Would you take your Bibles, please, and open up to Acts chapter 2. Acts chapter 2 as we continue in our series and looking at what is the dynamic church. We are looking at the church at the end of the 20th century and what it needs to be for this 21st century is we help Americans whose lives, both personally and corporately, are imploding because of their lack of a divine center. America has wanted to live many years without God getting in the way. And God has let us do that and we are paying the price for it. And the Church of Jesus Christ has a way of life and a message and answer to man's deepest spiritual needs into the crises he faces. One of those, obviously and naturally in a secular society, in a humanistic world, is the crisis of spirituality. All of our facts and all of our surveys and all of the lifestyle that we look at in America, indicate that men and women are deeply dissatisfied with the spiritual side or the spiritual dimensions of their life and have gone off of shopping, looking, wandering through a myriad of different spiritualities and search of the true God who will love and live with men as they desire him to do so. I want you to notice these statistics, things that we've heard often, but when we put them together, we see them almost like a funnel. Notice as I begin to quote these statistics how they start with a broad base and now they narrow down the very few people and the sad story these statistics tell in and of themselves. Ninety-seven percent, 94 percent of all Americans believe in God. Ninety-two percent have a religious preference on a survey, they indicate that they're a Baptist or a Catholic or a Jew or something. Ninety percent say that they pray often. Another 90 percent say that they own a Bible and it's in their home although they seldom read it. 88 percent believe that God does love them in some way. 78 percent have given a lot or a fair amount of thought to their relationship with God and to the impact that religion has had upon them personally. 68 percent of Americans are members of a church or synagogue. 57 percent say that religion can and should answer the pressing problems of life in today. 55 percent say that religion is very important in their life. 40 percent attend church regularly. That's either once every six weeks or six times a year. 30 percent say that they have never felt close to God, experienced divine guidance or seen a specific answer to prayer. And only 20 percent are found in church every Sunday. I could close with a meditation which would make you happy. They tell the story, don't they? Notice how our broad religious and vague beliefs soon begin to funnel down to a very few people who have a living encounter with God on a week-to-week day-to-day basis. The sad thing is that those people who answer those questions, 96 percent of them were raised in a traditional religious and churched home. J. Kirby Anderson says the bewildering array of spiritualities in this country easily blends into a nice bland heaven that goes down without any problem. Although there are those who try to follow the demanding precepts of traditional religion, most baby boomers find refreshment and a vague religiosity, which does not interfere in any way with how they live. Although I would take issue with Kirby Anderson, it's not just the baby boomers and baby busters. It's Americans, period. They mix in a little bit of the new age, a little bit of seeker sensitive church, a little bit of pop psychology, self-help religion, little synchrotistic theology and ethics. You know, wherever we find a nice person, we take a little bit of what they've got. We blend it all together, mix it up on a high-tech fast-food religion and serve it out by the truck load week after week after week. A young lady named Faith Popcorn, that's her real name. I'm not making that up. Faith Popcorn said a few years ago in ad weeks marketing weekly. There is a feeling of being lost and looking for something greater. People know that technology hasn't worked for them. It is unabsolutely nothing for their souls. America is experiencing a great hunger for spirituality. So hungry are they brethren? That last year many of them gathered in Minneapolis, Minnesota to reimagine what life with God and what God Himself was like, except God wasn't Himself. He was, it was, she was herself, Sophia, pleasure and wisdom. The sad thing about that conference is not that it occurred but that the majority of people who attended it were ordained ministers and ruling elders and deacons of mainline churches in America. So desperate for an encounter with God or Americans that they'll go off to some conference and reimagine a God who they can experience because they're not experiencing the God their parents told them about. One man named Jane Daret were to a minister in the PCUSA denomination and who's a professor of religion at Jamestown College and North Dakota. Recently wrote in Christianity today in an article in titled Testing the Spiritualities, said America is enjoying a fascination with spirituality. Grows through any bookstore and you will find bulging lists of titles in the field. Spirituality is promoted in package along with diet and health, ecology and counseling, job performance and even mountain bikes. On occasion, it also breaks into religion and the church. Spirituality is out of the closet and within arms reach at the checkout aisle along with batteries toothpaste and the national inquirer. Many Christians, however, are confused about this resurgence of the spirituality that rushes in to fill the back room in America. Is spirituality per se something that is Christian? Is it neutral? Are all non-Christian spiritualities necessarily anti-Christian? You see, spirituality then is not something about which Christians should be undiscerning. And he's right. It's the apostle John who says, beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have already gone out into this world. You see, there's this vague idea that we need to be spiritual who we have a hard time defining spirituality. Our own dear beloved brother, Knox Champlain, is in the thinking process of writing a book on spirituality. I ask him, what's holding him back? Why doesn't he just get into it and do it? Because it'll be anything Knox does is good. He said, well, the reason I'm taking so long is that I'm trying to find out what Americans mean when they say spirituality. I ask Alan Furry the same question. He said it means piety and a basic and biblical integrity of life. And he's right. The word that we would use in our language for spirituality really is the Greek word Yisavaya, translated in the New American Standard Godliness, sometimes piety, sometimes devotion or religious fervor, a zeal and a commitment to God. All of those things are under that word called spirituality in the scripture. The sad thing is that the reformed church, the evangelical church, the Protestant movement, thinks that they've never had spirituality. Hugh Olephant Old, who wrote an article in a different Christianity today this past month, wrote an article entitled, Dreschbuing Spirituality from the Coester, and he said, spirituality is a buzzword these days. But sometimes the impression is left that Catholicism with its long tradition of spiritual formation is the only game in town. In fact, Brethren, it might surprise you to find out, and then again it may not. But there are many people leaving the evangelical movement and finding their way into Catholicism, and the principle reasons they give is that in Catholicism we find a definite sense of power, authority, tradition, and the transcendent. In the liturgy, in the candles, in the incense, and the garbs, they find a religious experience, a piety if you want to call it, that they cannot find, in the man-centered, market-driven, mass-consumed evangelical church, a Nazim of 21st century America. And yet the sad truth is this. Listen to me. We have nothing to hang our head about when it comes to spirituality. History gives testimony that the richest tradition of true and biblical spirituality is in the reformed faith. Now many people don't believe that, in fact, one day, I used out at one of the seminaries I was attending the word piety. And one of my professors stopped the class and said, Michael, that's not a reformed word or a reformed concept. We don't talk about that. I beg to disagree. The only thing I've ever disagreed with this professor about, but I disagree with that. We do have a spirituality that Calvin and Luther and the Reformers gave. It came the full blossom. It came almost to a science of religion and those beloved Puritans who are the author of our confession of faith and catechisms and those who gave the steerage of Presbyterianism its course. We are pious people in a good sense. We are spiritual in our heritage, and we need to recapture it. Because spirituality is what drives the church forward in the power and the love and grace of God. In Acts 2, when Pentecost and the wake of that baptism of power and the descending of the Spirit, we see definite things beginning to happen in the church. They were giving themselves to the Word of God and to understanding it, and to praying together, and to taking the Lord's Supper together, and to fellowship, and to ministry, and to stewardship. And they were experiencing a sense of spirituality of piety through genuine, rich, and balanced biblical worship. Look at it in verse 46 of chapter 2. And day by day, continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people, and the Lord was adding to the number day by day those who were being saved. There are in those two verses six different characteristics of biblical worship, of spiritual piety, of spiritualality that the church in our day needs to recapture. Here's the first one. That true spirituality is a scholarly spirituality. There tends to be a mindset today that if you get goose bumps and have a feeling and sway back and forth, you're experiencing something spiritual. But if you're asked to think, it quenches the Spirit. I mean, how many times have you, now let's be honest, okay? How many times have you heard people say, it's all that doctrine, that dogma, that study, those sermons, those classes that bogged the church down and quenched the Spirit? What an ass-and-eye thing to say. When it says, listen, look at it, that they were day by day continuing with one mind, not one emotion, not one feeling, one mind. Captivated, we learn from chapter two, verse 42, all the way through to the end of this passage by the word of God. That's how we begin this dynamic history of the dynamic church. They were giving themselves to the word of God in experiencing a dynamic and a scholarly spirituality. Then we're just having mindless experiences. They knew what they were encountering, the God, who came off of the pages of Scripture and into their lives. Therefore true spirituality is a scholarly spirituality, which means it's a spirituality fed by God's word. We can never separate our vitality as a Christian from the word of God. Psychology, mystical experiences, esoteric ideas and feelings and this feeling good about your self-ridage and could never lead to a deep and fulfilling profound spirituality. That is found only in the word of God, the living and active word of God that's able to go down into our souls and to pull things apart and put them back together the way God intends and sees. You, all of an old said, reformed spirituality is first a spirituality of the word. The Christian life is a matter of hearing the word of God and receiving it by faith. It's a piety centered in the Bible, a scholar's piety, that emphasized studying the Bible, copying