Pastor Brian and Jacque Lother
Jacque: Did you hear Brad's beautiful guitar? It's bigger on this monitor and I can hear it better. It's so beautiful. I can't see you, Brad. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Just a couple things because we have good things here that we just want to draw your attention to. Look on the website for all the details of these things. Did you know daylight saving starts next week? That's a good thing. So okay. I have to read my notes because I always get confused. One hour ahead, one hour ahead next week. And then also on March 27th, right after church, we are going to have an all church lunch. It's on us. Just come on and let's have an all church lunch together and we are going to get to know Daniel better. He's our new youth director that we hired. He's going to tell us some of his plans. He's going to share his heart with us and we are going to be able to ask him questions. It's going to be a fun time just to be together as a church body. So circle the date for that.
Last of all, in February we had a game day, and it seriously was so much fun. People got to know one another and have fun together and the whole family it's for the whole family. So people asked if we would have another one. April 9th, we are going to have another one, so please circle that date too. That's it, Brian.
Brian: That'll be great.
Jacque: Oh, I have to say this. You can host a table of your favorite game. So call in the church office or email her or text her and tell her what game you would like to teach others to play, and you can host a table. Thanks.
I can't remember how many years ago it was that Norbert and Leslie Bond, who had been part of our church for at least 12 years, I think maybe longer, came to me, met with me in my office and said— because Norbert, originally, was from Hungary. He and Leslie met, I believe in YWAM, and then they came to the US. He didn't really speak much English when he got here and he ended up getting a master's degree. He got a bachelor's degree and then he got a master's degree in business with English as his second language. It was just amazing. They met with me and told me their heart for the Hungarian people and things fell together for them. I can't remember how long it has been. It's about four years, I think.
Jacque: I think five years.
Brian: Four or five years. They went to Hungary and they are part of our church over there. They are our missionaries in Hungary. They are part of this fellowship. This is their home church. We probably are all aware of the, you know, the war right now in the Ukraine. Hungary is really close to Ukraine, and Norbert drove all the way to the, I think, the Ukrainian border. I'm not sure if he was able to actually go get into Ukraine, but they are helping with the refugees over there. Sometimes when these kinds of conflicts happen, you feel really bad about it. You pray for the people which we have been doing, but sometimes there's this inside of us that says, I wish I could do more and we can. We are going to take an offering for them this morning. Those of you who are watching online, you can give as well.
We have their picture here up on the screen, Norbert and Leslie. You can just give to the designation “special” on our website or text to give, and that type of thing. We just want to really bless them. We are going to have this ongoing for, or a few weeks. Obviously, if you are not here, if you are watching by livestream, you can mail a check into the church. You can give online. We'll make sure Norbert and Leslie get the money. They are so grateful for the support this church and the people of this church are giving to them. I'd like to ask the ushers to come at this time and, and we are going to receive an offering for them.
Jacque: If you are on Facebook, you could go to Norbert Ban; go to his page and he has got daily running of what they are doing, updates of what they are doing.
Brian: ABC, I don't know if you saw this, this past week on channel five, but they did an interview with Norbert on channel five. He did an excellent job in really talking about what they were doing. This was seen by thousands and thousands of people. We are really praying that people will gather in support of them. This is something we can do. So father, I pray that we would be as generous as we are able to be today in helping these refugees. Many of them, Lord, are women, mothers with children. Their husbands, the fathers, have stayed back to try and defend their country. Lord, this is really a tragedy that's unfolding right before us. It reminds us of times in the past where we thought this could never happen again. And it's now happening again.
Lord, we do pray for your divine intervention, but in the meantime, there are all these people that need help and you have blessed us. If we can pool our resources together, we can make a difference, Lord. So I just pray that you'll multiply this offering like you did the loaves and fishes, just as you multiplied those five loaves and those two fishes, Lord, that this offering would be multiplied. As we give it to Norbert and Leslie, I just pray that many of these refugees who are running for their lives fleeing for their safety will run into the arms of Jesus. They will hear the story of Jesus that Norbert and Leslie will share with them, and that this will be a divine appointment, Lord, with you. I pray that you'll just send the right ones that are ready to believe in you, Lord and that they would come to know you in Jesus name, we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for your generosity. I know Jacque was in touch with Leslie this past week. Do you want to just share anything about that?
Jacque: She said, "Please pray that there's no nuclear war."
