Return to Egypt

Good morning. And happy birthday, Shepherds Gate. Can you believe we’ve made it 46 years as a church? Isn’t that incredible? And in case you’re wondering, we love making a big deal out of our birthday.

Each and every year we feel that what it does is it honors God and it shows the way that he is faithful and the way that he works through ordinary people like me and like you to accomplish his purpose in and through this church, amen? Well, if you’re new here this morning, we wanna warmly welcome you. Maybe this is your first time or you’ve been checking us out for the last couple of weeks. Just wanna let you know that myself and a couple other staff members will be in the middle of the West Lobby.

And if you wouldn’t mind just coming up and introducing yourself so that we can actually thank you for joining us today. Also wanna say hi to all of those that are watching online or maybe you’re watching later on demand and a special welcome to all of our really good friends that are tuning in from First Lutheran and Algonac as we are continuing our sermon series on the book of Exodus. So we’ve actually made it up to week six out of the 12 weeks for the first part of Exodus 1 that we’re going through.

Can you believe we’re already, by the end of today, we’ll be halfway through this first part of Exodus. I mean, it’s been an incredible journey so far. If you are new to Shepherd’s Gate, what we love to do is go through books of the Bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse, word by word.

And we actually encourage people to bring their Bibles to church, which is why the lights are up so you can see your Bibles and to leave your cell phones in your cars. Thank you. So apparently Albrecht’s the only one that did that today.

No, we want you to bring your Bibles and to leave your cell phones in your car because let’s be honest, there’s so many things vying for our attention. There’s so many distractions and to make this sacred space for one hour or one and a half hours, if you’re able to stick around and have coffee after the service, to just hone in and let God speak to us because we believe that God speaks to us through his word. Amen? Amen.

So I wanna let you know that today is gonna be a very special day. I don’t know how many of you read the passage today before you came, but the text today is really difficult. In fact, most pastors skip over what we are going to look at today.

And even as I was doing research this week, and I got our other two pastors, Ben and Eric involved, and we were doing a deep dive, we couldn’t believe how much is not written about some of the verses that we are gonna go over today. Even one pastor, I read what he said as he was summarizing these chapters, and he said, I would just encourage you pastors to skip these verses. Which those of you that know me and you know this church, we are not going to do that.

In fact, we’re gonna do the opposite. We’re gonna dig even deeper into the really awkward ones. How many of you are excited about this today? So again, good.

So if you’re a guest, especially if this is your first time here, and you walk away and you’re like, what in the world was that? You gotta come back the next couple of weeks and hang with us, and you’ll get to know us a little bit more. So with that, let’s look at what we did go over last week. It was the first part of chapter four.

Today we’re gonna be going over the second part of chapter four. And we find our main character, Moses. God has appeared to him in a burning bush after spending 40 years as a shepherd out in the wilderness.

God asked him a simple question, a rhetorical question. What is that in your hand? Moses didn’t pick up on the fact that God already knows, but Moses answers, oh, it’s a staff. And then they have this discussion.

They have this kind of debate because God is telling Moses that he has picked him to be the one to go back to Egypt to free the children of Israel out of bondage and slavery. And so Moses has got a lot of questions and objections along the way. God, in a way, to try to calm some of his fears allows him to perform some miracles.

And so he throws his staff on the ground. It becomes a snake. He puts his hand in his shirt.

He pulls it out. It’s full of leprosy. He puts it back.

It’s healed. He even gives them a third one as kind of a bonus one that if you get there and people don’t actually believe that God spoke to you, you can go get a pail of water, take it out of the Nile, and when you dump it on the ground, it’ll turn to blood. So all of these things should have been an encouragement to Moses.

It should have been a sign that really God was with him. God also said, I’m gonna give you the words to say. I’m gonna even tell you how to say it, when to say it.

Everything that you need, I’m gonna equip you to do it. And then we learn that Moses decided to say to God, sir, creator of the universe, I think you made a mistake. In fact, I think you should send somebody else.

And God wasn’t too happy about that. In fact, his anger burned against Moses. We don’t fully know what that means or what that looks like.

We just know that Moses picked up on that. Moses is the one that wrote this. So something happened in that moment.

And so God also in his grace ends up giving Aaron, Moses’ brother, to him to go and to say and to perform the miracles together. But the cool part is, is at the very end of last week that he told Moses, hey, you need to pick up that staff because you’re not getting out of this. You are to grab that staff and I am gonna work in and through the staff that I gave you and that is in your hand to perform those signs.