manuscripts, preserving the history of interpretation and preparing and preaching sermons. From the very beginning, Christianity was a religion of the book and its piety was a piety of the book. How many times in Scripture in the New Testament, in our age, are we told to attend to the living word of God that we're to study to make ourselves approved to God, that we're to give ourselves to the apostles' teachings, that we're to devote ourselves to teaching and preaching in prayer. The word of God is always central. It's always what God bleeds forth with. And you know, as we study the history of the church, even the history of modern denominations that are akin to us in many ways, we find this to be true. That when a church begins to lose its living relationship with God and its spirituality begins to die, it finds itself filling up the vacuum with rubrics and religious ceremony and liturgy. It's got to have something to give it an experiential experience and so it finds it encandles an incense, enchanting, and it processions and pageantry, thinking that that somehow will bring people out of the mundane and into the magnificent that belongs to God, the living God alone. But the reformed tradition denies that. It was Luther, in Calvin, in Zwingli, in Knox, in the Puritans, who said, enough of the liturgy, enough of having a rote routine to go through, let's return to the sermon, to the word of God, as being the central thing of worship. Enough of pageantry. Let's get away from pageantry and come back to thinking and reflection. We don't need the drama of the mass. We need the impregnating thoughts of the word of God to come into our life. We don't need a lectionary. We don't need to read through the same scriptures year after year after year. We have what the authors or what the reformers called the lexial continuum, the continuing lectionary, it's the Bible, and it was the reformers and their sons, the Puritans, who began to take the word of God and to begin verse by book, chapter by chapter, all the way through the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation to preach through this lectionary called the Bible that God has given to his church. Our piety is rooted in the word of God. It's fed by the word of God. It's also a necessity fed by sober and sound theology. It is an oxymoron to say that spirituality comes apart from those old doctrines passed down through all the generations. What is it in our experience in life that has led us to believe that men like Augustine and an origin and Luther and Thomas Brooks and other great men and women of the faith have experienced a spirituality but all of a sudden with the modern man things have changed. And it's no longer found through the truth of the faith once delivered to the saints but now through repeated new experiences and the shallow and short-spanned life of modern Americans. What's led us to believe that? The fact that we're market-driven, the fact that we have believed for many years now that theology belongs out there at Reform Seminary and real life belongs in the pew. And yet David Wells and others, men like Ausgenus and R. C. Sproul and John MacArthur and Michael Horton and Richard Moo and James Voice and thousands of others, are beginning to challenge that idea and say, no, that's not right. That doing theology is the job of belayment in the church. It is the preaching of the Word of God that you learn in Seminary that is given to the people and they need to confess, reflect, and apply sound theology to their life. One of the things we've lost in the reformed idea of the Christian is that we've lost what every man is. Luther thought that every man was a priest. To go to God directly to the throne of grace and sand beside Christ and look the father in the eyeballs and ask for what he wants because he's the son of God and a priest to do God's service. No more clergyman, but now a priesthood of all believers. That every man was a witness and ambassador. He had his job to be a missionary wherever he was and to spread the Word of God. That every man and woman who had a family were pastors in their home and took shepherding and primary pastoral responsibility for their children who lost one other idea that every man in the pew was a theologian whose job it is to know God and know him well. And brethren, we've got to return not to dry dogmen to philosophical, scholastic disputations or to academic exercises that sometimes sing English, but to a life view in which God is studied and known and at the center. That's what theology is. It simply means the study of God. It's a theocentric world in life view and therein lies the greatest problem of the dirt of the spirituality in our nation. Let me ask you something. How can we possibly raise men out of sin and the secular and self and lift them up to God so that they live on his realm when all of our life is preoccupied with making things comfortable for them, giving them easy things to believe and not making them think or be uncomfortable? How can we ever have a deep spirituality thinking like that? So the first step to true spirituality is to recapture scholarly spirituality and to become people who know and live that book called the Bible and who are unashamed to say, I believe that theology of the church. The second thing about true spirituality is that it is a balanced spirituality. Notice if you will in these verses in verse 46 that it says this was happening in the temple and they were breaking bread from house to house and they were taking their meals together. There was a balance there, a corporate dimension and a private and small group dimension. There was the Lord's day on Sunday and the weekday from house to house. There was the temple and there were small group Bible study and fellowship groups. There was that balanced because they need that balance. These