Also, similarly, this Sunday, our Easter Sunday service, there will be special music at 10.30. If you'd like to arrive for our service a little earlier than the normal 10.55 time, at 10.30 we'll have special Easter music so that it'll help us have a whole 30 minutes prepare to worship the Lord together. Also, in the connector, there are some Easter cakes that are available for delivery to our shut-ins and to those who cannot always worship with us. So please stop by and pick up a cake or two to deliver to our members and it'll be just a great service to them. And then finally, prepare all for a couple of weeks away. But April 6th is the clean and green. And we will be meeting together at 9 o'clock in the morning. There'll be more details later about that. But just gathering together to help clean up our city, a Saturday, April 6th. And that'll be trash pickup, graffiti removal. They see picking up litter and trash around our neighborhoods. And so, for more information, just check the announcements in the coming weeks. So now let's prepare our hearts for worship. 2,000 opportunity to renew our hope and our coming Savior. Into your hand, I commit my Spirit. You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God. I will rest in the Lord. I will rejoice and be glad in your stead, that's love. Because you have seen my Christian. You have known the distress of my soul. Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit. We come before you this morning on this Palm Sunday. Historically, the people of God joined their voices together and cry out for our Savior to come. And so, Lord, we renew our hope in you. We transfer our trust from the idols of the week to our one true living God. We love you, Lord. And we come to offer this morning a prayer of adoration. You are a great God, our Creator, our sustainer, our Redeemer. We come to worship you. Holy Spirit help us, help us to see Christ and to worship Him. And we pray this, a prayer of adoration as our morning prayer in the name of Jesus. Amen. Specifically, to this time in Christ's life, when Christ entered Jerusalem to the cries of the people. And then just a few short days thereafter was crucified. And so, we speak plainly and confidently of what we believe, the work of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit to be. But not only their work, we place our faith in them, not only for what they do, but for who they are. They are our great God. And so, Christian, I ask you, what do you believe? Even God the Father of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ is only Son and out of order. Who was conceived by the Holy West, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered at your Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried. He ascended it into hell. The third day, He arose again from the dead. He ascended it into heaven, and it stood on the right hand without the Father all night. From May to your Pontius Church, the Holy King, the dead. I believe in the Holy West, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. You may be seated. Our confession of sin is taken from Psalm 32. And it begins with a word that's actually in the plural in the original language, the Hebrew. It's blessed, blessed, blessed. Recently, while we were in Africa, we gave the children different gifts, or sometimes we would feed them food. And they would say, thank you, thank you, thank you. We come to the Lord this morning, and you think of the emotional collision that's taking place within us right now. The psalmist begins by saying, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven. This idea of, of thank you, thank you, thank you. My life is so rich because of your forgiveness. So I would invite us to wholeheartedly confess our sin to the Lord knowing that he forgives his people. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. That is by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of our sin. Take these moments and confess your sin, acknowledge your sin before the Lord. Heavenly Father, you say, if we confess our sins that you are faithful and just, forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, Lord, thank you for your forgiveness. Thank you for your mercy. Thank you for providing your son Jesus for us, so that we could be forgiven our iniquity, and so our sins would be covered. All of our in righteousness has been completely cleansed by your redeeming work. What a gracious God who gives us his son and his righteousness. So now it is our privilege to pray as your son Jesus taught us to pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, I will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, rise the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen. Let us take a moment to greet one another. Let us go to our Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, this morning we pray for your church. Father, there are many here today who come longing to hear of your grace, but struggling throughout the week. Many here who are overwhelmed by their present circumstances. Many here who feel that you are distant or that you have forgotten them. Father, through your Holy Spirit, help us know that you love us. Help us know that you cherish us as your children, that you are not distant or indifferent to us. Lord, give us your peace that surpasses all understanding. Remind us of your goodness and help us believe that we are blessed. Father, here are prayers for healing of sickness, for restoration, for those that are close to us. Lord, heal our friends, heal our family members of their grief and of their pain. Lord, help us