Predestined to the Praise of His Glorious Grace
Download MP3If you have a bible, I invite you to turn to Ephesians chapter 1. Ephesians chapter 1. We're gonna talk about predestination this afternoon. I said that in one of our morning services, and, no lie. There was an audible groan by some visitors here in the front.
Jeffrey Heine:And, 2 minutes in, they just got up and walked out. So if if you wanna walk out, wait till, like, I pray just, you know, so I don't actually watch it. It's okay. It did. You know, rather than string along a relationship, we just got it over with early.
Jeffrey Heine:Ephesians chapter 1, beginning at verse 3. We'll go through verse 14. Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Even as he chose us and him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved.
Jeffrey Heine:In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In him, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will. So that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory. And this is the word of the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:Thanks be to God. If you would, pray with me. Our Father, we ask that through Your Spirit, You would show us in this moment just how much You have lavished Your grace upon us. And may we just stand back and wonder. Lord, my words are death.
Jeffrey Heine:Your words are life. We need life spoken to us. We need calloused hearts and closed minds opened by your spirit. I 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.
Jeffrey Heine:We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. So the entire text we just read, as we learned last week, is one sentence. In Greek, it's one sentence. It's 202 words long in which Paul is just kind of rapid firing all of the blessings that we have in Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:With so many words, such a long sentence, I've never read any English translation that tries to keep it one sentence, because that's just bad grammar. But it's important for us to realize that this is all one flowing thought from Paul. But with so many words, it's hard to know, well, what exactly is the subject? What's the main verb here? Well, we find the main verb in verse 4.
Jeffrey Heine:Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, He predestined us. The word chose here, that God chose us. This is the only verb in this entire sentence that is not subordinate to some other element. In other words, this word chose is the primary thought, the primary verb that that carries this entire sentence of 202 words.
Jeffrey Heine:So so all of the glorious things that Paul has been talking about here fall under this chosen, that God's chosen these things. So all of the blessings we have, our adoption, our forgiveness, our redemption, our sealing of the spirit, all of our inheritance, all of these things are the results of God's choice. He chose to give us these things freely. And because they're freely given to us, we call that grace or sovereign grace. These things were lavished on us not because of anything we did, not because we somehow bought them, we somehow earned them, God was somehow proud of something we did so he then lavished them on on us.
Jeffrey Heine:These were simply the result of God's choice his grace poured out for us. And And that's why Paul says to the praise of his glorious grace. Now we need to understand that the reason that this is just gushing out of Paul, these these rapid fire words, this run on sentence is be because Paul gets this. I mean, he gets this. He was literally on the road to Damascus and he's going to persecute more Christians, and he wasn't looking for salvation.
Jeffrey Heine:He wasn't looking for God. He wasn't trying to experience grace. He certainly wasn't looking to have an experience with Jesus. That was not his plan. But then God had different plans, preordained plans.
Jeffrey Heine:And Jesus met Paul on that road and utterly changed his life. And Paul got that, and he's never gotten over it. So he can't help gushing about God's grace. Now, I mentioned last week as we began this study on Ephesians that Paul writes this letter to answer the big questions, the big questions of why. Why are we Christians?
Jeffrey Heine:Why is there a church? Why do we pray? Why do we try to live a holy, good life? Why do we do these things? And Paul's answer is this.
Jeffrey Heine:You do them because God chose you to do them. You are a Christian because God chose you to be a Christian. You are filled with the Spirit because God chose you to be filled with the Spirit. You're saved because God chose you to be saved. Every blessing you have is a result of God's choice.
Jeffrey Heine:That's the flow of this sentence. The main point of this sentence. Now, of course, when you look back on your life and you think of the different things that brought you to Jesus, what what you see and and everybody sees this when they look back at their own conversion, they see that God's spirit was already at work there drawing drawing them to your I mean, drawing you to him. You always see that God was actively drawing you to Himself, drawing you to Jesus. And Christianity wasn't something that, you did.