men and women in that day and age who wanted spirituality and we need the same balance too. Notice first of all that this spirituality that is balanced is nourished by corporate worship. One of the things are reforming fathers and mothers did was to recapture the sanctity of the Lord's day. It wasn't like the Catholics made it a day of obligation. The violation of which was a mortal sin. It was a day of privilege. It was a day set aside for the saint to worship God, to fellowship with his beloved brethren, and to serve God, and to be set aside for 24 hours from all of the work and worry and pains of this life. Our spirituality wanes and suffers in America because we have profane the Lord's day beyond measure. We put in our hour or two in the morning and we call that a day for God. If we gave that kind of time to an employer we'd be fired in seven days, we wouldn't last a week. It's a day for God to come and be set aside in our lives and for us to be set aside into his life more fully. It's a day for the congregation. It's on a specific day called the Lord's day. It takes place, this text says, around the table of the Lord. Those are all corporate dimensions of worship. Coming out of our private lives, out of our cells, and coming into the fullness of worship with God, and to fellowship with his saints. Notice, brethren, that these statistics show that 70% of Americans, 68% are a member of a church in the God, but only 20% are there every Sunday.
And I will give you this to challenge you. You think about this. It will perhaps irritate some. I say it not to irritate you, but because I believe it is truth in the word of God and verified by experience. For those saints who come to Sunday morning worship, and go to Sunday school, and go to Sunday night worship, grow faster and deeper and fuller than Christians who don't. You check that out. Take your own little private survey. Survey the people around you who profess to belong to Christ, and who you think are growing model Christians. And you'll find that they're the people who go to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night, and the Lord's day is for God and His people. You'll also find something else about them most probably, and that is that they have fellowship in small groups with people. Their religion just isn't contained to that one day of the week, but they're involved from house to house the breaking of bread and worshiping. They're involved in Bible study and in fellowship in these cell groups that offset the congregation. They have both dimensions in their life, a corporate worship of God, and a small group fellowship with one another around God's word and the fellowship of the believers. And we need to be careful to avoid two extremes. There seems to be two kinds of Christians today. One I call the Hermit Christian. He would like to go off in a small group and have that burger king religion where you can have it your way. He kind of constructs things the way he's comfortable in that little group and nobody enters in there to shatter his little world. There is the other hand, what I call the Clareal Christian. There are the formalists and only the hairdresser knows for sure what's going on in their life. They come to church and they look right and they go through the formal steps because they're a formalist. But God never impacts their life day to day week after week. They're a Sunday morning only Christian. Both of those are on biblical models, not because they're wrong but because they're imbalanced. You need both the corporate and the smaller group dimension, both the congregation and the cell group, both the celebration of worship and the fellowship of worship that God says was making these people such dynamic spiritual people in the second chapter of Acts. The third thing we learned about true spirituality is that it's a joyful spirituality. Obviously these people hadn't become Presbyterian yet because it says they were doing this with gladness. There was a smile on their face. They were there. I say it happy to be in Jesus. Parish the thought, but it's true. There was a joy in their life because of two things. They had the joy of the Lord because they were saved and they had the joy of the Lord because they lived under God's smiling face of providence. There was a certain contagious joy in their life. I mean, listen. Think of the worst thing that can happen to you. They absolute worst. Think of it right now. And then think of this right behind it. But if that happened and then you died and went to be with Jesus Christ, what does it matter? I mean, Jane mentioned to me this week. We were talking about some things. You said, you know, my the only thing that really matters is that we're saved and our sins have been washed away. And that's all that matters. That's the bottom line. And people who really know that they know they're saved. They really know it. They're willing. No pun intended to bet their soul on it because they are. There's a joy in their life. And this long-faced monkey, melancholy party belongs in the cloister. Let the monks and the nuns have that. The spiritual joy of the Lord belongs in the church and out on the sidewalks with the saints of God go out day by day. It's a joy because they're saved. It's a joy also because they know that the smiling God of providence superintendents all of their life. You know, one of the great injustices of history is the way modern scholars revisionist historians and I'm beginning to think that's about the only kind found out there anymore. Have rewritten the Puritans completely into dour, sour, black robe, long-faced party bloopers. People you don't want to be on your end of heaven for sure. And that is absolutely the opposite of the truth. There were never a people so joyful and at ease in this world and in the next in the Puritans. They believed