Episode Transcript
Well, good morning.
It's 10 o'clock.
Time for us to begin our Bible study.
Second Kings chapter 22 and verse 4 was our stopping place last week.
Kings 22 verse 4.
And we were reading about the silver that had been gathered by the keepers of the door of the temple after the money had been collected by the keepers from the people.
And King Josiah wanted an accounting of that money so he commanded that Hilkiah Sum up that money and as I studied for the lesson this week I Meditated on the fact that it was the high priest who was commanded to sum up the silver So if you look back in verse 3 It says and it came to pass in the 18th year of King Josiah that the king sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah the son of Meshulam the scribe to the house of the Lord saying Go up to Hilkiah the high priest that he may sum the silver which is brought into the house of the Lord and my first thought as I meditated on this was That this was not normally an assignment that you would give to the high priest Can you imagine the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, which is quite a large church Both in its building and the number of people who go there.
Can you imagine the pastor?
Being the one who counts the money Well, let me tell you there's nobody who is too big to perform a small task in the church So we want to get that out of the way But I expect that Pastor Jeffress has faithful deacons or accountants, staff members who handle the money counting, so he can tend to the duties of a pastor, which are the ministry of the word and prayer.
And if you're interested in that, you can find that in the book of Acts, there in chapters 6, 7, 8.
And, but I suspect that if Pastor Jeffress were the only one available to count the money, he'd do it and he'd do it faithfully.
In our text, the high priest was not given the option of designating the counting of the silver to someone else, at least not according to what we're looking at here so far.
He was to do it himself. would be his responsibility to do it.
And then my second thought was that this high priest Hilkiah was to be blamed because he had allowed money to be received by the keepers of the door of the Lord's house without having that money counted or recorded and because he was responsible ultimately for that money even though the keepers of the door gathered it because the hill because he'll kind of the high priest was ultimately responsible for that money Josiah sent the order to him to sum up the silver to count it perhaps it would remind the high priest to start paying closer attention to the affairs of the temple, which was his primary duty.
The Old Testament priests, if you don't remember this, I'll refresh your memory, those Old Testament priests had courses, C-O-U-R-S-E-S, or divisions of labor in the Bible, and that labor was divided both by the nature of the task itself and the time period during which they were responsible for those tasks.
In Luke chapter 1 verse 5 Luke chapter 1 verse 5 it says, "There was in the days of Herod the king of Judah a certain priest named Zacharias of the course of Abia and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron and her name was Elizabeth.
So the course of Abia, there's the word course, it's in the New Testament but it's the same thing.
The course of Abia means the division of Abia, the division of labor of Abia and And that name actually in the Old Testament is Abijah, A-B-I-J-A-H.
It's the same person.
And in 1 Chronicles chapter 24, we're told about a time when King David created more divisions of these Levites in order to organize the labor that was done in the temple that he wanted to build.
You remember he made all those preparations for the temple to be built, gathered all the materials, but God said, "You're a bloody man.
I'm not letting you build the temple."
And he let his son build it, Solomon.
But this was during the time when David was organizing all of this effort in preparation for that temple.
And in verse 10 of that chapter, that's 1st Chronicles 2410, speaking of those divisions of labor, it says, the seventh to Hakaz, the eighth to Abijah, whose name is Abiyah in the New Testament text in Luke that I read a minute ago.
Now if you study that chapter in 1st Chronicles 24 you'll see that those men, those Levites, were descendants from Aaron's sons Eleazar and Ithamar.
Now Aaron had two other sons but they died because they offered strange fire to the Lord, they died childless, Nadab and Abihu.
And these are the two sons who continued, Ithamar and Eleazar.
And so David created 24 divisions of labor or courses based upon the sons of Eleazar and Ithemar who came from the high priest Aaron.
And if you divide those courses of labor into the weeks of a year, then you have each course serving approximately two weeks, just maybe a little bit longer than two weeks.
And those weeks start with the first week of the Jewish New Year.
So it's not a Jewish New Year was the celebration of the Passover as we saw in Exodus chapter 12 he said this will be a beginning of months for you.
So the eighth course would have been somewhere around the 16th week or maybe the 17th or 18th week of their year and that would put the course of Abiyah or Abijah in the middle of the summer sometime around maybe late June early July.