Jeffrey Heine:Christianity was something that happened to you. It just happened to you. So there there's not a person here who, who woke up one morning, you know, you looked at your calendar, and you thought, okay, today's the day I'm gonna be convicted of my sin. Yeah. What do you know?
Jeffrey Heine:Today's the day I'm gonna meet Jesus. Today's the day I think I'm gonna have the Holy Spirit come into my life and just completely change my life and give me a new heart. Today's the day. I've got it on my calendar. Today's the day.
Jeffrey Heine:None of us planned for it, but God did. God planned for that day to be the day, although you had not. Think of all the events that led up to your conversion. It was a certain conversation that you had, led by somebody else, maybe giving you just a timely book, something you really needed to hear. Maybe you were some place where you happened to hear the gospel preached.
Jeffrey Heine:Now the question is, do do you believe that was all coincidence? That was just one big coincidence that somehow brought you to faith? Nobody believes that. Nobody believes it was coincidence. Everyone I know would agree here with the bible in saying that these things were planned by God.
Jeffrey Heine:Now, the question is this. Do you think God planned this on the fly? Do you think, like, as you're just kinda walking through life, God is walking next to you and it's like, woah, man, I'm seeing how things are coming together here. And I can I can work with this? You know, I could I could just kinda nudge this person here or I could maybe kinda get this person to say this.
Jeffrey Heine:Do you think God was planning these things on the fly? Or do you think maybe perhaps God planned this minutes beforehand? Maybe maybe a day beforehand, He planned your salvation. What about a millennia beforehand? That's what we call predestination.
Jeffrey Heine:That's the word that Paul uses here. Predestination. It's a biblical word. You can't get around this. He begins by saying chose in verse 4.
Jeffrey Heine:And then he's gonna switch in verse 5 and in verse 11 to using predestination. But this word means that, basically, this is God's choice in which he decides what will happen before it happens. God ordains what will happen before it happens. And this isn't just found here in Ephesians. This is found all throughout your Bible.
Jeffrey Heine:Really, that God sovereignly deciding what will happen is in just about every page of scripture. And so you come to places like Acts 13, and when Paul is preaching to the gentiles, and we read in verse 48 this. When the gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord. And as many as were appointed to eternal life, believed. We we don't read that as many as believed were appointed to eternal life.
Jeffrey Heine:We read that as many as were appointed, or as many as were chosen, believed. John, in in his gospel, several times, he brings up the times that Jesus talked this way. In John chapter 6, we read all that the father gives me will come to me. He doesn't say everybody who comes to me, those are the ones that the father gives me. He says, no.
Jeffrey Heine:All that the father gives me, those people will then come to me. Everybody that the Lord chooses comes to Jesus. And just to kind of reinforce that point later, he says no one comes to me unless the father draws him. And that word draws here, he's not talking about, you know, I have such a magnetic personality, I kinda draw people to myself. That's not the draw there.
Jeffrey Heine:That's translated elsewhere in scripture as the word drag. So when Paul was stoned and he was dragged out of the city because they thought he was dead, that's the same word there as draw. So when Jesus says nobody comes to me unless the father draws him, have that image in your mind. Body to Jesus. It's predestination.
Jeffrey Heine:God's choice, not ours. God's plans, not ours. Once again, this is a theme that we see throughout all of Scripture. It's not just some obscure doctrine here in Ephesians or in Romans. But rather than just going through kind of a laundry list of all the different scriptures, I really don't wanna do that.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm happy to do that, really, with anybody who who wants to go through that later. But what I want to do instead is go over some of the main objections to predestination. Because it produces some kind of reaction in us, doesn't it? When we just even hear the word. It produces all sorts of emotions, especially for people who live in a society like ours that values personal freedom and personal choice and individuality above all else.
Jeffrey Heine:That's what America is founded on. We are the ones who make our own destiny. We're the ones in charge of our own destiny. And so when we hear something like this, we kinda bow up, it kind of rubs us the wrong way. We have a very emotional response to it.
Jeffrey Heine:I certainly did for a long, long time. Predestination was not something that came easy for me to believe. It was hard to swallow. So let's look at some of these objections, and I'm just gonna look at 3. 1st is that, well, our decisions don't really matter then, do they?