that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him, to the elect who have been called according to His purpose. And they didn't just quote that at the hospital room or when the IRS man just got done calling, they believed that and lived it day in and day out. Let me just prove this. Let me just give you these facts about some of the things that were written by our reformed heritage. Calvin, for example, it was God's providence. And the spin-off of that doctrine, predestination and God's sovereignty that was the kingpin of Calvinism and the reformed theology. God's comfort and care was the subject of more sermons and the Puritan and reformed age than any of the sermon that God was in control of everything and working all things for the good of the saints. Listen to these books written and published by Puritans, believe it or not. Thomas Watson, all things for good. Thomas Brooks, heaven on earth. And another one by Thomas Brooks, precious remedies against Satan's devices. John Flavall, the mystery of providence. William Brids, a lifting up of the downcast. Jeremiah Burrows, the rare jewel of Christian contentment. Octavius Winslow, no condemnation. John Murray, not a Puritan, but a son of the Puritans, wrote this little pamphlet that everyone ought to read behind a frowning providence. The banner of truth continues to publish work after work after work by the Puritans and the children of their age. And they are all great comfort to saints who believe that God has all things ordered for their good and for his glory. John Flavall wrote a thoughtful Christian, thinks over what providence has brought about, and this makes him glad. Brethren, how can anything bad, I mean bad in the final sense, ever happened to you and me when we are in the palm of Jesus Christ and God has said in sworn by his own blood, I work all things for your good because you love me and I love you. And when we know that, we're glad there's a joy to our spirituality that is contagious. True spirituality, brethren, is also a simple spirituality. Notice that it says that they were doing this with gladness and sincerity of heart. That word, sincerity, which is translated that way in the New American Standard or sincere heart in the New International version, really should be translated simplicity. It's the word awfulotace, which comes from two words in Greek, aw, which means no or not, and fellos, which means rock or stone or something that encumbers one's way. Simon Kistamacher says, this expression's sincerity, this word awfulotace, occurs only once in the New Testament here in Acts chapter 2 verse 46. It derives from a word that signifies a smooth, plain land without any rocks that mar the surface or the soil. In other words, there's nothing to get in the way, and that's how spirituality and worship ought to be. It is a simple worship. It's free from formal liturgy and it's free from modern marketing, which are the two encumbrances that get in the way between God and man. Listen, formal liturgy always on the outside looks very spiritual. It's up and down in genuflect and all of these things and it's just busyness going on, but you know what? It gets in the way. Pretty soon, take my word for it, I did it for 27 years. It's the church that becomes the center of worship and not the Christ. And the more formalized we become and what we do, tell tale brethren, the less spiritual we are. That may not be our problem here, although sometimes we're a little bit tight, no one would ever accuse Trinity Church of being too loose, but we need to worry more about something else. And that's modern marketing. The fact that the service has to turn into the Ted Mac amateur hour. There's a moment for this and a moment for that and a message here and this and that and spotlights and you know it's like Hollywood, that also gets in the way. After while the audience of worship becomes not God, who is the true audience of true worship, but man, man becomes the center of why we do things the way we do. And I believe the modern church growth movement has stumbled into that, not on purpose, but genuinely they have. Constructuring everything so that people are comfortable when that is what is to be forsaken. And the way to recover a God-centered focus in worship is that first of all, we begin to sing and read and pray the songs. Those are the words and the poems and the hymns and the prayers that God wrote to lift us out of ourselves and up to Him and to take our minds off me, myself, and mine. And all of our great music that we appreciate, old and modern, Maranatha songs, Isaac Watts's hymns and Charles Wesley's hymns and Calvin's Geneva Psalter and Handel's Messiah, they're all singing and the praising of Scripture back to God. And so there is a great need for us to recover a simplicity of simply praying and preaching and praising and professing before God. That's all we need. That's acceptable to God. His spiritual present from us every Sunday. Also true spirituality is a feel-centric spirituality. It's centered on God where God is preeminent and man is prostrate below Him as a sinner. How could we ever be spiritual when the goal of our religion is to make us feel good about ourselves rather than to tell God how good He is to us? May I oversimplify the case in saying that what Luke and others are teaching here is that we need not worry about how we feel about ourselves, that how God feels about Himself. We're not the ones who have to walk out here feeling good God does. And I know that's inaccurate. It's an inaccurate statement, it's theologically atrocious, but I say it for effect, not for accuracy. We can't make God feel good about Himself. He possesses all goodness and satisfaction and fulfillment in Himself. What I mean to say is that we ought to focus time bragging on God rather than focusing on me and you. And