Here are our scripture lessons, from Deuteronomy chapter six. Here, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets on your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. And when the Lord your God brings you into the land, that He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards, and olive trees that you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take care, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the Lord, your God, you shall fear. Him, you shall serve, and by His name, you shall swear. And from Psalm 78, give ear to my people, to my teaching, and climb your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter dark sayings from old, things that we have heard and known that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from our children, but tell them to the coming generation, the glorious deeds of the Lord, and His might and the wonders that He has done. He has established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded to our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and rise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments, and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God. And then from Ephesians 6, children, obey your parents and the Lord for it is right, honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land. Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in discipline. Now we will... Thank you for all of you who have been and are praying for Sarah and me. We're very grateful for that, and I love these times of prayer, whether we're sending off the Czech team or us today, we prayed over Sarah and me. I don't know, one of those sweet times of fellowship for me, I appreciate that. If you have your Bibles, you may want to put a finger at Deuteronomy chapter 6, and one at Psalm 78, as those will be the primary places we're looking at this morning. Kind of as a heads up as to where we'll be going. Fred will be preaching in the Psalms the next three weeks, Psalm 95 next week, and then 96, 97. That's the text he'll be preaching from. And then when I come back, I'll start a series in Isaiah. We'll be looking at the first six chapters between now and Easter. The time in February of March, you know, building up to the Easter is the Lenten season, or historically, is treated that way by the church. And it's usually a time of soul searching, of seeking God, of making true repentance in such. And Isaiah 1 through 6 will be great for that. The Lord willing, as we look at it, it'll be a time where we can be honest with ourselves. And with such confidence in the gospel that we're good with God, showing us stuff in our lives that we want to repent. And with the idea that we celebrate every week the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and as we build toward the Easter celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we're just all the more aware of his mercy and grace toward us. That's really the goal, that we see his greatness, his beauty, his majesty, his holiness, and his compassion and his mercy, and just have that sense of awe at the fact that he loves us, that he redeems us, that he is working in our lives for good purposes. So that's kind of where we'll be going. Where we've been in the last few weeks, December 30th, I preached on redeeming the time and how to make the best use of our time. We talked about the fact that to do that, you really need to have a clear understanding of what the scriptures would give us as priorities, what's most important, and second most important, that sort of thing. Kind of been keeping with that. I've been doing these little topical sermons in the month of January, and we talked about time and God's word, and we talked about prayer, as ways we connect with God, critical for developing our relationship to God personally, but also in the greater scheme of things, critical to knowing how to best glorify God in our lives and our community as a congregation, and such. A word in prayer is important. To move from there to parenting, I am skipping a couple of priorities in between, and I acknowledge that marriage is something, you know, if we went from chief priority being God, the next one would be family, and I'd say the marriage relationship, and then the parents' relationship to the kids, or maybe as you grow up, maybe your siblings or your parents are different aspects, but certainly in the nucleus where there's kids at home, I'd say the relationship between the mom and dad, the husband and wife, would take precedence. But I wanted to preach on parenting, so I just skipped a few priorities, and I hope you don't mind. I want to say a couple of things before I start. First of all, if you're done with the child bearing years and child rearing years, and whether you're close to your grandkids, or that part's done or not, I want to just encourage you to either pray for me while I'm preaching or say, I want to know this stuff. I want to be an encouragement to my children who are parenting, or those in my life that are parenting, those in the congregation, and support and help them in that. If you're somewhere along in the parenting process, I know it's real different to be a parent of an infant to an adult child, and you'll have to think about that as I preach. And if you're here as someone who doesn't have children yet, young, and married, or single, I want to say, you're my main target today, and I apologize for everyone who's not in that category that you're