So if you have your Bibles, if you wanna open to Exodus chapter four, verses 18, we’re gonna be through 18 through the end of chapter four today. And it says this, Moses went back to Jethro, which is his father-in-law and he said to him, we’re really asking him, let me return to my own people. Okay, the people that are enslaved, the children of Israel that are in Egypt to see if any of them are still alive.

Now he’s doing this because he’s part of his father-in-law’s family business. He’s also making the statement about whether they’re still alive because if you weren’t here, Moses is actually a murderer. He’s killed an Egyptian for mistreating an Israelite.

No one has come and brought him back to stand trial before a judge or a jury or Pharaoh. He hasn’t spent any time in prison. So that’s always this lingering thought in the back of Moses’s head.

And like all good father-in-laws, when they want to, you know, the son-in-law wants to take your daughter and move her to another state, what should the father-in-law say? Those of you with daughters? Okay, well, that’s not what Jethro said. He said, sure, go and sends him with a blessing. You take her, take my grandkids and I wish you well.

Now the Lord had said to Moses in Midian, which is where he was at, you’re gonna go back to Egypt for all those who wanted to kill you are dead. The reason God is saying this is to bring comfort once again to Moses. Hey, those people that you’re worried about that would know that you were a murderer, that you did this, whether it was Egyptians or Israelites, okay, all of them in these certain groups, a lot of that has dissipated and so it’s just gonna be a different scenario when you show up.

Now, if you were here a few weeks ago, you might remember when we were talking about Moses and how God used Moses, his mother, his sister and Pharaoh’s daughter to save his life because he was placed in a basket in the Nile, even as other innocent Hebrew boys were thrown in the Nile and they were drowned and they were murdered and they were killed, Moses’ life was saved. That was a foreshadowing of the Christmas account that we read in scripture. That was a foreshadowing of when Jesus was born and a ruthless dictator named Herod, he ordered all of the baby boys in the vicinity two years and under to be murdered and it was a terrible, awful, dark time in history just as it was for Moses.

This is also a foreshadowing of that as well because when Jesus’ family actually escaped to Egypt, which is where they were hiding baby Jesus, an angel came to Jesus’ dad, Joseph, and said, guess what, you can take Jesus and his mom, you can go back to your hometown because those that sought the child’s life are what? Including Herod, so you can kind of see the parallels there in the Bible. Verse 20, so Moses took his wife and his sons, put them on a donkey and started back to Egypt and he took the staff of God in his hand. If you were here last week, you remember that this instrument, this physical object that when it’s combined with the power of God has the ability to perform miracles and so from here on out, it’s gonna be referred to as the staff of God or the rod of God.

This is God’s staff, Moses just gets to hold onto it and watch God at work in and through it. Then it says this, the Lord said to Moses, when you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. Hey, reminder, remember our little interaction with the burning bush, remember what I told you to do, all of those miracles are still in your back pocket, those are the things that are gonna help you prove to Pharaoh that God in fact came and spoke to you.

The second part of this verse is the first kind of difficult verse that we have to navigate this morning because part B of verse 21 says this, this is God, but I will harden his heart, I will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will not let the people go. Wait a second, does God have the ability to harden a person’s heart? But I thought we all had free will, I thought we all had the ability to figure out where we stand with God, whether we receive God or whether we reject God. The question is, well, how can God harden a person’s heart? And I’ll tell you this, there are theological differences when it comes to this very passage.

There are church bodies, denominations, groups that believe that God is sovereign over all, which is what we believe, but they believe that God has already predestined who is going to go to heaven and who is going to go to hell. One of the ones is called predestination. So if God has already selected who is going to heaven, that’s predestination, if God has already selected who is going to hell, we call that double predestination.

And so the view is, is that God is using Pharaoh as an instrument of evil, like this is just his plan and Pharaoh has no choice in the matter, he was doomed from the time he was born, just like they would say that there’s other people on our planet that have been doomed since the time that they were born and no matter how hard they try, no matter what the gospel is presented to them in whatever fashion, that if God decides that they’re damned to hell, they’re damned to hell. That is not the case with us, we do not believe that as a church and our church body that we’re part of does not believe that. Here’s what we believe about this passage in the hardening of the heart.

Hardening does not equate or equal damnation. That just because God has the ability to harden someone’s heart does not mean that that person is automatically damned to hell. Pharaoh actually hardened his own heart starting in Exodus chapter seven, which we’re gonna get to in a few weeks.

What’s actually happening in this passage is God is just telling Moses the future. Again, everything that God’s doing is to bring comfort and assurance and confidence to Moses. Hey, at some point, God is going to harden his heart.