Brian: Yeah. They are concerned about that in Europe.
Jacque: She said the people are so afraid, afraid, and they just really know that they were brought to Hungary for such a time as this.
Brian: They are really in their element and we are really proud of them. You can give at the kiosk after the service; just pull up special and you can give that way as well.
Jacque: They are feeding people, they are creating spaces for people to live. It's just amazing how the world is coming together for the Ukrainian people. It's beautiful.
Brian: It's really sad, what is happening. It's a real tragedy. It breaks God's heart. It completely breaks God's heart that this kind of evil exists in the world. I pray, we've been praying that God would be glorified through this all.
Jacque: We were watching a report last night and the men are so courageous and they are staying back to fight, do all they can for their country and all these women and children are going off. It's just heartbreaking. You just need to pray for those families.
Brian: It's very difficult for us in America because we are isolated from so much. Europe has been such a— I don't know if the word hotbed is the right word, but it has been such a place of war throughout the centuries, just on and on and on and on and on, conflict. We are just so blessed in this country that we haven't had those kinds of experiences. It doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Our world is a lot smaller today than it was 50/60 years ago. What I mean by that is we can be affected by something that happens on the other side of the world in just a few minutes.
Jacque: This morning I was thinking of this situation and I thought, oh, that's a problem. I need this. And then I thought, that is not even a problem. When you consider it, those people and all that, they are going through, I have no problems. No problems.
Brian: So father, we are thankful for the land that we live in. We pray blessings over America, Lord. I know that we do have our issues, our problems, our situations that we are trying to deal with, but Lord, there are people in the world that are so much worse off than we are. So we just thank you for the blessings that you give to us here. And I just pray that we wouldn't just be consumers of, but that we would take those blessings and be generous with sharing to those who have so little and ask so little. In your precious name, Lord, we pray. Amen.
Have you ever heard the expression, usually it's given as a toast, here's to what, mud in your eye? Here is to mud your eye. Some people think that that expression came out of World War I, where there were a lot of soldiers in trenches and they got very muddy and they were toasting each other because they would have a tendency to drink a lot in those times. There's a whole other camp that believes that expression. Here is to mud in your eye comes from a whole different place. It comes from the story we are going to read today in John chapter nine, where Jesus healed a blind man by putting mud on his eyes.
The whole toast about here's to mud in your eye is really about a toast to good health. Well, obviously, the mud that Jesus put on this blind man's eyes gave him good health, didn't it? So we are going to read this story together. How many know that Jesus was always teaching, even when he wasn't teaching? Jesus taught a lot, but then there were a lot of other times that he wasn't actually teaching and yet he was still teaching and he claimed to be the truth. We see this in John chapter 14, verse 6. Let's read that.
Jacque: Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no one can come to the Father except through me."
Brian: Either Jesus was uh, really crazy lunatic to say that, or he was true in saying that, but let's be honest about this. There's no in between. He's either the way the truth and the life and no man can come to be reconciled with God apart from him. Either that is true or he's a liar. There is no middle ground on this. Sometimes, people who are followers of Jesus have been criticized because of their perspective of exclusivity. I believe in welcoming all people. So in that sense, there should be no exclusiveness, but it is true based on what Jesus said, that there's only one way that our sins can be dealt with and forgiven and our shame can be dealt with and our guilt can be forgiven and gotten rid of. That's through the person of Jesus Christ.
I don't believe we as followers of Jesus should ever back down from that. Because if we back down from that, we then are basically saying, I don't really believe what you were saying here, Jesus. So if I'm going to be a follower of Jesus, I just need to believe what he said. I just need to believe what he said. The people who lived with Jesus and also followed him during his lifetime on earth and who came to actually know him in a personal way, actually said that Jesus was God's word to humanity, lived out in the flesh. We see that as John pinned the scriptures. I really like how, again, The Chosen series, when John is beginning to formulate how he wanted to write the Book of John, because the Book of John was written later, one of the later gospels. Jesus is obviously ascended into heaven and it's important to John that they capture the essence of who Jesus was and is. He begins his book, the Book of John by I saying this: John 1: 1-2.
Jacque: In the beginning, the word already existed.
Brian: In the beginning, the word already existed, but what's the word?
Jacque: The word was with God.
Brian: Well, we know that the word was with God
Jacque: And the word was God.
Brian: So we know the word is also God.