Jeffrey Heine:If God's predestined everything, then our decisions don't matter. What what about that? Next objection, is this. Well, if you believe that you were chosen, doesn't that produce pride? Isn't that a pretty arrogant thing to say that you are chosen?
Jeffrey Heine:And then a final objection I wanna look at is, well, why share our faith at all? If it's already been determined beforehand, why do we even need to share the gospel, if only those who are predestined are going to believe? So let's look at those three objections. Our decisions don't matter. This is a common objection to predestination, that our decisions don't matter.
Jeffrey Heine:And I will grant you this, it is the logical deduction of predestination. That we're really just kinda robots. Alright? This is often called fatalism or determinism. And I I just want you to hear me say that the Bible's view though of predestination is far more nuanced than determinism or fatalism or what you would first think of when you think of predestination.
Jeffrey Heine:The bible gives us a far more nuanced view. For the bible says this, you make choices. And those choices are yours. You actually made them from your own heart and your own mind. You made them, and they were real choices, and they have real consequences.
Jeffrey Heine:So we hold that, and then we also hold this. Yet, everything that happens, happens according to God's plan. It happens because He has ordained it. And we hold those two things in tension or in mystery before each other. We don't drop either one of those.
Jeffrey Heine:There's a number of places where we can look to see this played out, but Proverbs is a great place to go. Proverbs 16:9 says this, the mind of man, or some of your translations might say the heart of man, plans his ways, but the lord directs his steps. That's the tension there. The mind of man plans his ways. The mind of man makes his decisions, Real decisions.
Jeffrey Heine:His choice. Yet the Lord directs his steps. What actually happens, happens according to God's plan. Proverbs 1921. Many are the plans in the mind of man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
Jeffrey Heine:Once again, your decisions are your decisions. Yet everything that happens, happens according to God's design. Or as Paul puts it in Ephesians, we've been predestined according to the purpose of his purpose of him who works all things and according to the counsel of his will. So we hold up those two things in tension or in mystery with one another. That our decisions really matter, they really have consequences and they are really ours, we're not just a robot, and at the same time, everything that happens happens because God has foreordained it.
Jeffrey Heine:He has predetermined it. For those of you who like physics, I love reading books about physics. I don't pretend to understand them, but I love reading them. Think of light. Light behaves as both a particle and a wave, which is completely contradictory.
Jeffrey Heine:But we know that it acts like it has mass like a particle, but at the same time it acts like a wave that has no mass at all. And so the only thing we can do is treat it as both a particle and as a wave. Why? Well, we don't own we don't understand why. We just have to say it is.
Jeffrey Heine:We don't have enough knowledge to say why it is this way. We can only say it is this way. That's very similar to this view of predestination here. It's like we don't understand why it's this way, but without a doubt, as you look through scripture, you have to hold it together and say, it simply is this way. We just don't have all the information to to explain why.
Jeffrey Heine:It's a mystery to us in this life. It might be a mystery to us in the next. We don't know. Alright. Let's look at pride.
Jeffrey Heine:Believing that we were chosen produces pride. It's a common objection. I mean, after all, if you were the chosen one, I mean, the the chosen one, doesn't that kinda give you kind of an air of superiority to people who were not chosen? And once again, I would grant you that, yes, that would be true, if God was, you know, picking a kickball team or something like that. You know, you know, he's kinda doing his fantasy draft, you know, whatever it is.
Jeffrey Heine:And like, you know, this person's gonna score me some points. This guy has a lot to bring to the table, you know. I I really need him on my team, but that's that's not how God choosing us works. He doesn't choose us because of any value we bring. He's not looking and amazed at our gifts and like, you know, I really could use him on my side.
Jeffrey Heine:You know, I'm gonna That's not what God does. Matter of fact, he has to choose us before we're even born because when we're born, we're just gonna screw it up. And so he chooses us way beforehand, before we've ever done anything. There's no ground to boast and to say it's because of something I've done or because it's who I am. As a matter of fact, if you go through scripture, if anything, it is the exact opposite.