when our worship is anthropocentric rather than feel-centric, it's an abomination. People don't really, I believe this, so maybe I'm just whistling through the dark or making excuses or rationalizing like most sinful people do. But I don't believe people really mind long sermons. What they don't like is sermons where they're constantly reminded that they're a sinner and God is great. What they want is the trash that's out there that says that you're okay and somehow God's defective in what He's done. And if you don't believe me, take a Sunday off and survey 10 churches somewhere and find out what they're taught. We at Trinity believe that God's okay and we're not, but that God can make us right with Christ, through Christ and in Christ, and we'll do that if we're willing to humble ourselves in the presence of God. He will exalt us at the proper time, but Sunday morning is not the proper time. This is prime time for the preeminent one where to give our hearts and minds to him. And if we walk out of here feeling, boy, he's so great and I'm so little, then praise God. That's the first step to heaven. Finally, spiritual worship and spirituality, true spirituality is one that is contagious. Rather than begrudging and dark and uncomfortable with people, that's not true. Look at the last part of the last verse. They were having favor with all the people and the Lord was adding to the number day by day those who were being saved. Why? How could something that tells men to deny themselves and die in the cross could ever be favorable with men? Because mixed into this whole spirituality are two views that we need not forget. One that all of life is sacred and that all people are precious to God. All of life is sacred. If I can think of nothing more than recovering the scriptures to the centrality of the church, I would credit this as the other thing that the reformers have done for us far and above everything else. They have taught us that everything we do is an act of worship to God, not just something done in church. It was Luther who said in a little bit more colorful language than I'll use this morning. That if man goes out and shovels cow manure, it's just as much a minister of Christ as one who shovels the Word of God into men's souls. And if he preaches to no one but the cows, it's a message pleasing to the Savior. I don't care whether you're homeschooling your children or out in the legal world or out in the business world or teaching in a public school, working for the military or the government doesn't matter. The drudgery of everyday life is your spiritual act of worship. Paul says in Romans chapter 12 verse 1, And what you do is important to God because you're important to him and so are other people. Therefore the Puritans taught us that worship begins in the home where dad and mom are priests. That all of life, marriage and family and work and recreation is to be done for his glory. The preaching of the great, the paintings of the great Dutch impressionists like Rembrandt and his contemporaries, these Dutch reformed Christian painters, all painted pictures of men and women in the field and in the marketplace and in the pantry and in the pulpit. Everywhere men went, God went with them because God was in them. And therefore everywhere the soul of a Christian touches becomes sacred ground and subject to the message and the methods of Jesus Christ to bring all things under His dominion. That is because God loves them and men are important to God. So much so that God comes down in man's form and lives with him and dies for them and sucks with them and embraces them. Sunday after Sunday and reminds them that the way they are and how they've lived is not right but they are right with him and that he loves them not for what they are but for what they will be and that he loves them enough to give his life totally for them and wants only for them to give his life totally for him. And he's constantly reaching out Sunday after Sunday with the message, come, come be with me, come to Papa, little children, come to Abba and spend time with me. Let me love you and you love me, you are made for this, you are made to be with me and by the blood of my son, be with me you will. In the end I will get you and you'll be online and I will be all yours. That's a contagious message, men out there in that world are walking around looking for someone or something to fill them up to bring them close to give them assurance and that's someone that something is God. Found through Jesus Christ through the medium and the mode and the message of His church. It can't be hurried up this thing called spiritual. It's not seven steps to this, three keys to that, two clues to that. It's a life in Christ, a corporate life, a simple life, a biblical life, a theocentric life, a balanced life, day after day, week after week, year after year, life after life, eon after eon time, after time, spirituality, flesh is itself out in the old ways of the church that come together in Christ and through Christ worship God. God comes down to them and has an encounter with them and that breadman is true in biblical spirituality. And that is what men are literally dying for and dying without. Old Father give us this encounter again and again, lead us to true spirituality. Keep us away from the trash and the trinkets of this life that creep the way into the fellowship and worship of you church and fix us upon Christ and His Word and His great love and message for us. We cannot do it ourselves. This is a work of your grace we acknowledge. The God of grace, unbounding and unlimited you are. Come now Father at this Lord's Supper and extend that grace to us and be with us. Come and love us again. We might tell you how much we love you and need you and how much we belong to you through Jesus Christ our Lord and whose name we pray. Amen.