Jacque: He existed in the beginning with God.
Brian: Now he puts this word "he" in here. That "he" of course, is Jesus. In the beginning was Jesus, the word, and he already existed. Jesus was with God and Jesus was God and Jesus existed in the beginning with God. He was God's word to humanity, lived out in the flesh. So then we see in verse 14 of the same chapter, John says it this way.
Jacque: These are the New Living Translations. So the word became human.
Brian: Or so Jesus became human.
Jacque: And made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen in his glory, the glory of the father's one and only son.
Brian: Wow. You can meditate on that for a long time and just get carried away. Most religious outcasts, people who were not accepted by the rank and file of the religion or order of the day, most religious outcasts loved Jesus. Most of them did. And most religious leaders hated Jesus. If you were disenfranchised or marginalized or had some kind of physical deformity or anything that was less than perfect, that would create a situation where you could be ostracized, those are the people that loved Jesus. The people that really hated Jesus were the people that felt they had it all together and they were mostly the religious people. You have to ask yourself the question, why? Why did these marginalized people love Jesus and why the religious leaders hate Jesus?
I really believe it's because both groups actually understood his mess. Both groups understood his message. It was a message of hope to sinners and also a message that was a threat to the stewards of religion. Those people who were in charge of keeping religious order, Jesus was a threat to them. In John chapter 9, Jesus heals a blind man in a most unusual and very dramatic way. In this chapter, we find a real interesting twist. We see that the blind are made to see, and those people who claim to see are actually really exposed as being really blind. We see where Jesus heals a blind man and exposes those who think they see as really blind. This particular story happened at the tail end of a religious holiday in Jerusalem. The population of Jerusalem kind of reminds me of the little town I grew up in Northern Minnesota, Crosby Arrington.
During the week there might be 2,500 people that live in the town. You may not be aware of this, but Crosby was an iron mining community back when I was a child and they have all of these mind dumps where all the tailings were dumped and stuff from the mining. They were little mountains and people loved to go mountain biking, so on the weekends in the summer Crosby's population can swell to 15,000 people. Can you imagine a town that's built for 2,500 people? You have a restaurant that seats 30 people or 40 maybe, and then you have two gas stations and you have a Dairy Queen and a grocery store. It functions really well for 2,500 people. And then all of a sudden, for three straight days, there's 17,000 people in the community now, all wanting to buy gas, all wanting Dairy Queen, all wanting whatever they want.
This is like Jerusalem at this time because this festival was a festival of booths or sukkot. I'm not quite sure how to say it; people say it differently. I thought I knew how to speak Hebrew and then I went to Israel and our guide corrected me on all my wrong pronunciations of all the things in the Bible. I'll let him be the expert. This of all was a celebration of all the years that Israel spent in the desert and the way that God protected them. I find it interesting that the reason they were in the desert was because of their grumbling and complaining and really their sin and unbelief. And yet God was still faithful to them during that 40 years.
God instituted this festival of Sukkot to remember and celebrate how God was faithful to them during this 40 year period. This celebration or festival began to be observed on an annual basis called a feast of booths. People would build booths and actually live in these booths for eight days and not live in their homes. It was a way to connect back to what their predecessor had gone through. At the end of this festival, Jesus is teaching in the temple courts where the largest group or number of people could hear his message of hope.
The religious leaders could also hear his message of warning, because he did that.
On the last day of the festival, Jesus and his disciples are leaving the temple area and they see a man who has been blind from birth. The fact that this man was outside the temple area, the temple grounds is significant. The reason it's significant is because at the time of Christ, a physical disability like this man had, being blind, was often assumed to be God's punishment for some kind of sin. So this sinner would not have been welcome in the holy services or the celebrations that were taking place during this festival in spite of the fact that he was Jewish and that he was part of that Jewish religion. The disciples, apparently, had bought into the US idea that maladies from birth, whether it be blindness or this kind of thing, they bought into the idea that these things happened because of either their sin or the sins of the parents. And so they asked Jesus, why was man born blind? Was it his sin or his parents' sin? Let's read this from John 9:1-2.
Jacque: As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. "Rabbi," his disciples asked him, "why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents' sins?"