God has not hardened his heart yet, he is gonna wait for Pharaoh over and over and over again to harden his heart and when he sees that Pharaoh has no interest in believing in the one true God, then God divinely is going to act and he begins that hardening in Exodus, actually chapter nine after the sixth plague. Now, here’s what’s also important. God confirmed that condition in Pharaoh’s heart.

God did not create it, God did not start it, he confirms what it is that Pharaoh continued to believe in. There’s other portions of scripture that actually address this. If you read the first chapter of Romans, if you read 1 Corinthians, if you read 1 Timothy.

In Romans, Paul, who’s the writer of Romans, inspired by God, actually tells us that God gave some of the Roman people over to their sinful desires, their lust and their depraved minds. And he was specifically addressing people that were caught up in sexual sins and perversions. And so we see this repeated in the New Testament.

Paul, in Corinthians and in 1 Timothy, he actually says that he hands people over to the devil to be taught a lesson. Now, let’s pause there for a moment because I know this is getting awkward and it’s getting weird, but let’s be honest. We have people in our life that we would like to hand over to the devil to be taught a lesson.

Get real with me this morning. Anybody have a boss or a coworker? And you’re like, pastor, I don’t need to hand them over, they already are the devils. Come to work with me someday.

Or maybe you have a neighbor, or maybe you have a family member who’s rebellious, who never has anything good to say, who completely rejects God or any form of him, in fact, just constantly is a drain on the family. And when the scriptures say that someone is handed over to the devil, that is not damning them for all eternity. What those passages are actually saying and what they’re doing, it’s an act of grace.

That if they wanna continue in their sin, and we see this with people with addictions, we see this with people that have lustful ideas that let them get out of control, there are people that no matter what you say, what you do, what rehab you put them in, they continue down that road, and you hope that one day they hit rock bottom and the light finally comes on and they realize the error of their way. Because being serious for a moment, many of us, me included, have people in our families that reject God, that want nothing to do with God. And some of you, it’s very personal for you because you raised your kids in the church.

You brought them to Sunday school and services. You read them the Bible, you prayed with them, you modeled a Christian home, and now your kids want absolutely nothing to do with your God, your religion, or your church. And it breaks your heart.

You’ve probably spent countless nights on your knees crying out to God, and you don’t even know if you have any tears left in your eyes. And it’s heartbreaking because you want nothing more for them to finally come to their senses, for them to finally realize how much they are loved by Almighty God, and you’re doing everything that you can to model that and extend that grace to them. And you know what our responsibility is is to continue to pray for them, to continue to stand in the gap for them and to bring them before the Lord and pray if they have turned you off and if they’ve rejected you, that God would bring other Christian influences and other people in their lives that maybe, maybe, just maybe they would listen to and they would come to their senses, amen? So that’s what’s happening, and that’s what we believe.

In fact, the people that are on the other side of this debate will point to the scripture in Romans where Paul actually quotes Exodus, and it says this, that Pharaoh was raised up for this very purpose that God might display his power in and through Pharaoh that his name may be proclaimed to all the earth. And they’ll say, see here, he’s predestined for evil. And we’d say, no, no, no, no.

That’s not, that’s taking it out of context. In fact, go to 2 Peter where Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples said this, that the Lord is not slow in keeping his promise as some understand slowness, which can I just be honest with you? I don’t understand slowness. I don’t understand God’s timing on things.

I’ll tell you one of the biggest patient lessons that I’m learning is this whole faith forward and building campaign. And wherever Rob is at in the building is with me on this. Rob, where are you at? Where are you at? Over here, right? Dear Lord Jesus, why does it have to take so long? Because it’s not my timeline and it’s not up to me.

It’s up to God and what he wants to do. And even watching that video of the history of our church and all the ways that God has blessed us over the years. Like I know enough of the history of the church, just watching that little two and a half minute video to know many of those milestones that we celebrate today were not in the timeline of the leaders of this church.

It was being patient and waiting for God to unveil and unfold his plan that he has for this place. How about this one? The children of Israel, the people that are enslaved, they’re enslaved. Do you know how long they’ve been enslaved for? Correct, not 100, not 200, not 300, not, but 400 years.

God, that’s a little slow, in my opinion. IMO, right? 400 years. I mean, that’s a lot of people.

That’s a lot of generations to have to go through to unfold your plan. And I don’t even know if we’ll ever fully understand, comprehend or appreciate why it is that God does things in the timeframe that he does. Here’s the good news that we need to hear.