Jeffrey Heine:So we saw this when Paul addressed the Corinthians and they were getting all puffed up, and he looked at them, and he goes, look at you. Look at, not many of you were wise. Not many of you are noble. You don't really have any great gifts. I mean just look at you.
Jeffrey Heine:He basically says you're pathetic, but God chose what was weak in the world to shame the wise. You wanna know why you were chosen? Because you're weak and pathetic. It's not a grounds for boasting, is it? This is a doctrine that humbles us.
Jeffrey Heine:Think of your own salvation. Ask yourself once again the question, how is it that I became saved? Why why did why did I believe? And maybe think of a coworker who's not a Christian. And say, why did I believe and this person did not?
Jeffrey Heine:Just keep asking that question, why. And and you might think, well, I mean, I believed the gospel, That person did not. Well, okay. Well, why did he believe the gospel? Well, the gospel just made sense to me.
Jeffrey Heine:I understood it, and and this person didn't understand it. Well, why is it that you understood it and this person didn't understand it? Well, I I guess that I had this growing awareness of my sin and kinda this need for a savior. Okay. That's great.
Jeffrey Heine:Well, why did you have that and this person not have that? And you just keep asking the question, why why why did you choose this and the other person did not? Keep asking and you're gonna finally will it down to to where there's only one of 2 answers. Only one of 2 answers there, and it's this. Either I chose to believe because actually, I'm a little bit better than this guy.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean, he didn't choose, but I did. It boils down to just, I mean, I'm not a lot better. No Christian would say that. But you know, when it boils down, I'm a little, just a little wee bit better. Or you could say, I'm no better.
Jeffrey Heine:It was God's choice. And I don't understand why, but God simply chose me. And can I tell you this is why the doctrine of predestination is so good for my soul? Because confession here. There are many times when I look at people around me who haven't believed.
Jeffrey Heine:You're living a life of sin, and I think deep down, actually, I'm a little bit better than them. Deep down, that that's why I'm a Christian, is deep down, I'm just a little bit better. And then, predestination comes on me and just takes my feet out from underneath me. And says, nobody stands on a pedestal before me, and it humbles me. And can I say that this is a doctrine that, really, we need to embrace, we need to embrace in America?
Jeffrey Heine:Because this is a doctrine that puts us all on an equal playing field. It completely destroys any notion of supremacy. Whether it's from an individual or whether it's from a race, you cannot look at anybody else and say, I'm even at When you strip it all down, I'm even the slightest bit better. God says, you're not. Don't you dare believe that.
Jeffrey Heine:You were saved by grace. I didn't choose you because you were better. I chose you according to my own purpose. So it's a very humbling doctrine. And I think this gives us the posture that we need in order to live out a life of worship and a life of holiness.
Jeffrey Heine:Now, there's a temptation for us to think, as we're talking about predestination, you're like, who really cares? I mean, come on. We're actually dedicating the entire sermon to predestination. We're not in college anymore. It's not 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, when you normally talk about these things.
Jeffrey Heine:Who who who really cares? And you might be thinking, it doesn't matter if I believe this or if I don't believe this. Well, all that matters is that I love Jesus, I wanna worship him, and I wanna obey him. And so we we kinda embrace these things and then we just put off to the side any notion of predestination or sovereign grace. But we can't put it aside.
Jeffrey Heine:Don't. You you wanna understand the place that predestination needs to have in our lives, you you just need to look at the book of Romans. Alright? Romans is when Paul most clearly lays out his theology of who God is and who man is, And he orders it very strategically. And so we get to Romans 1.
Jeffrey Heine:And Romans 1 is essentially, there is a God. It's a good place to start. There is a God. Romans 2. And this God is going to judge.
Jeffrey Heine:Okay? Romans 3. Bad news. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. You have now sinned before this judge.
Jeffrey Heine:Chapter 4. Good news. But you're justified by grace through faith. Chapters 56. And now you have peace with God.