Brian: Here is the question: they had bought into this idea. Some, in our modern day culture, would call it karma. That's what some people would call it. But I have good news for all of you believers today, and that is, grace is greater than karma. Grace is greater than karma. Let that sink in for a little bit. Let's just sink in. One of the popular beliefs I said at the time of Christ is that this disease or disability from birth was attributed to the sins of the a or even your own sins while you were in the womb. I was talking to Jacque about this last night. I said, what kind of trouble can a baby in the womb get into that God would judge them so severely? But people believed that God was always watching and ready to punish even the smallest infraction. I wonder how much of that belief has seeped into churches today.
The disciples were thinking that one of two perspectives had to be true: either this man had committed some kind of sin or his parents had committed some kind of sin. So they asked this question: whose sin brought on this man's suffering? I wonder how many people are asking that question about Ukraine today. I wonder what sins the Ukrainian people committed that they would be brutally attacked in this manner from a war monger.
The disciples see this blind beggar, and all they can think to do is use him as a launching pad, into a discussion about the origin of evil. That's all they can think about. They see this beggar, he's blind, been born blind, had been blind his whole life. I think he was 38 years old. All that the disciples can think of is to use this victim, this poor man as a launching pad to get into the discussion of who was responsible for the evil. Let's face it; isn't it always easier to respond to suffering with pious concern and even indignant conversation about who's responsible for evil than it is to actually do something about it?
You see a homeless person suffering and we go through all sorts of questions in our minds. Well, I wonder what he did. I wonder what irresponsible thing he's been doing. I bet you he's an alcoholic or I bet you he's a drug addict. I bet you this. I bet you that. We launch into a discussion on the origins of the evil or the origins of the tragedy rather than focus on what God wants us to do, and that's actually, let's do something about the suffering in the world. The disciples ask this question to Jesus, who is responsible for this man suffering, his parents or him? And Jesus responds with these words.
Jacque: "It was not because of his sins or his parents' sins," Jesus answered this happened. So the power of God could be seen in him. We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned to us by the one who sent us. The night is coming and then no one can work, but while I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.
Brian: Jesus basically says, stop blaming the victim for their own suffering. Stop blaming the victim for their own suffering, and he flatly rejects karma as a graceless doctrine that many people buy into. Instead, what Jesus does here is he teaches that we should see each and every situation of suffering as an opportunity to help, every single one, not look at what was the cause of the suffering. Who was responsible? Was there some guilt to bear upon the person who is suffering? But rather, let's just bring a relief to the suffering.
Jacque: With the same mercy we've been given, apply that mercy to another.
Brian: That's right. So Jesus teaches that we should see every situation of suffering as an opportunity to help and to see God work through us. Right attached to this scripture, let's read it again, he says this, we must quickly carry out the task assigned to us by the one who sent us because the night is coming and then no one can work. Jesus looks at this suffering as an opportunity to do the work of God. I can just see the disciples now. This wasn't their first rodeo with Jesus. This was near the end of Christ ministry. So they'd seen him do a lot of miracles. They probably got accustomed to recognizing when Jesus was about to do another one.
I can just see the disciples now. They might be glancing at each other or looking at each other. Maybe if there were a few of them, a little bit away from Jesus, maybe they might have said, how do you think he's going to do this? Is he going to go and lay hands on him? Or maybe he'll do what he did with the Romans centurion, and he'll just say the word. He'll just say the word. I wonder how he is going to do this. I wonder if some of them thought, what method is he going to use that we can emulate? We see in verse six of this chapter, what his method was.
Jacque: Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva and spread the mud over the blind man's eyes.
Brian: Jesus stops in his tracks, bends over the dirt and he starts to make those noises that one makes when they are trying to get a big goober up in their mouth.
Jacque: Well, he needed to have a little more than a tiny bit.
Brian: Yeah, that's it. That's it. Can you do it again?
Jacque: No, no.
Brian: How do you get enough spit to make a mud with? You have to kind of collect it there a little bit. I think Isaac knows what I'm talking about. I thought to myself, I've never seen this in a stained glass window in a church. If you are walking down the street and you hear someone make that noise, you pivot left or right or you start walking a lot faster. So here's the moment in the life of Christ that really doesn't make it into many movies. Jesus Lays a big one down in the dirt and picks it up and starts to make a kind of poultice. The disciples, I can just see what's going on in their minds. No one expects what happens next. Jesus walks, obviously, towards a blind man with his hands out in front of him. Of course, the blind man can't see what is about to take place.
Jacque: A good Thing.