Instead, God is patient with you, which means he’s patient with me, given my fallen, sinful nature, given my impatient attitude, given my desire to wanna speed things up or to get ahead of God and to not wanna do things according to his timeline or to his plan, because here’s the key. He doesn’t want anyone to perish. It doesn’t say, well, he doesn’t want anyone to perish other than like, okay, Pharaoh, Herod, Judas, and some other characters from the Bible.

No, he says he doesn’t want anyone to perish. He wants everyone to come to repentance, including Pharaoh, the baby killer. Look at what it says next.

Then you’re to say this to Pharaoh. This is what the Lord says. Israel is my firstborn son, so that he understands how much he loves these people and how much he’s watched over them for these 400 years.

And I told you, let my son go so that he may worship me, but you refuse to let him go, so I will kill your firstborn son. Again, this is gonna happen later in the text. This is gonna happen later in our account.

He’s just telling Moses that when he goes and he begins to perform these miracles, not to get frustrated and not to get dismayed and not to hurry God up. He’s telling him he’s going to reject everything that you bring him, but eventually he’s going to have to listen to you. So Moses now has more instructions.

He’s got three miracles in his pocket. He’s got more instructions from God. He’s already gotten permission from his father-in-law.

So the next thing to do is to get on his way. So they’re on their way and they stop at the Motel 6 on the way to Egypt, okay? So they’re at a lodging place and the Lord meets Moses and it says this, and was about to, wait, what? This doesn’t make any sense. You just spent all that time first saving Moses as a baby, then watching over him for the 40 years that he was a shepherd.

Now you spent all this time with the burning bush and the miracles and everything else and even getting everybody ready. You’re just gonna kill him unless the hymn in this passage isn’t talking about Moses. In fact, in the Hebrew, we actually don’t know if this is talking about Moses or if it’s talking about Moses’ son.

Exodus was originally written in Hebrew and scholars have debated this passage because why would he go through all of that effort and why would he do all of those things just to get him to the middle of where he ultimately needs to end up in Egypt if he’s gonna take Moses’ life? Here are the next two verses, okay? These two next verses are the verses that people tell you to skip. You don’t need to talk about it in church. It’s really confusing.

It’s really ugly. We’re gonna read them. You ready? Buckle your seatbelts.

If you fell asleep, now’s a good time to wake up. But Zipporah, who’s Moses’ wife, took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it. Huh? What? You wanna kill somebody first? You don’t know if it’s Moses or? Wait, I’m gonna read it again.

But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it. It’s weird. Some of you that brought friends, I’m sorry that this is their first time at Shepherd’s Gate.

Please come back next week. It goes on to say, surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me. Okay, let’s make it even weirder.

She said, so the Lord let him alone. Well, was him Moses or the son? We don’t know. At that time, she said, bridegroom of blood, thanks be to God she defines it, is referring to circumcision.

How many are so excited that this sermon is about to turn into a circumcision sermon? Those of you that were here with Genesis, you remember this, we spent two whole weeks just talking about circumcision. You guys remember those sermons, don’t you, how many remember those sermons? If you’re new to Shepherd’s Gate and you wanna do a deep dive into circumcision, make sure you see me afterwards in the West Lobby, I will send you the two sermons back to back that we talked about circumcision. Because here’s the thing, circumcision is throughout all of scripture.

There’s plenty of scriptures, Old and New Testament, that talk about this very thing. Here’s the first thing to take into consideration. At the end of the day, even confusing and difficult passages like these two verses can be, we believe all scripture ultimately points to the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And so when we look at this, we look through the lens of okay God, what are you up to and what are you doing and are you using his wife in this manner because you’re trying to accomplish a greater plan for this family? Let me just give you some high level stuff when it comes to circumcision. Circumcision is a covenant between God and his people. God instituted circumcision, okay? This wasn’t man’s idea, this wasn’t Abraham’s idea, this wasn’t some medical doctor at the time that said, oh, we think this will be cleaner and look nicer for boys.

Okay, this is not the case. This was God’s design because he wanted a visible sign so that people knew who belonged to God and who didn’t belong to God. And at the beginning of the passage, the beginning of the chapter, God was dealing with Moses as an individual.

God has now shifted and he is now dealing with Moses’s entire family. Keep in mind, he’s doing this before they get to Egypt. For us here at Shepherd’s Gate, circumcision is actually connected to baptism.

At the nine o’clock, we got to watch a baby be baptized. It was absolutely incredible. We got to watch God at work.