to be there for others, to grieve and mourn with others. Father, heal us, heal our brokenness, our pain, our scars. Lord, heal those who cannot be here because they are sick. Lord, be with those who, though feeling poor, came here today. Lord, be with them and heal them and give them comfort. Lord, help those who are hurting, who are depressed, who are struggling to feel good about themselves, Lord. Lord, there are many here today who need to see a pastor, a counselor, a doctor. Through your Holy Spirit, move them to get help, move them to open themselves up to others. Lord, find help for those who need it. Lord, help us be a blessing to others. Let us be a church that celebrates with each other and one that also mourns with each other. I pray that you would continue to strengthen the community of this church. Lord, I pray for those especially who feel lonely this morning, lonely because they recently lost a loved one, lonely because they're single, lonely in their marriage, lonely in their family, Lord. Father, heal our loneliness, give us true and honest friends. Help us, help this church to be a home to the lonely. Father, I pray for those who do not know you, who do not believe in you that are here today. Whether they tired of this fallen world and it's demands on them and their failings, whether they come here today looking for answers as willing worshipers. Whether they are only here today because of their children or because someone asked them to be. Whether they're here because their parents made them get out of bed. Whether they're just here out of curiosity, Lord, you've brought them here for a reason. I pray that you would transform their hearts through your Holy Spirit, that the gospel will grab hold of them and never let go. Lord, I also pray for those of us in here who are Christians that you would continue your sanctifying work, that we would not become self-righteous boasting of our works, that we would not despair of our failings. Father, remind us of the beauty of your love, show us the depth of your grace, so that we just not reflect upon your cross, not just lean upon it from time to time, Lord, but enable us through your Holy Spirit to cling to your cross, to cling to the gospel and to the hope of the resurrection in this fallen world. Lord, let us be more obsessed with pointing people to your grace than pointing people to our accomplishments. Lord, give us a passion for the lost. Lord, give us a love for your kingdom which we celebrate today on Palm Sunday, your kingship. Lord, help us put off our own lonely school-sized kingdoms and live for your kingdom. Father, we pray that we continue to restore and redeem your world. Lord, we pray for healing and peace around the world. We pray for the poor. Lord, I pray for an end to human trafficking and end of prostitution, an end to pornography and all other exploitive practices. Father, I pray, help this church bring an end to exploitation in Chattanooga and around the world. Lord, restore your world and give your church a passion for the poor and the marginalized and the exploited. Lord, everyone in here has addictions and idols. Everyone in here is worshiping something other than you, whether it be approval of others, money, wealth, politics, materialism, our own body image, control. Lord, help us see that in you we are a new person and that these addictions are not more powerful than your grace and your Holy Spirit. Father, help us to be able to remove the idols from our life. Help us see the lives of sin. Lord, help us see that sin promises to bring us satisfaction, to make us happy, to comfort us, but that it only destroys us, destroys our relationships in our community. It diminishes our joy. Father, help us to resist temptation. Father, help us to enjoy the good things of this world and the common grace of our lives, but not worship them. Help us worship the Creator and not created things. Father, I pray for the church leaders, the elders, the deacons, church staff, all those who volunteer and serve in this church. I pray that you would protect them from the evil one. Take away their doubts, continue to give them a vision for the kingdom. Father, I pray for the pastors at first praise. I pray that you would protect them, encourage them, protect their families from the evil one. Help us be an encouragement to them as they have been to us. Help us love them as they have loved us. Father, thank you for the gift of prayer. Father, we worship and live for so many things that we cannot pray to, and that even if we could pray to them, they could do nothing, they did not create the world, they are not in control. Only you are, and you love us perfectly. Only you know what is best for us. Thank you for being such a loving Heavenly Father. Please give us the faith to pray to you more and continuously. And all God's people said. Amen. Scripture reading, read for us at a Deuteronomy, chapter 12, verses 29 to 32. Deuteronomy 12, verses 29 to 32. To dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land. Take care, they insinere to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their God's saying. How do these nations serve their God's? That I may also do the same. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates, they have done for their God's. For they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their God's. Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it nor take away from it. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Thank you. The Lord is warning His people about the dangers of a new environment. Much like a parent or a grandparent would take their child and say, I know you're headed off to university soon. Or I know you're moving with your family to a new city. And we've warned them. We tell them of the dangers. We say, look, I know at college the weekend starts on Thursdays. Or I know in college you might think your curfew is be home by breakfast. We have a different way of looking at this. We want to warn you as to the dangers that are before you. And the people of God are about to enter into their promised land. This is the fulfillment of many, many years of struggling. They've changed locations. They've moved from being slaves to being free people. That's quite a transition. And now they're about to enter into the promised land. And the Lord seeks to warn them to alert them to what's coming. To bring to their attention the dangers of following false gods. In 1831 at the age of 25, a Lexi detoked for a left France and came to America. His original mission was to take a look at the American prison system. And in fact, since then, France based its prison system on America's. But when to took the tour to America and he went coast to coast by the way, he noticed something striking. He noticed that the presence of churches and the presence of Christianity. He noticed that the church held the country to a high moral standard. And that the church served the poor. The church did things like we're going to do on April 6th when we do our clean and green. We're going to take care of this place. It's ours. We're not going to let other people take it away from us. We're not going to allow other people to litter it with their junk simply because they don't value creation the way we value our creator who made creation. And so, as a Lexi went through, he noticed something very interesting. He said this, there's a strange melancholy that haunts the inhabitants of America in the midst of abundance. So, in the midst of abundance, a Lexi noticed that Americans had this strange melancholy over them. I believe, of course, that like most Americans, they had bought into the idea that they could gain happiness through possessions and prosperity. Detokeful said the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the human heart. In her recent memoir, Easter Everywhere, Darcy Stanky recounts how she, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, left her Christian profession. She moved to New York City and entered a life of club hopping and sexual obsession. She wrote several novels. She continued, however, to be extremely restless and unfulfilled. And in the middle of the book, she quotes from Simon Wheel, a summarizing main issue in her life. She says this. One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God, one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of divinity in them. This sermon is about idolatry. This sermon is a warning from God's word from idolatry. Tim Keller in his book, Counterfeit Gods, asks, what is the cause of this strange melancholy that permeates our society, even during boom times of frenetic activity, which turns to outright despair when prosperity diminishes? Datoqueville says that this strange melancholy comes from taking some incomplete joy of this world and building your entire life on it. So what is an idol? An idol is something, someone, anything upon which we place ultimate hope. Idolatry is placing our love, a misdirected love, if you will, onto something or someone other than God himself. As I prepared for this sermon, I came under great conviction of numerous idols in my own heart. One area of idolatry that I found very clear was I had placed trust in our political system. I had placed trust in the democratic process found within our republic. I realized that, and you can look at this either way, you can either say, well, we have a president and leaders of our country and our local government. And I've put too much hope in them, or you might look at it and say, I really haven't placed much hope in them at all because I'm extremely disappointed on who they are as people and how they're trying to lead our country. I've recognized this week that I've placed too much hope in politics and politicians, and I've had the repent of that. You know, the government cannot do what God can do. Only God can provide for his people. The government cannot do what the church can do. Only the church can bring a living hope to the world. Only the church can serve the poor in a meaningful way, in a way that doesn't cripple the poor and that they walk around with their hands out for the rest of their life, but in a way that enables the poor to worship the one and true living God and to begin to live a new life. And so this definition of idolatry was more than a definition for me. It broke through to me because I realized that I was breaking the second commandment. I had placed an idol before me. I was placing trust in something or someone other than the Lord. I wanted to give us a few characteristics of idols because as I thought about it, I thought, how did this happen? Here's a couple of things I've learned about idols. Idols hide the true cost from their victims. They don't let you know everything you're getting into when you start to get into placing your trust in these idols. And by placing trust in anything, anyone other than the Lord, I found that they produce an incomplete joy in me. There's this strange melancholy in my life when I'm trusting in someone or something other than the Lord. Idols don't have any power in and of themselves. They borrow our power. An idol doesn't have power just like a con man doesn't have money. But a con