not the main target. I think it's a blessing to you. It's dealing with God's Word, but singles and young married couples. This stuff, I think, is just critical. I think it's an important aspect. I've been planning on preaching on this for months, but wouldn't you know, as luck would have it as a lucky Calvinist, this week on NPR in their morning edition, they've been doing a series on those who have in a sense lost their religion. The Monday, they called them the nuns. If you do a Gallup poll and they ask for your religious preference, you check the box that says none. And according to their research, this compromises atheists and agnostics, as well as those who would just say nothing in particular, kind of a secular mindset. The couple of things that were interesting about it, first, they showed this graph, I looked it up on the webpage, they didn't show the graph on the radio. As far as I know, I'm still in touch with reality most of the time. Anyway, on the webpage, they had this graph back in 1950, it was like 2% of the population checked that box, none, no religious preference, no religion at all. That was 1950, and 60 was about the same, about 2%. But in 2010, it was 18%. It's like right at 20% right now. And you say, well, 20%, that's not that much, but it's a huge jump in 50, 60 years. And especially on the graph, it's amazing, because you can see those, you know, like the 70s, all sorts of crazy stuff being taught in the schools, and in our culture, and there's this change, and in our perception of God change. And they said where we are today, with this close to 20% of people who say, I have no religion, I have no religious preference. Two thirds of those are 30 years or younger. And there's some sort of disconnect, something happened in that parenting, that I think a lot of people just missed it. And so if you are a parent of 20s or 30s, some things in your kids have aren't walking with the Lord if they would check that non-passage. I'm not preaching against you. I'm not mentioning this as blame or anything like that. I know God is big and reasons, or multitude as to why we are where we are spiritually. But it does underscore, I think, the critical nature of parenting. And so I wanted to give kind of just a one shot sermon on that. I wanted to make a little handout back there that has some resources available to you. They've just put out, republished a book by JC Ryle, a fellow who is no longer with us, but wrote excellent work. And there's other books like Everyday Talk and Shepherding a Child's Heart, and some other things on that paper that you can get Lord willing still on the back table for resources. So one shot, there's no way I can say it all, but I think hopefully I'll say stuff that's important. And again, especially for the singles, and all the way from those who have no children, but hope to, to those who have toddlers and such, you really are my heart's desire in reaching today and parenting in general is fine. As we look at the verses that were read earlier in the service, I want to ask the text three questions. And as we look at the text and ask the text three questions, I want to ask you to ask yourself these questions as well, as it relates to parenting. Here's the first question. What are your goals? What are your goals? What what the scripture say are our goals? I picked these three texts. They're kind of like classic texts that talk about, well, not necessarily just parenting, but about some of the high priority and as it relates to parenting. And let me give you just two goals. I realize you can have lots of goals, whether it's about how they do with sports or jobs or various aspects. But let me give you two goals that you want to make sure you have when it comes to parenting. Here's the first one. We should have as a goal that our children know the Lord personally and experientially. And I can't explain today all that I mean by that statement, but if you, if you do write notes, I know that there's no fill in the blanks on that, but it's worthy of remembering. One good goal that our children know the Lord personally and experientially, that they have a personal relationship with them. It's not enough to know about the Lord. You're not, in parenting, it's not enough to just give them good information about God. This is what he's like in such. The goal in parenting, one of the goals, one of the teeth goals in parenting, is that the children know the Lord personally. Experientially, that they are relating to them on a regular part in their lives. We get this from Deuteronomy 6, verse 5, the great commandment, Jesus told us, this is the first and foremost commandment. All the other laws hang on this in the second, which is, love your neighbor as yourself. But here it is. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And I just, I just underscored that word with all your heart. He goes into parenting pretty soon, doesn't he? And you shall teach these things diligently to your children and such. That first goal, that we win the child's heart to the Lord, that from the heart the child knows the Lord, it's a great, well, it gets a danger in a minute. It's a great importance that we seek our child's heart to know the Lord. That they have this personal relationship with them. And in that context of them, really knowing him, really having this relationship with them where they love him, that they demonstrate that by keeping his commandments. In other words, we don't want them to just conform to a set of rules. We want them to love God so much that they want to keep his commandments. That's what the text really calls us to do. After it says, love God with all your heart, so might, verse 6, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. Love the Lord with all your heart, and these commands shall be on your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children, et cetera. Now, I want to say if you hear that, and you hear in your little like a legalism-rate art goes up, that's probably a good thing. I'm saying you need to teach your children to love God and to keep his commandments, and it's like, wait a second, is there a legalism here? Let me just say what I'm trying to say, I don't mean as a legalism. Legalism would be if you made a bunch of your own rules and said, now you can keep God's rules by keeping this big list of rules, that'd be legalism, and I'm not saying to do that. I would say fewer the better, especially in those younger years, but we'll talk more about that now. But the commandments that God has given us, that's not legalism. If you try and teach your child, not try, most people don't try and teach this, it just happens. But if you teach your child in order to be loved by God, you must keep these commandments. I will love you if you keep these commandments with the implication I don't love you if you don't keep these commandments. That might be a legalism too. It's certainly not parenting by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ or modeling the way God Himself loves us. He loves us, He saves us just like He did in Deuteronomy. In the Old Testament, Moses is going over these things and he starts with, remember, God saved you out of Egypt. You were slaves there, and by His mercy and grace He saved you, and now that you have a relationship with God, so the parenting starts with, love Him, know that He saved you, know that He redeemed you. See how much He loves you in Christ Jesus, that He would send His Son to die for you. See how He calls you to Himself. Read as you study the Scriptures and see that they have this idea of, oh, that they would obey, that I may bless. That's the tenor of the Scripture. So we call for this obedience, and by the way, this is something that Jesus Himself would teach. In John 14, verse 21, He says, you ever has my commandments and keeps them? He it is who loves me. In verses 23 and 4, He says, if anyone loves me, He will keep my word, and my Father will love Him, and we will come to Him and make our home with Him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine, but my Father who sent me. That idea that, excuse me, we express our love and keeping us commandments. It comes from the idea that we trust Him, which is faith, right? We trust Him, and that's what we want to develop in the lives of our children. God gives us that they know Him, that they trust Him, and because of that, they want to keep us commandments. They want to show their love that way, trusting, serving, obeying, living in the fear of the Lord. That's what the Scriptures would call us to. The second command, and this is very, I'm sorry, second goal I'd like to suggest, and this is very practical, and I think it makes sense, but I can also show it from the text, and that is, our second goal is that our children grow into mature adulthood, right? Like I said, oh, yes, and we're paying you to come up with this kind of stuff. It sounds obvious, doesn't it? The text teaches it, by the way. You pay me to know the Greek, and one of the verses, the Ephesians 64, fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up. Bring them up, has the idea of nourishing to maturity. That's what Thayer's lexicon says, and so really, this bringing our children to maturity, it's a goal that we ought to know and write down. When we say, well, everybody knows that, and we don't write it down, we don't think about it, we don't plan it. In fact, it can come into our heads, oh, I just want my children to have as long of a childhood as possible, and then like when they're 30 years old, and living in the basement, we say, well, maybe this is a little too long. It's okay to have that as a goal, that you're bringing them to adulthood, as it pertains to adults, or to excuse me, teenagers, and trying to prepare them for adulthood. It's just very simple things. It's very practical stuff. How to manage a checkbook. How to drink responsibly. If you believe that the Christians have the liberty to drink a beer, a glass of wine, or whatever, let me just ask you the question. I've asked it to you before, or put it in these similar words anyway. Do you want to teach your children how to drink socially, or would you rather than just learn that at college? In fact, at the teenage level, as they're ready to launch into adulthood, the more freedom you can give them to try things, to learn, to spread their wings, so that you're there to debrief how to go. You see what I mean? I mean, if this is a goal, it's nice to start young, so that they're thinking about this stuff before their teenage years. Okay, so there's this idea that our children grow to maturity, and I think of two aspects. One is that they're just responsible, that they learn to be responsible. They're not passive in life. They're active. They know how to take responsibility for their actions. They know how to be responsible with the things of God, in the community of God, and in the world. They're able to take