Jeffrey Heine:You are reconciled with him. Chapter 7. But what does it mean? Because I'm still sinning. How is it that I'm still sinning?
Jeffrey Heine:Well the reason you're still sinning is because you're still in your mortal body and you're still on this earth. But it's okay because chapter 8, it will not always be that way. Someday you'll be in a resurrected body in a resurrected earth and you will sin no more. That means chapter 8 is just like the pinnacle there. But then you get chapter 9.
Jeffrey Heine:Chapters 9 through 11 is all about predestination. Right after going through all of that, predestination, which prepares you for chapter 12, in which Paul says, I appeal to you brothers by the mercies of God. All the mercies I've just talked about present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. For this is your spiritual act of worship. So do you see the progression there?
Jeffrey Heine:Paul teaches about predestination after he gives us the entire gospel. So the entire gospel is given first, and then he says, now I want you to understand why you believed, why you could be secure that you're not gonna lose this salvation, and I also wanna create in you the posture that is now necessary for you to move forward and live a life of holiness in worship. So it doesn't just go gospel to worship, it goes gospel predestination in the worship, And we need to remember that order. And you get that order wrong, everything gets messed up. You've met the people who put predestination first before the gospel.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean, we've all met those people. I call them jerks. Alright? The people were just like, that's all they could talk about is predestination. And that's just so damaging and it's so skewed.
Jeffrey Heine:It's gospel first. But then you've also met the people who put it at the way into the other end of the spectrum. It's like, all I need is a gospel. I just need to love the Lord. I'm gonna live a life of obedience.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm gonna worship him. And then maybe when I die, I could get to that issue of predestination. Well that is equally as harmful Because it doesn't create the posture necessary for a life of worship. Gospel. Predestination, which is understanding how it is you came to believe, and how you could be secure in this, and how you could be humbled, So now you can move forward in a life of worship.
Jeffrey Heine:This is exactly what Paul presents here in Ephesians 1. Look at verses 4 again. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us. He chose us for the foundation of the world.
Jeffrey Heine:Why? It leads to our sanctification for us to be holy and blameless for our life that has lived to His glory. I am There's no way I'm gonna finish this sermon, guys. There's just no way. Alright.
Jeffrey Heine:Why why evangelize? Why evangelize? Let's see. Alright. Why why would we ever share our faith, if it's already predetermined who's gonna come to Christ and who is not?
Jeffrey Heine:Well, for starters, you're commanded to. Okay. That should be enough. But second is this, faith comes from hearing the gospel. And that's not a contradiction with predestination.
Jeffrey Heine:Look at verse 13. Paul says this, in him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. So Paul has no problem at all talking all about being chosen and predestination and then talking about the necessity of us believing in order to receive the holy spirit. And actually, predestination is what gave Paul the confidence he needed to go and share the gospel. When we started that series, we looked at Acts when we studied about when Paul was coming into Corinth.
Jeffrey Heine:And he was coming in beaten. He had just been in all these places where he'd been persecuted, and he's coming in fear and trembling. And now's the great city of Corinth, Bigger than Athens. And so he's scared. And so the only this is the only time that the Lord does this.
Jeffrey Heine:The Lord actually appears to Paul to encourage him in his faith to go and share the gospel. So so Jesus appears to him and Jesus says these things in Acts chapter 18. It says, Paul, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you. And no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people. So Paul's confidence to go and share the gospel to a place that doesn't have the gospel, his confidence is this.
Jeffrey Heine:The Lord appears to him and says, you could go ahead and preach the gospel, Paul, because I already have many people in this city. And the moment they hear my voice, they will respond. My sheep hear my voice and then they come and they follow. And Paul, I'm telling you, I've got sheep. I've gone before you.
Jeffrey Heine:I've already prepared the soil, so just scatter the seed. And that was Paul's confidence in going into Corinth and sharing the gospel. Now for us, I realize this just doesn't make much sense that God would declare something. It's it's irrevocable. We know it's gonna happen.