man's a confidence man. Somebody who seeks to gain your confidence, they gain your confidence and then you give them your money or you give them your trust. And then they don't provide for you what they promised. They steal your money. They take your power. You've put your hope on something that's a lie. It's not going to deliver. Idols make promises to the victim that they cannot keep. But the victim is so lonely or so empty or so confused that they're willing to put their trust in something. That's really not an eternal truth. It's a temporal moment that produces an incomplete joy. God tells his people that they're going into a land and they need to be very careful because the God of prosperity may capture them and producing them a melancholy. A strange melancholy that numbs the senses and dumbs down the thinking and produces within them an incomplete joy. The worship of something or someone other than the Lord God himself. The text says in verse 30 that you're not to be ensnared. The word ensnared means to entrap. It's actually a hunting term or a fishing term where you trick something into your control. You know a lot of times when people fish they hide the hook within the bait. And so when the fish sees the bait they simply think it's a food source. And when they come toward the food source and they begin to ingest it it's too late. You set the hook. You're ensnared. You're captured. Some people throw nets for fish. They're called casting nets. And you go to the edge of the boat or the edge of the dock or the edge of the shore and you fire your casting net. And it comes down and surrounds the fish. And before the fish realizes that it's under the net you pull the line and the weights come together at the bottom and you have them trapped. That's how idols work. And God is telling his people do not be captured by the God of prosperity. Do not allow materialism and possessions to so control your heart that you pursue them with everything you have because they will produce an incomplete joy a strange melancholy will fall over you because you've lost the vibrant connection with the Lord Jesus Christ himself. You've lost the vibrant connection of following your God listen to the how the word of God says it Ecclesiastes 912. For man does not know his time like fish that are taken in an evil net and like birds that are caught in a snare so the children of man are snared at an evil time when it suddenly falls upon them. Deuteronomy 725. The carved images of their God shall burn with fire. You shall not covet the silver or the gold that is on them or take it for yourselves less you be ensnared by it for it is an abomination to the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 1230 take care that you not be ensnared to follow them Proverbs 1213. An evil man is ensnared by the transgression of his lips but the righteous escapes from trouble Proverbs 296. An evil man is ensnared in his transgression but a righteous man sings and rejoices. Deuteronomy 610-15. And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers to Abram, 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 sisters that you did not dig and vineyards and oil trees that you did not plant. You eat and you are full then take care unless you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery. Deuteronomy 8, you know I've been studying Deuteronomy for a long time now and it keeps saying the same thing over and over and over. And I've read to you multiple scriptures and I'm going to read you another one because the Holy Spirit in his wisdom felt it appropriate to stack the scriptures up that relate to this problem, this problem of the heart Deuteronomy 8. Take care unless you forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments and His rules and His statutes which I command you today, less when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and living them. And when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied then your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery. The Lord led us and His concern for us is that our wealth would lead us to idolatrous worship, that our wealth would lead us away from Him and that our wealth would ultimately lead us to a pursuit of prosperity and possessions which got us as individuals and as a nation. And that rather than being the people of God the Lord promises that he will remove us from the land the same way he removed the people who possessed it before the Canaanites. And if you know anything about the history of the Old Testament you know where the people of God went from here they heard this over and over and over what do they do they got into Canaan and they worshiped false gods and they worshiped prosperity and they got comfortable in their wealth and they turned their backs on the Lord they became like prostitutes. They began to take credit for what God had given them as if they had made it with their own hands apart from God's blessing and they turned their backs on the Lord and the Lord sent them out and they went into exile. They lost their nation. They lost their nation. Sometimes when I preach around America I have a sense of Alexi's words, a strange melancholy. We're awake but we're not urgent. We have a sense of God's presence but maybe more of a God whom we've crafted for ourselves. You know in that day the Palm Sunday today in the church calendar the people were worshiping Jesus they were crying out to Jesus. They were saying, Huzanna right they're crying here is the one who saves us but were they worshiping Jesus or did they want Jesus to do something for them? They weren't concerned with their sin. They weren't concerned with their idolatry. They were concerned with the political aspect of being under the Roman rule. So when they said Huzanna even quoting Old Testament scripture they were misappropriating it. They were misappropriating the scriptures. They were saying come get rid of the Romans so we can return to the kingdom of David where we ruled and we lived in the land of Melchandani. They wanted prosperity. They wanted freedom. There's nothing wrong with prosperity. God doesn't call his people to be unwelfy if he will but he warns them. He warns them and they don't listen. If there's one thing we learned from studying history is that we learn absolutely nothing from studying history.