initiative when they should, to not get involved when they shouldn't. These are just a part of growing them and preparing them for maturity. It's important goals. By the way, on that handout, we as a church have kind of hammered out a draft statement, if you will, on what spiritual maturity looks like, and we've given it seven parts. I love the fact that seven is the perfect number, so it's got to be a good definition. That's a joke, just in case you didn't know. But it's on the handout there, and it may help you as you're thinking about, how do I grow toward maturity, and how do I help my children, or the children God will give me grow to maturity? That may be a good resource for you. The second question, I think, is important to ask, is what are the dangers, right? And I know all three verses talk about what the dangers are. For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verse 12, we're told, then, take care, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land or you jumped out of the house of slavery. Take care lest you forget. Psalm 78 in verse 7 says something very similar, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments. There's this danger that children will forget, and it doesn't mean like, oh, yeah, God, how could I forget? Like you would with your time tables, right? Six times nine, six times nine. I don't remember. I forget what the answer to that is. Oh, thank you. Is there a compromise? No. We may forget that way, but that's not the forget the Lord he's talking about. He's talking about the forget the Lord that, well, God's just not that important. I know about him. I remember he's there, but he doesn't really have any substance to my life. He doesn't make a difference to me. Whatever. That's kind of forgetting that he's talking about. Not that he's totally out of mind, but that he's in mind and indifferent and maybe moved towards all the way from, from, yeah, yeah, he's important when I get married and have children to raise and needs him help and raising them. I'll go to church then. That kind of thinking. It's like, no! That's forgetting the Lord. That's forgetting what he says. That's forgetting his commandments. That's forgetting his works and how he calls us to himself, to know him, and to love him, and to serve him. And that's a danger in parenting. Another danger is found in verse, excuse me, Psalm 78, verse 8, and it's kind of breaking in it says, and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God, or it's found also in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4, fathers do not provoke your children to anger. It's another danger. And I would sum up the dangers that these verses are talking about this way. The sins of the fathers, right? Don't be like our fathers who were stubborn and rebellious and such. The sins of the culture, the generation, right? The whole generation. It wasn't just that it happened right here or a little piece. The generation was seen as corrupt as rebellion, as rebellious and stubborn and such. And then this idea of provoking a child to anger. Interesting concept is provoking a child to anger. When a child is young, they are developing cognitively and physically and all these things are going on. And I'm not saying every time your child is angry, I don't think the text is saying, every time your child is angry, it's because you've provoked them when you've just told them to clean their room or wash their hands for dinner or this sort of thing. But just because it doesn't mean it's not your fault every time they get angry, he is saying, hey, you know what, fathers? It's easy for you to be so heavy-handed to be this way or that way and provoke your children to anger and to frustrate their lives. And a lot of the people, a lot of people who, I say this as a counselor, not as a statistician, okay? So from my experience it seems like a lot of people who turn away from the church, who hate the church and think it's full of hypocrites and such. Often in that parental relationship, they're just mad. They're mad at their parents. They were hurt. And that may have been added into by the church culture and a real legalism and some other problems. But these are the kind of the dangers we face in parenting. Just think about some of these. The sins of the fathers. I'll give you a very silly example of one as it relates to education. Let me preface this by saying, we're very careful it's out there not to say you should homeschool or you should Christian school or you should public school. We're very careful to say you should choose and work with that system and you're responsible before God to parent and bring up your children whichever way you choose. But in my particular family, our kids went to a couple of preschool years in Christian school and then homeschool for like seven years. And then off to Christian high school, maybe late junior high or something, and then high school into the public schools. And we said joke around and say, our children learned to cuss when they went to the Christian school, right? Because they had a sheltered life before then. And then they learned the rest of the cuss words at the public school kind of thing. And the truth is though, and I don't mean this as bragging or anything, just as reality, they learned their first curse words from their father. They heard their first words from me. There's a danger in our parenting. They see us. They watch us. They hear us. They are impacted by our