Jeffrey Heine:Therefore, we have to work in order to make it happen? We don't think along those ways. But all throughout scripture, you see that. Kind of a silly example you see in Genesis is, after the flood, God talks to Noah. He says, hey Noah, I just want you to know I'm not gonna destroy the world again in a flood and from now on, there is always going to be a springtime and there will always be a harvest.
Jeffrey Heine:So God promises Noah there will always be a springtime, there will always be a harvest. Now, we hear a promise like that, there is always gonna be a harvest, and you know what we're tempted to do? We're like, thank goodness. And, you know, I could just watch TV. You know?
Jeffrey Heine:We just we don't have to do anything. We can just sit because God declared it's gonna happen. But that's not how you see God's covenant people react or respond when God gives them a promise. They actually get to work in confidence that they could bring that about. So the first thing Noah does after he gets the promise there will always be a harvest is he says he plants a garden.
Jeffrey Heine:He gets to work. So the Lord tells Paul, I've got people in this city. I've got people, my people in this city. And he goes, great. I'm gonna go and get there.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm gonna go and proclaim the gospel. It gave him the confidence he needed. And can I just say that we instinctively, whether you're, you know, wherever you land on predestination, I believe every Christian instinctively believes this when we pray? And we instinctively believe this when we pray. So, let's pull up that coworker again that doesn't know the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:Let's say you were praying for that coworker. I have never in all my years of meeting with people to pray for the lost, have heard this prayer. Lord, I know this person is running away from you. Lord, I know this person is making terrible decisions. So I ask right now, that you grant them their free will.
Jeffrey Heine:I have never heard that prayer. If you pray that, talk to me afterwards. We we need to do some corrective things, alright? This is how we pray. When we see, you know, we pray for that lost person who's making terrible decisions and running away from the Lord, we say, God, save them.
Jeffrey Heine:God change their heart. God take away their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. God, override their will. Do whatever it takes to bring them to yourself. Never do you say, Lord, the best thing is just to let us freely do what we wanna do.
Jeffrey Heine:All of our prayers are about God overriding that and all of our hopes are that God will override that and he will drag us to himself. And anybody who's prayed for the loss, they feel that and that is what they pray for. That's what Paul's unpacking here. Saying absolutely, our salvation all depends on whether God Him self is the one who drags us in. And this is something that He has planned before we were even born.
Jeffrey Heine:That's our confidence to go and share the gospel. When I came to believe this, my evangelism exploded, and in no way withered. It exploded. Okay. So that's predestination.
Jeffrey Heine:Alright? So, so let the emails begin. Let me give you my Hotmail account number. Alright? Just just just send it all in.
Jeffrey Heine:I I do want you to hear this. I hope that Redeemer is a safe place to talk about these things. We need to talk about these things. And this is a safe place. You will never hear me, like, beat you over the head with something like this.
Jeffrey Heine:Try to be confrontational or argue with you about this. That's that's not the posture we want here. And I hope, as you were reading through these words from Paul, that you understood that that's not Paul's posture at all. I mean, do you even get a hint that Paul is being confrontational here as he talks about predestination? He's not being confrontational.
Jeffrey Heine:He's being caught up in wonder. This is leading him to absolute worship. Once again, he can't get over the fact that God saved him. And so so so this is all as he keeps gushing to the praise of his glorious grace, to the praise of his glorious grace. I did nothing.
Jeffrey Heine:God did everything. And I pray that, as a church, we never get over that as well. It's the heart of the gospel here. Let's pray that God writes these things on our hearts. Pray with me.
Jeffrey Heine:Lord, I pray that your word would do its work and it would humble us And that it would lead us to Jesus. Lord, as we just hold this doctrine in front of us, it's not a doctrine, it's just something that shows us about Your love. Before we could even do anything wrong or screw it up, you chose to love us. And we give you thanks, and we give you praise. And I pray now that as we hold this before us, we would be enabled to walk a life of holiness blameless before you.
Jeffrey Heine:That we'd be humbled, so that we might live a life of worship. All for the glory of Jesus, to the praise of his glorious grace. In His name we pray, amen.
