative power of prayer, because there we let God speak first, and we respond to him. So in other words, you should pray with your Bibles open. Pray with your Bibles open, reading, listening, saying, God, what would you have for me? Speak.
Joel Brooks:Or better yet, you can memorize scripture, and then just chew on that all day. Lord, what what would you have that scripture, like, would you speak to me through the scripture? What is it to mean? How am I to apply this in my life? Meditating on God's word is where life changing prayer begins, and that's why the Psalter begins there as well.
Joel Brooks:And we're to do this night and day, which if not sure what that means, just think of your phone. It's what you do with your phone. You look at it night and day. The average person looks at their phone every 12 minutes. That's meditation.
Joel Brooks:You're just meditating on something different. But you're meditating when you lie down, when you wake up, when you walk, on the way, you're it's it's always looking at your phone, and it's feeding you. You're thinking of those things. That's meditation day and night, and the psalmist is saying, do that with scripture. Let let that be the thing that forms and shapes you.
Joel Brooks:Now the result of this type of meditation, we find in the next couple of verses, verses 3 and 4. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but they are like chaff that the wind drives away. Now in the climate where this was written, trees could not survive unless they were planted by a water source, So they could only grow by streams, and the psalmist is saying that we are no different. We cannot grow spiritually unless we put our roots in by a stream, and that stream is the word of God.
Joel Brooks:So meditation is putting down deep roots in the word of God and sucking it into our very life as if our life depends upon it, because it does. And we're told that if we do that, the result will be a fruitful life. We're not just gonna eke out an existence, but we're gonna be an evergreen. We're never gonna wither. Do we all have to worry about the climate?
Joel Brooks:We don't have to worry about trials when they come, we will always be green, and more than that, we'll grow fruit. We drink in God's word, and we're not just sustained, we become fruitful people. We grow fruits of the spirit, which we know are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control. Who doesn't want more joy or peace in their life? The psalmist says, you gotta drink it in.
Joel Brooks:It doesn't just happen. We drink in those things. Actually, if you were to look at this verse, it is full of Garden of Eden language here. When we meditate on God's word, the blessings of Eden once again flow into our lives, and this is what we were made for, people. We're made to enjoy the blessings of Eden, and to become a conduit of that in order to bless others.
Joel Brooks:That's the good life. Don't be discouraged if this doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to grow fruit, but if you keep drinking, if you keep drinking from God's word, you you will have fruit in its due season. But then we're told not sow the wicked. It's almost like a slap how quickly this changes.
Joel Brooks:Not sow for them. The wicked person's life, we're told, resembles chaff, which is this dry husk that's around that living seed. That husk is dead, dry, it's good for nothing. It falls to the ground, and it is just carried away by the wind. It's the exact opposite of an evergreen tree.
Joel Brooks:Now, the more I've thought about these verses this week, the more I've thought about Matt's sermon last week. Last week, for those of you who weren't here, Matt preached a terrific sermon on Mark chapter 10, which is a story about when the Pharisees, they came to Jesus in order to track him, to test him or track him, by asking him this question, did he think it was lawful or permissible for a husband to divorce his wife for any reason. And that was the common accepted practice at the time. It's what the majority of the Pharisees believed, that you could divorce your wife for for just any reason. Did you notice how Jesus answered them?
Joel Brooks:He actually didn't teach them anything new. There wasn't one new thought. There wasn't one new idea. Instead, he simply reminded them of what God had already said in his word. Jesus had meditated deeply on Genesis 2, but the Pharisees hadn't.
Joel Brooks:That was the difference between them. Now I don't know about you, but I found it it was hard for me to even fathom that there could be Pharisees who were deeply religious, deeply intelligent people, how they could actually get to a place where they thought that divorcing a woman for those reasons was okay, that it was actually God's will that they could do that. I mean, how did they get to a place where they they actually thought that they could divorce a woman if if she burnt supper, or if perhaps she put on a few pounds, or if they just honestly didn't really like her anymore, like somebody else better. How could these Pharisees get to a point where they thought that was okay with God? Well, it didn't happen overnight.
Joel Brooks:Perhaps, it even took generations, but they got to this point because they no longer meditated on God's word. They no longer listened to him and his instructions. Instead, they began to come up with their own instructions. They began to listen to the counsel of the wicked, and then they began to stand in the way of the sinners. And now they have sat down with the scoffers, and they were mocking Jesus.
Joel Brooks:In other words, they had become increasingly comfortable with sin. That's how they got there. And that makes me have to ask this question. Are there sins that we are becoming increasingly comfortable with? Let's just look at marriage again.
Joel Brooks:It seems like it was just yesterday, doesn't it, with everyone, whether you were a Christian or not. Everyone thought that marriage was to be between a man and a woman, but now such a view is not only seen as backward, it can be seen as bigoted. Even saying something that would have never raised an eyebrow for, all of human history, like there are only 2 genders. Now to say that, to say that God created us male and female, like he said in Genesis 2, that can be considered hate speech. How in the world did we get there?
Joel Brooks:It's not a rhetorical question. Like, how did we get there? How did we get to a place where we, even as a society, have set aside an entire month celebrating those sins? Where if you were to go one block from here, and you were to go to Avondale Library, this week, they're giving out free pride bracelets to children. How did we get there?
Joel Brooks:We got there the same way that the Pharisees got there in their view of marriage. They quit drawing on or meditating on scripture, and they began listening to the counsel of the wicked. And as a result, they've become chaff, and they're being blown around by every cultural wind. And then it's not just those sins that we've become comfortable with. I mean, there there's a whole litany of them.