sins. And it can lead to the forgetting of the Lord. It can lead to stubborn and rebellious generation and so on. In fact, a couple years ago, I started to write a little booklet on parenting and it was in very sarcastic how to destroy the faith of your children or how to ensure that your children don't have a genuine faith. I'm sorry, that's the way I am, but I didn't put it on the back table. At least I was smart enough not to give you this, but all the things not to do, things that do destroy the children. And I'll just bring them up as it can relate to the sins of the parents or of the culture, especially even in the life of the church. We can think that if we teach our children, or have our children learn to memorize Bible verses, we're good, right? And if we have them do it in Sunday school, or children's church, or a Christian school, or what others, or whatever the thing is, if they're learning to memorize the scriptures, then we feel like, okay, well, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. But if we teach our children to memorize scripture, but they never see us in the scriptures, if we don't know what the scriptures teach, what we're teaching them is, look, it's important to be religious, but you don't have to take it seriously. It's not really important. And they learn that lesson. Another danger, I think, in parenting, that happens too easily, is we address the outward behavior in not the heart. It's a huge danger. It leads the kids astray. When we do this, God's grace is greater. Praise God. Praise God for His grace. I say that as a parent, and as one who's saved. Praise God for His grace. But when we only correct the outward behavior, when we require outward conformity, rather than an inward heart for God, we are only exerting our power while we have it. When they move out of the house, they won't necessarily love Him. They will know about Him. They will know what the standards are, but from a skewed point of view. If you just go through the passages I've read this morning, and look at how they call to reach the heart, to speak to the child's heart, you've got to be able to say that, God, in his parenting of us, and in his calling us as parents, he goes for our heart. And he tells us in a million different ways through the scriptures that he's totally unsatisfied with the superficial relationship with us. And if we promote that with our kids, we're undermining a genuine faith in them. I'll give you just a couple examples of how we might do this. Little Timmy and Sally are having a fight, it comes at an awkward time. And so we say, okay, that does it. I've told you guys not to fight. You're both in trouble. Just go to your room. And you go back to what you're doing and say, oh, I forgot. A couple hours later, you go and say, now I hope you learned your lesson or whatever. And it's done. And when they come back, you make sure their heads are low. And now say, you're sorry, I'm sorry, okay. Now, don't do that anymore. And you're done with parenting. You never reach their heart. You've exerted your power and authority, but you have not done so with the life of Christ toward them. And they'll fill this. They'll fill this. So a way you might reach the heart with these two children is to say, well, what happened? Well, he started it. Okay, how did he start it? Well, maybe he did start it. But it's worth knowing why did he start it? Was there some legitimate desire? Was there something right about what he wanted? Wouldn't God be apparent? Talk about, okay, wouldn't we want something and it's legitimate? What are some legitimate ways we go about getting that? And so that we don't sin against God, but honor him in his word. It takes a lot longer than shut up and quit acting up. But you reach their heart. And when you talk to the offended one, you know, if you just punish them equally, then how unjust is that? The scriptures would have nothing to do with that. As far as justice, you know, you can talk and say, well, what did he do? Why did he do that? Was that right? No. It wasn't. Now, what does forgiveness look like? And is it right to hit him back or call him names when he did that? No, it's not. Is it God would tell us not to do that? And you bring the gospel into it. It takes a lot longer. But you're winning their heart. Otherwise, the danger is, you're just using conformity for a short period of time. I'll move on. Number three, how do you teach them? How do you teach them? Let me give you just one more verse. Proverbs 236 says, My son, give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways. My son, my daughter, my children. Give me your heart. That's precious. You've got to be careful with what you do with it. You don't want to be the one making it hard, or stubborn, or bitter, or resentful. You're calling on them to trust you, and you're calling on them to learn from your ways that your eyes observe my ways. How do you parent? Let me just give you two important principles. Obviously more, but two for today. One is talking. One of the books, by the way, is called Everyday Talk. The passage talked about this, Deuteronomy 6, 7, Teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lay down, and when you rise up, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. You're saying, talk a lot. Talk when you get up in the morning, talk when you go to bed at night. Talk when you're going about your business in the day. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. You get good at it. You can tell your children in their high school years. You remember lecture 12? Okay, maybe not, but you want to talk to them. You want to share your own heart, your own life. You want to listen and let them talk, and learn how to draw them out. Some that's hard to keep from talking and others would never say a word. How do you teach them self-control? How do you prepare them for adulthood? How do you prepare them for the kind of maturity where they can give and receive? Talk. Tell stories. Do you brief the day? Eat a meal together, and talk about what you did for the day. It takes time. It's a priority. Think about it. Modeling. Let your eyes observe my ways. This is also very much in the Deuteronomy passages. And these commands, which I command you, will be on your heart. You'll teach them diligently to your children. Talk about them all the time. Who we just said. And you'll bind them as signs on your hands, and front limits before your eyes, and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and gates. In other words, there's a life that backs it up. They see that you love God. They see that you love God, and they model that. They see you're love for the scriptures. They see your submission to the scriptures. They see what obedience looks like by the way you obey God. You model for them faith. You model for them how they're supposed to live. There's one of the resources I suggest as a book by the guy named Doug Wilson. And he's also got some stuff online, and I've put some references there. I give him a guarded recommendation. He's a great guy when he's on. He's really good. He would love my how to destroy your children's faith. The sarcasm is a strong point with him. He usually uses it well, but just forewarned. He's not everyone's cup of tea, but he says some good stuff in that book, Father Hunger. And in one of the chapters he talks about the mechanics. And he mentions various things that are helpful. Let me just suggest a couple of them. Love Jesus Christ and express this in worship. If you want to model to your children, what it means to know the Lord personally and experientially, let them see that in you. In your private life. In your community life. In your corporate church community life. Lead them to Christ. It works much better than driving them to Christ. Love your wife. If you're a guy, love your wife. If you're a guy, love your husband. You give your child something precious. If you teach them how Christ and the church are to live together in unity. In fact, in discipline, discipline is one, not as two. The model, a love relationship, that they can emulate in their adulthood. I'm going to stop there. Let me move to this fourth point. This fourth point is in a question. It's just kind of follow a way to get the gospel and trust the better parent. Trust the better parent. God revealed Himself to us His Father. In fact, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There's something of that family relationship. Something of that parenting relationship. We can learn a lot about parenting. From God, in fact, we desperately need this. If you're here, I want to say this, if you're here and your children are grown and such, well, it doesn't matter. If you're anywhere in the parenting thing, you probably took some blows today. I didn't mean to beat up on you, but you may feel that anyway. Praise God for His mercy and grace. I don't speak to shame you or to point out your weaknesses. In any other way than to say, go to Jesus with it. He's the perfect Son and He leads us to the perfect Father where there is forgiveness. And God's mercy and grace is far greater than your sins and failures. Praise God for that. Praise God for that. There would be no salvation if it was salvation by good parenting. Even for us or for the kids, right? I mean, yes. But as you go to the Father, the better parent who we read this, as a Father shows compassion on His children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. And He talks about how that Son talks about how God does all about us and He leads us accordingly. We will find mercy and grace to stab our wounds and embarrassment and shame and failures and stuff in the gospel. We will also see the perfect model. He models for us what parenting is like. And it's as we look at Him that we can actually love Him and begin to trust Him and keep His commandments and serve Him well. Not to earn a salvation, but because He's already redeemed us. All of you who have put your faith in Christ, the God sent Christ to die for your sins. He saved you by His mercy and grace. And He reveals Himself to you that you may see His beauty, marvel at His majesty, love Him for who He is. And want to give Him cheerful obedience right away and without talking back. That's great. Father, we thank you that you have not given us a spirit of slavery leading to fear, but that you have given us a spirit of adoption by which we cry of the Father. And thank you, O Holy Spirit, that you assure us that God loves us and delights in us and accepts us and is pleased with us and has done everything necessary that we might know Him and one day see Him exactly how He is having been transformed to reflect that image without sin. You are kind and good and merciful. O may we find mercy and grace forgiveness of sins and the kind of steadfast love that would be an accurate reflection and imitation of your beauty and majesty. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.