Remember we're trying to understand the importance of Hilkiah the high priest being the one who was ordained to sum up the silver that had been collected in the Lord's house both during Josiah's reign and before Josiah's reign.
There's no telling how much money was in there.
There's no telling how much money had been stolen out of there too.
Numbers chapter 1 verse 50, Numbers chapter 1 verse 50, the instructions are given to Moses it says, "but thou shalt appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of the testimony and over all the vessels thereof and over all the things that belong to it."
Now what would that include?
That would include money, wouldn't it?
They shall bear the tabernacle and all the vessels thereof, and they shall minister unto it and shall encamp round about the tabernacle.
So the work of the Levites, all of those who descended from Levi, the work of the Levites was to tend to all the things that belong to the tabernacle.
Now here in second Kings 22 we're reading about the temple.
That was the hard permanent structure that was built under Solomon's reign.
But in the days of Moses, it was the tabernacle of the wilderness, that portable structure that they took down and put up in certain order and then took it down and carried it and put it up in a certain order as the Lord led them through the wilderness and that wilderness journey.
So the work of the Levites was to tend to all things that belong to the tabernacle, which would necessarily include the silver that was brought into it.
Well, what was the job of the high priest?
Remember he represented God to the people and the people to God, and he had a full-time job.
He was the one who entered into the most Holy place once a year to make atonement for Israel.
He offered the various offerings and you can read all about those details in the book of Exodus and Leviticus and numbers.
And there's one verse in particular that tells me the high priest was not likely to be the one counting the silver brought into the temple in numbers.
Chapter three, verse 32.
Numbers chapter three, verse 32 and Eliezer, the son of Aaron, the priest shall be chief over the chief of the Levites and have the oversight of them that keep the charge of the sanctuary.
Eliezer was the son of Aaron, the high priest.
So Eliezer would be the high priest when his father passed away.
And Eliezer, according to this.
Verse I just read you was the supervisor over the supervisors.
He was the supervisor of the ones who kept charge of the sanctuary.
So when it came to counting silver, he was like the bank president rather than one of the tellers.
Now bank president knows how to count money.
Pretty good chance that a bank president was a teller at some point in his or her life.
So it's important to remember that Hill Kaya's principal job was not to count silver, but to be in charge of the ones who did.
And because he did not do his job of supervising the keepers of the door.
Now he would have to do their job.
This is an important biblical principle when it comes to leadership, by the way.
If you don't, and you can apply this to any job you want, if you don't oversee the people who are under you, then you'll have to do the work of the people under you.
My uncle, my dad's, one of his older brothers, owned an air conditioning business for a long time.
And occasionally he would hire a hand, that's what he called an employee, he'd hire a hand, hire somebody to do that work so he didn't have to go to every job site.
And he still worked.
And sometimes, I was in the truck with him one time, I was a teenager just riding around with him because I liked to be with him and like to work with him.
And he had a little two-way radio, like a CB, and so he could talk to his workers on that radio.
And one of them had finished a job doing some duct work, but to get to this large air conditioning duct, he had to tear out some wood.
And so he called my uncle on the radio and he said, "We're going to need a carpenter out here."
And my uncle said, "For what?"
He said, "Well, they're going to have to put this wood back together."
He said, "No, you're going to put the wood back together."
He said, "You took it apart, you put it back together."
And that's the way he felt about it.
Well, he ended up having to go behind that man to do his job and he finally had to get rid of him.
Now that was, he was properly supervising that man and still had to go behind him to take care of business that the man should have been taking care of himself.
Hilkiah, on the other hand, had not been properly supervising these keepers of the gate, and so now he's going to have to do their job for a little bit.
As a patrol sergeant in my secular job, I supervise a squad of deputies.
Now when I was a deputy, my job was to vigorously, and I did, vigorously enforce the traffic laws and to work serious collisions and to write investigative reports and all that comes with that.
That's no longer my job.
If I were to engage in the work of a deputy at the pace that I used to, then I wouldn't have time to supervise my deputies who are supposed to be doing that.
That's just a basic principle of leadership.
But as a supervisor, if I fail to lead my deputies, and let's say I just stay at my house the whole night and take a nap, which is tempting to do when you work deep nights, but let's say I did that, then their work is going to suffer at some point, isn't it?