Brian: Yeah. That's a good thing. Jesus takes this mud, made out of spit, and I know that religious people would want to make that into some kind of holy spit, but it was spit. Jesus makes this concoction, this mud and spreads it all all over the man's eyes. And then he told him to do one other thing that was very interesting.
Jacque: Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva and spread the mud over the blind man's eyes. He told him, go wash yourself in the Pool of Siloam. Siloam means scent. So the man went and washed and came back seeing.
Brian: We are left with a couple of questions here, I think. Why the mud and why the pool? For the fact of the matter is the power that healed this man was not in the mud that was made. It wasn't in this potion that Jesus created the power that healed him. It was within Jesus himself. The question we need to ask ourselves then is, well, why the dramatics? Why the mud out of spit, why go wash in the pool and then he received his healing? And why wash in that specific pool before the healing could take effect. So to understand the answers to those two questions, why the mud and why the pool, we have to read on just a little bit further and we see another verse that reveals the larger Jesus was going after here. We find it in verse 13 and 14.
Jacque: They took the man who had been blind to the Pharisees because it was on the Sabbath that Jesus had made the mud and healed him.
Brian: Now it comes out. It was on the Sabbath that Jesus did this. When God gave Moses the law back on Mount Sinai, it didn't take long for what was called the elders of Israel to begin to interpret the law that God gave. They began to add different applications of the law. God said, "Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy." The elders then began to start to interpret that law and they began to create what was called the oral traditions, the oral Torah. Later on, these oral traditions became codified or written down, and this accumulation of all of these traditions that was written down was called the Mishnah. That's a Jewish; I'll call it a book, the Jewish book for all the oral traditions and interpretations of the law.
There are many laws or rules in the Mishnah about what can and cannot be done on the Sabbath. As a matter of fact, there were so many laws that had been created or rules, rather, that had been created by the oral traditions that a person was bound up every which way from Sunday, or maybe I should say Saturday. It was a day to avoid all forms of work. Jesus seems to be absolutely committed to breaking as many of these rules as possible.
According to the Mishnah, attempting to heal someone with a remedy on the Sabbath is sin. That was one of the old traditions, unless the situation was life and death. If the ox had actually fallen on you, okay, you could pull the ox off, but chronic conditions like blindness or leprosy or a limb that was lame, or what have you, paralyzed legs, deaf ears, all of that can wait a day. Anointing someone with any kind of sav or healing ointment is specifically prohibited in the Mishnah. We all know Jesus could have just said be healed, but he was after something deeper than just the healing of this man.
One of the rules of the Mishnah was that you could add water to your breakfast Porridge, but you couldn't mix it because mixing is working. Do you now understand why God said in Hosea, "I hate all of this religious stuff you are doing"? They took the principles of God's word, which in general terms described what it is like to be in a good relationship with somebody or a good relationship with God, and they absolutely heaved burdened upon burdened upon burdened upon people.
Jesus comes along and this is his approach: spit, mix, smear, wash, be healed. We have to understand that this is no magical formula for healing blind people. I actually wonder how many people have tried to emulate what Jesus did, not knowing that what Jesus was after here, the mud had nothing to do with the healing. Jesus was one that healed. The mud had everything to do about coming against the religious rules and regulations that were binding people up from having a true love relationship with Jesus Christ. It was basically an attack on religion, gone amuck. That's what it was. It was an attack on religion gone amuck.
Even the pool that Jesus sent the blind man to was a central part of a cleansing ritual that, believe it or not, on the last day of Sukkot, the high priest would take an entourage and go to this pool and gather water and come back and do their ablations and all their ceremonial things for cleansing and even some for healing. This blind man walks in with mud on his eyes and gets in the pool ahead of the high priest and comes out seeing.
Wow, I would have loved to see that. Jesus violates the religious law, not only by healing on the Sabbath, by making mud and applying it as a healing agent and then sends the man into the center of a religious ceremony to wash off the mud in the holy water of the pool of Siloam. I love Jesus. This is all intentional and it's all rather confrontational, because Jesus chose a forbidden time, the Sabbath, a prohibited way, making mud a or potion to make his point and then he sent him to a provocative place. He sent him to a place that was going to provoke outrage among the religious leaders.