Joel Brooks:Some of us, we've become quite comfortable with our political idolatry. We've become quite comfortable with our sports idolatry, with greed, with hate, especially online hate. Some of you need to remember, I can actually see your social media posts, The the the means that we send out, it's hateful. There's no place in the Christian life. We've grown comfortable with our lack of empathy for the poor, grown comfortable with injustice.
Joel Brooks:We've become increasingly comfortable with heterosexual sex outside of marriage. Church, God has given us a much better way to live. He's the one who created us. We should listen to him when he tells us, this is how you will live, this is how you thrive, this is how you become fruitful people. He's describing the blessings of Eden in this verse.
Joel Brooks:The blessings of Eden will flow to you, and then these blessings you could take, and it will flow to others. Years ago, I had a reporter call me up, ask if they could interview me, and do a story on Redeemer's 9 lessons and carol service. And I thought, sure. And they said, well, you know, I'll meet you at the church. So we met out on the front steps.
Joel Brooks:Redeemer, we're we're having our services in the Lyric Theater. I mean, you guys know this. It's it's a really big event, even for the whole city of Birmingham. Keep in mind, this was a Christmas story. First question I was asked.
Joel Brooks:So, what is your church's stance on same sex marriage? It was a trap. It was a test. That's what it was. Person didn't care.
Joel Brooks:The person just know however I answered. It was a headline. It was exactly what the Pharisees had done to Jesus. But thankfully, I had Jesus as my guide, and Jesus who had gone before, and it was a pretty easy answer. I just went to Genesis 2, just like Jesus had done.
Joel Brooks:Said marriage is God's gift to us, and it's between a man and a woman.
Jeffrey Heine:And for
Joel Brooks:us to do anything otherwise, well, it's not according to his design or plan, and and it hurts us, and it hurts society. I did let this person know right after this. I said, but I want you to hear this. That this church here, we are a gathering of sinners. Otherwise, I couldn't come.
Joel Brooks:All of us have sinners. Now all of us are sinful. All of us have broken lives. All of us have things that we are dealing with, and that we need Jesus to fix us. That's why we actually all gather together.
Joel Brooks:We gather together because we need Jesus' grace. We need Jesus' forgiveness. We need him to save us and to change us. That's why we gather. It was actually quite an easy answer when the reporter asked me this, because in my mind, I just thought this.
Joel Brooks:Are we gonna be a church that has deep roots sucking in the life of scripture? Are we gonna be like chaff blown about by every cultural wind? I want us to be a fruitful people, a fruitful church. I want the garden of Eden blessings to flow from us to the rest of the world. It's not a hard answer.
Joel Brooks:Now I don't know about you if you've noticed this in the Psalm or not, and it's it's a little unusual Psalm for a number of ways, But one thing that stood out to me is that whenever the wicked or the sinners are described, they're in the plural. But there's only 1 righteous man. So those practicing evil, they're in the plural. You have the wicked, you have sinners, you have scoffers, but it's the blessed man. Blessed is the man, or the man who listens to God's instructions.
Joel Brooks:That person is always singular. I actually think the psalmist wrote it this way for a couple of reasons. First, the psalmist knows this, that when you're trying to do the right thing, it feels like you are alone. When you're trying to do the right thing, often it feels like the entire world is against you. And this is the way that the psalmist is trying to encourage you.
Joel Brooks:Don't give up. Stand on God's word. Suck it in like your very life depends on it, and you will have a fruitful life. And it's actually all those who mock his word. All of those are like the chaff, and they will be blown away.
Joel Brooks:And that's actually how the Psalm ends, with the pronouncement of judgment on the wicked. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. That's one reason I think that we have the man in singular, but I do think there's another reason as well. Because reality is this.
Joel Brooks:Actually, none of us are that person. None of us. All of us are the sinners. All of us are the the people who haven't truly delighted in the law of God. Jesus is the only person who has truly done this.
Joel Brooks:A matter of fact, he delighted so much in the word of God. He is described as the word of God who's become flesh. And so our hope is not in trusting in our own righteousness. Our hope is trusting in the righteousness of Jesus, because he alone can save us, and that's where Psalm 2, that's where it picks up and it leads us. Psalm 2 ends with blessed are all who take refuge in him.
Joel Brooks:That's our hope. That's our salvation, is that we take refuge in him. Take time to read through Psalm 2 this week. Psalm 2 is all about the kingship of Jesus, the authority of Jesus, and how all the powers of the world begin plotting against him. And we read that Jesus reacts this way.
Joel Brooks:He laughs Because he knows that the powers of this world cannot do anything. The powers of this world actually, at one point, said, we're gonna off these chains. We're gonna cast off the binds because they think that the instructions of the messiah are restrictive. He says that won't work. Says, you know what your hope is?
Joel Brooks:Says, kiss the sun. Kiss the sun. And that all who take refuge in him are saved. Blessed are all who take refuge in Jesus. It's a plea.
Joel Brooks:Come. Come. I live the righteous life for you. So are you coming to Jesus? Let's go to him now in prayer.
Joel Brooks:Lord Jesus, forgive us for so easily casting off your life giving saving word and embracing things that just not only will not satisfy, they will lead us to death. Lord, you're so good, you offer your grace and your forgiveness freely. Jesus, may we find our refuge in you. We pray this in the strong sweet name of Jesus. Amen.