They won't have me there to guide them in the right way to do the job and to provide correction when they make mistakes.
And at some point, I will be held accountable for the poor quality of their work.
My lieutenant will say, "Hey, what's going on with your shift?
They keep messing things up.
We keep getting complaints about the way things are handled."
He's coming to me about their work.
And I'll be held accountable.
And that means I'll have to go out with them, start completely over, do the job for them and show them how to do it, step by step, and had Hilkiah been exercising oversight of the keepers of the door in the temple like Eleazar was supposed to do over them that had oversight of the temple, then he would have already known how much silver was in the chest.
It would have been at his fingertips.
Now here's something else to consider about the silver gathered by the keepers of the door whether it was then or now.
And we touched on this last week when we were talking about one of the many crooked ministries and I hate to call it a ministry, it's not.
That Kenneth Copeland sham where he gets rich off everybody else's money and says that that's proof that there's a God.
Boy, if that's proof that there's a God, then there's not one in my life.
Is there?
Well, I know better than that.
The cross is proof.
There's a God, what the spirit of God does through his word in the life of a believer, regardless of how much money you have, that's proof there's a God.
But those, those keepers of the door.
Where we know they were crooked for the most part.
Now there could have been an honest one in there somewhere, I don't really know, but I know that Hill Kai the priest wasn't doing his job.
And when the supervisor doesn't do his job, that tends to lead to people below him not doing their jobs.
Now you're always going to have one outlier.
And you may, I hope you are one of these people that no matter how bad things are around you, no matter how bad your supervisor is and your co-workers are, you're the shining light in that workplace and you're going to do the job, right?
Because you're not doing it for them.
You're doing it as under the Lord.
And so there may have very well been some workers in that temple, some Levi's in that temple who were honest.
And feared the Lord, but by and large, that was not the case.
And so you think about those keepers of the door, those Levites, and then the people who brought the money in.
Well, you know, the Levites ministered under the Lord and the people ministered to the Levites they gave.
And there were certain parts of the animal that the Levites would get to eat.
And so they didn't have to go out and be full-time, uh, farmers or woodcutters or gold diggers or any of that.
And so they depended on what the people gave in order to eat.
And so if that's the case it would be very easy for the givers of the silver to use their gifts to manipulate those priests.
And today and it's been this way as far as I know some churches have members in them who use their tithes who hold that money over the pastor's head.
You take a, you take a small church somewhere.
It could be a big church, but a small one would really be susceptible to it.
And let's say in that small church, you had 50 members and they were all.
There's dirt poor and what they gave wasn't a whole lot.
It was their tie.
That was their offering, but it just wasn't a whole lot because they didn't have a lot.
And suppose in that church you had one rancher who owned hundreds of thousands of acres of land and he was a multimillionaire and when he gave his tithe, boy, it really, it really upped the bank account.
And let's say that rancher said, pastor, I'm about tired of hearing you preaching on drinking.
If you want to keep my check coming into the bank, you probably better knock that off.
And see, that's what a person like that would do to manipulate what the pastor preaches or what he teaches.
And so there certainly is that opportunity, whether by direct threat or insinuation, the financially wealthy members of those churches or the financially wealthy Jews in these days we're reading about have the power to control the priests and the pastors.
If the pastor allows that to happen, if the priests allow that to happen.
And this is one of the reasons why the apostle Paul had a secular job.
He tells us, this is one of the reasons he had a secular job as a tent maker.
First Thessalonians two verse nine, first Thessalonians two, verse nine.
For you remember brethren, our labor and travail for laboring night and day, because we would not be chargeable unto any of you. we preached unto you the gospel of God."
So Paul is teaching us here, he preached the gospel, but he also worked outside of that.
Because he would not be chargeable to any of them.
In other words, none of you are going to get a stranglehold over me because I'm preaching what you don't like, so you hold back your giving.
That's what he was showing us here.
That was his reason For, uh, having that secular job.
And he speaks of that elsewhere in the new Testament.
He wrote the same thing to the Corinthian church there in second Corinthians 11, verse nine, you see, Paul was the opposite of a crooked doorkeeper.
It was more important for him to have the Liberty to preach the gospel and the things that flow from the gospel than it was to make a good living as a preacher.