Do you notice how the religious leaders treated this man? They all had seen him. They had actually not allowed him to become part of a lot of their ceremonies, especially on holy days because he was born blind and therefore, it was because of some sin. They knew who he was and all of a sudden he's seeing and they can't figure it out. How did this happen? Who did this? Why is this being done on the Sabbath? They could care less about this person. This is why God said, "I will give you shepherd after my own heart," not religious leaders who can quote the law. Jesus wasn't just ignoring the religious rules of the Pharisees to Jesus was actually going after them. He was exposing them for the mockery that they were. One of the reasons Jesus said to his disciples, if you've seen me, you've seen the father is because what they were raised in by the religious leaders represented God in a way that God wasn't at all. The church has continued to do that for 2000 years.
And so where does that leave us? Where does that leave us? I think we need to examine our own oral Torah, our own religious rules. We need to examine our thoughts and our ways that might lead us into categorizing people as us versus them. I think we need to ask what ways have we made people feel marginalized and devalued and ostracized as a church, as a person that claims to be a Christian. In what ways have we made people feel as though they don't measure up or aren't good enough? How have we done this? It's really easy to look at a condescending Pharisee like these Pharisees were and say, "how could they do that" and not see how we have done? Maybe the very same thing only in a different way because it's 2022; it's not AD 30.
I pray that we will see where we have become like a Pharisee. I pray that we will see where we have fallen into that same trap. We should ask ourselves the question, what does Jesus want to go after in our lives that God might say, that is not what I want? What is in our lives, how we believe or how we think where God might say to us, that's not what I want. I want mercy. When you see a victim, instead of saying, but he did this or he did that or that was there. Every time we see woundedness, it's an opportunity for us to bring The grace of Jesus to that woundedness. I can hear Jesus now: I want mercy, not religious rituals. I want mercy. I want people whose hearts are like my heart. I want people whose hearts are like my heart. Let's just take a moment to pray. Pastor Robert, would you come?
Robert: I don't know if there's anyone in the audience here, in the building, but I feel in my spirit that there are those of you that are watching by livestream, that God wants to speak to you. He has spoken to you and I feel led to pray for you, for those that Have been rejected by those who should have loved you, who have demeaned you when they should have valued you, all in the auspices of being a leader in the church, a leader in the community. By proxy, I want to ask Forgiveness. As I stand in the office of a shepherd, I ask you to forgive us for not representing the spirit of Christ and for using a place of authority or an office to hold a rod over your head, or have you jump through hoops or meet certain expectations that go beyond What the holy spirit has designed for your life.
I pray for those chains That I've been for armed on your mind and around your heart, I command those change to be broken in the name of Jesus, and that every place where as a defense mechanism, you formed a false identity because of shame because of guilt, because of condemnation, that that false identity would fall by the wayside and that your identity in Christ would come forward, for he is the breaker. Many in our lives, religion, religious leaders, churches have blamed the devil For human error when the greatest enemy in our lives has not been, the devil Has been by our own tainted hearts.
But I pray that you would release all resentment, all bitterness, all unforgiveness, and that you would declare this day that you are accepted in the open arms of Jesus, for he loves you and he accepts you and he wants to cleanse you and make you whole. For you matter to him and he desires for you to be perfect in him. So I pray that everyone, at the sound of my voice, that you will hear the heart of God and be wrapped in his embrace and he will melt away all your fears, all your doubts, all your unbelief, and you will commune with him and he will commune with you and he won't let go. So I pray that you lay it all at his feet today, never to pick it up again, and allow his cleansing power to overtake you and be free in Jesus' mighty name. Amen.
Brian: If you prayed that prayer with Pastor Robert, we ask that you contact us. We have a video series we would like to send you on why you matter to God. It's a video series that Jacque and I put together and it’s just some very important reasons that help us change our thinking about our own self worth and so forth. We would love to send that to you, so please write to us. We need your email address to send it to you. If you could do that, we would appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today. All of you who are here, thank you for braving the icy roads and coming by ATV and four wheelers and snowmobiles and everything else today. Those of you watching from Florida, you probably think I'm joking, but I'm not, actually. Thank you for being with us today. Let's raise our hands together. Let me bless you.
Now, may the Lord bless you and may the Lord keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you and may the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his peace and may your heart be full of mercy to all of those who are hurting. This, we pray in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. God bless you. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. Bye-bye .
Robert: For communion today, Brenda and Jim steam will be over for communion. So if you want to partake in communion today, please join them.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 3-6-22. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.