We live in a wonderful land my brothers and sisters but we are an idolatrous people and when I say we the referent of that pronoun includes the church I must state strongly that idolatry is nothing less than an all out attack on the gospel. Idolatry is seeking to cause us to transfer our trust from the king Jesus, the king who entered in on that palm Sunday if you will to transfer our trust from him and to become an idolatrous people. I was in Guatemala a few years ago and I went to a wedding ceremony. I didn't know as a wedding ceremony. I climbed up on top of this hill. It was a Saturday afternoon. I got up to the top of the hill and there a man and a woman were kneeling down and there was a priest standing in front of him with a chicken. And he had the chicken and he walked around them and he shook the chicken around them like this and then he waved it around their heads like this and then he stepped back and he pulled the chicken's head off and he held the chicken and he did the same thing again with the blood around and I thought I'm watching a pagan ceremony. I mean, this is cultic pagan goddess worship. I don't care what kind of robe the guys wearing and I thought about that and I thought what are the gods of America. You know, I was so repulsed by that. I've never involved a chicken in any wedding ceremony. I've ever participated in. So over the years, I ask my foreign fringe, our world missionaries. I said, when you come to our country, what are our idols? I hear three all the time. Number one, your God is your stomach. You're surrounded by restaurants and grocery stores and in general, you eat way too much. Your God is your stomach. Secondly, your God is entertainment, expressed in sports and the worship centers that are built for those sports. Yesterday, I was wearing a hat and said cowboy stadium on it. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars spent to build cowboy stadium. Right or wrong, they were spent and people go and people worship there. They worship there. We worship entertainment. We worship our stomachs. Another thing that missionaries share with me that was quite striking is they said the chairs in your home are all oriented around the television. So if we were going to group our chairs, okay, let's gather them up. Let's get them here. Get everything set because we don't want to miss the game. We don't want to necessarily talk to each other because our chairs would be like that or my chair would be like that, choir. We focus our chairs around entertainment and distraction. Some people focus their chairs so they can speak to one another. But these are the comments of our visitors from other countries. I want to say a couple things about this. First of all, there will come a day. Jesus actually says night cometh. He says in John, but when night falls, when night falls, he doesn't say if night falls, he doesn't say if night comes, he says when. The very first word used in our text in Deuteronomy 1229 is when. It's not if it's when. Do you think the Lord knows the future? Do you think the Lord knew the life of these Israelites when they got into the promised land? Do you think the Lord knows about the future when night does come? What's going to happen when night comes? What's going to happen when the Lord Jesus Christ returns? First of all, there will be no opportunity for repentance. It's over. It's done. He's back. And it's done. There's no more repentance. You will not have the opportunity to say, oh my, I was going the wrong direction following this idol. I repent. It's too late. You're in the snare. You're under the net. Judgment. Secondly, there will be no distractions when the Lord returns. You won't have your little iPhone texting people. You won't go. You won't think, oh no, I sent her a text message 30 seconds ago and she hasn't responded. I wonder if that means we're going to break up. She doesn't like me anymore. No distractions. Doesn't matter how you arrange your chairs to face the television or not. When Jesus returns, there's no distractions. Jesus will return and he will honor his people and he will honor his covenant promises to us. There are many things I could say at this moment. Let me say two more. One. God's wrath will not be restrained when he returns. His wrath was restrained in the time of Noah. Doesn't sound like it was. It was. There was a warning. He allowed Noah to build the ark and he allowed eight people to get in that ark and he limited the time of the rain. His wrath was restrained. If you want to hear a horrific story, one of the worst stories in the history of the known world, read the story of Noah. It's not simply a story of a couple giraffes looking out over the top smiling because they'd be smiling at floating corpses as they floated in the flood water underneath the wrath of God. When God returns, there will be no opportunity to repent. There