And you know when a church takes financial care of its pastor it should always, always be out of obedience to the scriptures, not out of a carnal desire to control the pastor or what he decides or what he preaches or who he favors.
And I I am truly convinced that the members of this church and the visitors who give have always had the right motive for providing financial support to the pastoral members.
And I'm very thankful for that.
But just in case, your pastor and I have secular jobs because it's more important for us to preach the gospel than to receive a dime from anyone who is a member of the church.
But I'm not worried about that.
We tend to attract people because we're preaching the word and getting rid of all the extraneous stuff we tend to attract people who love God's word so they love to give.
And this is a very, very giving church.
I can promise you that.
Let's look down in verse 5 now.
If you just joined us, you're late, but we do welcome you to our Sunday school class.
Second Kings 22 verse 5. of the keepers of the door of the temple and let them deliver it into the hand of the doers of the work that have the oversight of the house of the Lord and let them give it to the doers of the work which is in the house of the Lord to repair the breaches of the house."
So after this silver is summed up, after we know how much money we've got, the next thing to do is to deliver it into the hands of the ones who are doing the work.
And it said that have the oversight of the house of the Lord.
The Hebrew word for oversight is normally translated as the word number more than any other word.
So an overseer, one who has oversight, one who numbers in this capacity, he takes care of the numbers.
Whether it's the numbers of the workers or the inventory of supplies or the money, the projects, the list might go on.
And here these overseers were actually part of the ones who did the work.
You have to have overseers and workers, don't you?
In your church your pastor is the overseer.
Brother Fulton is our overseer and that doesn't mean he doesn't work and y'all know that but his primary job is to oversee the work of the church in fact his primary job is the ministry of the word to give himself to the ministry of the word and prayer.
I remember sharing well brother Fulton shared this with me we were talking about a particular church and we both knew the pastor there years ago and the pastor was having to do a lot of the work around the church.
Cutting the grass and taking care of the odds and ends that have to be taken care of because the members of his church weren't doing it.
And it was taking his time away from the ministry of the word and other things he had to do. do and he also had a secular job.
And so he asked, uh, brother Fulton, he said, I don't know what to do.
And brother Fulton said, let the grass grow.
She let it grow.
Just keep growing.
You give yourself to the ministry of the word and prayer.
It was words to that effect.
And I thought, well, that's pretty good advice.
Now that'd be a shame.
Wouldn't I tell you what I've never.
I've never worried about the things around this church being taken care of.
We've always had people who stepped up and do that.
And you know who you are and we appreciate you and some aren't here anymore.
And we appreciated them when they were here and did those things.
I didn't appreciate the porch being painted white.
I'm just going to tell you that and we'll move right along here.
But we got that taken care of.
Now the work of the church, by the way, is the gospel ministry, the edification, the building up of the saints through the teaching of the scriptures.
And that verse said, let them give it to the doers of the work, which is in the house of the Lord to repair the breaches of the house.
So now we're getting a little bit more specific about the actual work that was to be done.
It was repairing the breaches.
The breaches are the gaps are the torn places the holes and the house of the Lord in those days had all of that going on.
So this silver was to be summed it was to be given to those who would do this work and the ones who would repair the breaches were look back in verse 7 carpenters, builders, and masons.
So even more specifically, these skilled workers are named here.
So the nature of their work tells you where the breaches were.
If you have carpenters, that means you probably have rotten wood or broken wood.
If you've got builders, then that's a little more of a generic term but you have things that are not built they're torn down they need to be rebuilt.
If you have masons then that means you've got stone that's been broken that's in disrepair.
These things have been left unrepaired even though there was silver that had been supplied to the house of the Lord.
Now that's just financial laziness isn't it?
We've got the money we're just not going to fix the Lord's house which makes you wonder where did all that money go all those years if it wasn't to fix the Lord's house.
It was probably stolen to do worldly things outside of that and it It says in verse 7, "And to buy timber and hewn stone to repair the house."
So at a very basic level, we can conclude that the house of the Lord was in physical disrepair.
When you looked at it, you said, "Wow, that thing is a mess."
Now a kid with my wife, every once in a while we'll be driving somewhere and I'll see an old house little I like little old house that's less vacuuming a little house sitting off the road in a pasture somewhere and I'll say you know I bet you I could fix that up and that'd be a nice little place to live and she'll make some noise like oh I don't blame her I'm just kidding I know I know those things are a money pit sometimes it's better just bulldoze them down and start over.
But you can see with your eyes, oh it's in disrepair.
You wouldn't dare live there now.
And what's more here is that in this state of disrepair, the high priest seemed to be okay with it.
When we have a leak in our roof, somebody would normally come up and tell us, hey brother Andy I was back in the such-and-such room or when I came in the sanctuary I saw water dripping down and that becomes an immediate priority for us because we want that leak stopped we want the damage repaired we want the cause of the leak identified and fixed and for us just to continue to meet in the church with water dripping down and running all over the floor and the ceiling falling in, well that would just be foolish, wouldn't it?
Would not fixing the damage make it go away?
No.
If you just ignore the damage, it doesn't go away.
So Hilkiah must have at some point noticed the first breach, the first hole, the first gap, the first torn place in the house of the Lord.
And not just Hilkiah, but the other Levites as well.
Their job was service of the temple.
Everything that went on in there.
But we don't read of anyone sounding the alarm and saying hey we have a leak in the roof or hey we have a hole in the wall or the stone is crumbling over here at the entrance.
They just got used to it.
Have you ever wondered how a hoarder can let his house gets so bad?
Well it starts and there are obviously some emotional problems with somebody who who is a hoarder.
There's no doubt about that.
I don't discount those.
But the truth is the hoarder gets used to it.
He has that first pile of magazines that he doesn't pick up and then he throws another one on top of that and he puts a box next to it and then there's a mess over here, some spilled chips that don't get cleaned up.
And before you know it, one more box, one more pile of clothes, and it won't hurt anything, right?
We'll just leave it there, and before you know it, the poor man can't get through his house.
But rather than clean that mess up or have somebody come help him do it, he just kind of creates little tunnels to walk through.
If y'all have ever seen that, it's very sad.
It's evidence evident to me that these physical breaches in the house of the Lord just piled up and went unrepaired.
Now why did that happen?
How did it progress to that point?
Well the answer ultimately is in the neglect of God's word.
All these things are symptoms, signs.
And you might say, "Well, what does God's word have to do with a hole in the wall or a leak in the ceiling of the building going unrepaired?"
Well, let's look at the progression of that problem.
Listen to the prophet Haggai. one verses three through nine Haggai, H-A-G-G-A-I if you forgot, chapter one verses three through nine.
Then came the word of the Lord by Haggai the prophet saying, is it time for you O ye to dwell in your sealed houses?
Now that means a house with a ceiling on it.
And this house, speaking of the Lord's house, lie waste.
Now therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts, consider your ways.
You have so much and you bring in little.
You eat, but you have not enough.
You drink, but you're not filled with drink.
You clothe you, but there is none warm.
And he that earneth wages, earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.
Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Consider your ways.
Go up to the mountain and bring wood and build the house and I will take pleasure in it.
And I will be glorified, saith the Lord.
You looked for much and lo, it came to little, and when you brought it home, I did blow upon it.
Why saith the Lord of hosts?
Because of mine house that is waste, and ye run everman unto his own house."
God very specifically mentions the condition of his house in Haggai's writings.
And he also mentions the conditions of the houses of the children of Israel, calling them sealed houses, C I E L E D meaning they have ceilings or coverings.
That's what that means is a covering like a roof.
And those sealed houses were contrasted with the Lord's house, which God said lie waste, and that same word translated waste is also translated as desolate or dry.
Now the Lord's house wasn't in this condition because the people were dirt poor and couldn't afford to fix it.
That's not why it was in the condition it was in and reading from the text in Haggai, we learned that they had seed to sow.
They had something to drink.
They had clothes and wages.
That means they made money.
The problem was the children of Israel were greedy and selfish.
Their labors went to waste.
He said, you had, you earn wages, but you earn it to put it in a bag that has holes in it.
I know people like that.
And if you're one of them, you need to get right financially with the scriptures.
You shouldn't be spending more than you make.
It ought to be the other way around.
And if you're in debt and you either are or you have been, it's a terrible feeling because that's what you feel like.
I've got this money coming in and I'm trying to put it in this bag, but the bag has a hole in it and the money keeps going out the other end.
And I don't know what to do.