will be no distractions and his wrath will be full. Lastly, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. There will be eternal destruction. When you think of destruction, you think of a project. Hey, we're going to tear out that closet and we're going to redo the whole thing or oh, we're going to gut the kitchen and get some new appliances in there. Your brain you're thinking it's going to be bad for a while, but eventually we will cook a turkey in that oven. One day, it's going to function. But you know, that's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches, there will be eternal destruction. There will be a removal of what you've been trusting in in your whole life if you're trusting in idols. And you will be inconsolable. I mean, it's one thing to be sad. Okay, I lost my job. Well, praise God, I've got my family to walk with me through it. Or well, so and so got sick or so and so was hurt. Well, you know, we'll rally together and we'll find a way to make it through. But despair by definition is inconsolable. And when your idols are ripped out from underneath you, you will be inconsolable. Underneath the wrath of God with no distractions and no opportunity to repent. That's all what my side do. I'm going to ask you a few questions and give you a few things to consider. First of all, what absorbs your imagination more than God. What do you think about? What do you think about more than you think about God? Now for some of you who only think about God on Sunday morning for about an hour, you're in big trouble because you are consumed with idol worship. And you are not worshiping the one true living God throughout the week. And you're in great danger. What demands your allegiance more than God? Is it your job? Then that's an idol. If it demands allegiance more than your allegiance to God. Is it school? Then that's an idol. Is it your spouse? Is it your child? Is it your family? Is it your success? Is it your popularity? Those though all are good. They're idolatrous. An idol can be anything if we put our ultimate hope in it. And it's not the Lord. It's idolatrous living. What is it in your life that if you lost it, you would feel that life isn't worth living. David said, take not your Holy Spirit from me. What do you say? So how can I help us in this? I would say a couple things. First of all, we've established a definition of idols. We've established a definition of idolatrous living. Now you must take that definition and you must identify the idols of your heart. And you must identify them and then you must remove them. But not simply remove them, you must remove them to replace them with the Lord himself. And so there's a definition, there's an identification, there's a removal and there's a replacement with the Lord himself. And some of you must do that and I would encourage you to do that immediately. Not on your way home from church, not next Sunday when it's Easter. Not when you get to your mother's house because you want to talk to her about it. Now, because when the Lord comes, there will be no opportunity for repentance. There will be no opportunities to stop worshiping idols, it will be over. And so I come to you and plead with you. We are an idolatrous nation and our churches are filled with idolatrous people. How do I know? Because I am an idolatrous person. I am your chief shepherd at first Presbyterian church and I am an idol worshipper. I get distracted, I get ensnared, I get confused, I lose my focus on the Lord and I repent of this and I ask the Lord's forgiveness and I ask that you would do the same. For Alexi did oakfield found in America in the early 1800s that he would not find now, may God have mercy on the United States of America. And may God have mercy on his people and may God have mercy on you and may God have mercy on me. For this is not a process we go through one time. You don't walk out of here and say, got it, defined, identified, removed, replaced, no, every day as long as you are alive. The idol factory of our heart is going to need to be forted and refocused on God Himself. Our only hope is the work of the Holy Spirit and that we would hear His voice not once. We would hear His voice not twice but we would hear His voice unceasingly until that great day. Let's pray together. Father, we come to you and we feel that just to hear your word out of Deuteronomy, you are being merciful to us. You are being patient with us. Oh God, forgive us of our sins. Forgive me, Lord, for placing my trust in anything or anyone other than you. Lord, there's a strange melancholy over our dying nation. Lord, we have been ensnared. And Lord, I would humbly say I believe our churches have as well. Oh Holy Spirit, would you please help us? You've convicted us. I pray now you would move us to repentance and you would fill us with your very presence that we would always have Christ at the center of our life. Not as the one who's going to change our government, but as the one who's going to remove our sin, who's going to forgive us, who's going to carry us along even until the day of His return. Help us, Holy Spirit, we are desperate. And what's scary, Lord, is we don't believe that we're desperate. We have a strange melancholy in our lives. And we ask you to replace it with a passion of Christ and for Christ. We pray in Jesus name and all God's people said, Amen. Would you please stand for the benediction? And now may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord cause his face to shine upon you. May the Lord lift of his countenance on you and give you peace both now and in the life everlasting. Amen.