So that's the condition that Israel was in, but they were wasting their money.
They were propping up their own houses, But they weren't taking care of the house of the Lord.
I taught on Haggai.
It's been quite a few years now, but we did a verse by verse study.
It was a little shorter than Jeremiah.
Wasn't it?
Yeah, quite a bit actually.
And so in verse eight of that passage that I read you from, from Haggai, God told them, here's how you're going to fix that, go up to the mountain and bring wood and build the house. and I will take pleasure in it and I will be glorified, saith the Lord."
Now for Israel to go up to the mountain and bring wood, they had to first stop what they were doing where they were.
They had to stop what they were doing before.
They couldn't continue to sow this seed that brought little.
They couldn't continue to drink and clothe themselves with new clothes and burn through their money.
They had to stop all of that.
And that's the first step right there, isn't it?
Stop doing what you're doing that's harmful.
Just, you got to stop.
And somebody goes into the emergency room, if they have a severed artery and a cold, Brother Luke doesn't say, well, let's get some medicine for that cold and see if you feel better in a little bit.
He's going to stop that bleeding first and worry about all the rest later.
So here you have to stop the bleeding, literally you have to stop what's harmful and after they stopped doing what was harmful, what was selfish, then they had to give of themselves to the Lord's work and that giving started with a trip up the mountain.
Rebuilding the Lord's house is hard work.
Climbing a mountain is hard work.
And then when they got themselves up that mountain They had to cut down trees and gather the wood.
If you think pruning the inner canopy of my oak tree is difficult, cutting those branches and bundling them and setting them out by the curb, if you think that's hard, try climbing up a mountain and cutting down multiple trees and bringing them back down.
That's a lot of work.
Cutting down those trees was not so the children of Israel could come back and sell the wood and make a profit and then go waste their money.
It was for the purpose of repairing the Lord's house.
In fact, the words Haggai used were "build the house."
Are you ready for a special blessing?
I know you are.
Let me tell you where the Hebrew word for build was first used in the Bible.
Genesis chapter 2 in verse 22 and I want you to listen for it.
Genesis 2 verse 22, "And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man made he a woman and brought her unto the man."
Did you hear it?
You didn't hear the word build did you?
That's because it was translated as the word rib.
Yeah, the word rib.
From the same Hebrew word translated as bill and haggai.
From Adam's rib God made him a bride.
He built him a bride, didn't he?
Made him a bride.
Adam is a type of the Lord Jesus Christ from whom his bride came.
Both the tabernacle and all of its furnishings and the instruments, the materials that were found in the temple and that made the temple, all of those were representations of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You can take any part of the temple and teach about Jesus.
And the Israelites were instructed through Haggai to go up the mountain gather the wood and build the house of the Lord and the house of the Lord was the rib taken from the Lord himself how so for that house to be built or rebuilt as the word also signifies it had to be done according to the pattern that the Lord gave them they couldn't just gather the wood around town or find secondhand wood that nobody else was using or maybe some pre-cut lumber that would do the job.
They had to go up the mountain and start over with brand new wood and build it right from the very beginning.
For the church to be the Lord's church it has to be built according to the pattern the Lord gave us.
Matthew 16, verses 16 through 18.
Matthew 16, verses 16 through 18.
And Simon Peter answered and said, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.
And Jesus answered and said unto him, blessed art thou Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
Jesus' church must come from Jesus himself just as Eve came from the rib of Adam himself.
Jesus originated his church not Peter.
God originated the tabernacle not man.
Moses simply built the tabernacle according to the pattern God showed him in the mountain.
And in Haggai, the Israelites would not just be collecting wood for the ceiling of the Lord's house.
They were showing a picture of the rib, the church of the Lord, built properly in his way.
And in our text, the Jews would have to repair the house of the Lord the way Josiah commanded them.
And with that, we'll close and come back next week and continue our analysis of how the Lord's house got as bad as it was.
Father, thank you for all who came and tuned in.
Thank you for your faithfulness to teach us from your word by your spirit.
And I pray that we would retain what we learn and build upon it next week when we come back to continue this study.
Bless us now, we pray, during the next hour as we sing and worship you, and as we are fed from the word of God, that the saints may be built up in the most holy faith, and that all sinners will be drawn unto you through the gospel.
In Jesus' name, amen.