And it’s not that there’s anything special about the water, it’s when God’s word is combined with the water, it has the power to change and transform our lives. God does the work, not me as a pastor, not of any of the other pastors. It’s all because of what it is that God does for us.

And in that covenant, in that sacrament, that is when God puts his seal of faith in our hearts and our lives and he calls us as his own. Are you following me? Whether it’s circumcision or baptism or now the rod of God, it is always God that is at work. Do you see how God becomes the center of everything that we believe and teach here at Shepherd’s Gate? Good, because I got more for you.

What is it that God is teaching Moses and what is God teaching us? Here’s the application this morning. Obedience to God’s plan. If God makes a covenant and God tells his people to do something, you better do it.

That’s why we have the Bible. That’s why we have God’s instruction. And it’s wild that we know the scriptures and we know right from wrong.

We know what to do and not do. God clearly lays it out in the scriptures because he knows what’s best for us, because he created us. And it’s not because he’s some dictator in heaven with his finger out and he’s trying to catch us or to get us off of what he has for us.

The reason he does these things is because he loves us. It’s him extending his grace and his mercy because he knows the best way to live with the little tiny short period of time that we actually have on this earth. Because eternity is what awaits us.

Not only is it about obedience to God’s plan for our lives, it is a life and death situation. If you go back to Genesis 17, there were some people that didn’t have their sons circumcised and there were some people that didn’t have the men circumcised. And because the men refused to be circumcised, they were cut off from being included with the people of God.

And see, that’s the reality that we deal with to this day. We’re not a universalistic church. Don’t get me wrong here.

We don’t believe that everybody goes to heaven. Like there is a heaven and there is a hell. And our job with our time on this earth is to tell as many people as possible about the hope they can have in Jesus Christ.

We want to depopulate hell. And we want people to come to faith and to know the faith and the hope that they can have in the resurrected Jesus, amen? Now, the last one is equally important. Household responsibility has always been under God’s design.

We talked about this last week. We talk about this a lot here at Shepherds Gate. We believe men are the biblical spiritual leaders of their homes.

That men should be the ones that bring their families to church. Men should be the ones that bring their Bibles to church and leave their cell phones in the car. Men should be the ones that their families see them singing the worship songs.

Men should be the ones that are praying. Your kids need to hear you pray. Men need to be the ones that model the Christian home and the Christian life.

And it’s not that you’re perfect. It’s not that you’re always gonna get it right. We’re not gonna get it right.

But by God’s grace and him working in and through us is what is going to bless our children. And what I love about Shepherds Gate is we don’t just preach this. That we give you the tools, that we equip you to be the spiritual leader that we know biblically God has placed and called you to be.

In fact, after this service, Pastor Eric, our newest pastor here, he’s our discipleship pastor, is meeting with any of the men in our church that are interested in what our men’s ministry are going to be doing later this year. And if you’re interested in that, go to room two after the service. He would love to connect with you as we continue to invest in the men of our church.

Is anyone in agreement with me this morning that we should be investing in the men of our church? Amen, right? Okay. All right, here’s the final few verses for today. So the Lord says to Aaron, so he goes and he appears to Aaron.

He says, go into the wilderness to meet Moses. So Moses, go find him at Motel 6. He’ll be right there along I-State 69, right? So he meets Moses at the mountain of God and he kisses him. Then Moses told Aaron everything the Lord had said him to say, which is what he was instructed to do, and also about all the signs.

Here you go, Aaron. Here’s the signs he told me to tell you. He had commanded him, so he’s being obedient, this is Moses being obedient, to perform.

And then it says this, this is so cool, because Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, all of the spiritual leaders, all of those that were in positions of influence, and Aaron told them everything the Lord had said to Moses. Together, they performed these signs before the people, and here’s what’s so cool. They believed.

They believed. They believed Moses and Aaron. And here, after 400 years of being enslaved and hearing the stories of their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents, that day in and day out, the abuse that they were suffering physically at the hands of the Egyptians, and here in this moment, this is so cool, that God is giving them hope and he’s giving them purpose.

He’s telling them, I am not done fulfilling my plan in and through you. Look at what it says, the last verse for today, and when they heard that the Lord was concerned about them, wait a second, you mean God has heard our cries? You mean God has not abandoned us? You mean to tell me God cares for us? And now in their generation, in their time, that maybe this is going to be the moment when they will finally be released from captivity? God has seen the misery that we have gone through. He’s seen every time one of these slave masters have viciously beat us, starved us, and forced us to do labor against our will for their purposes, not for ours.

And then look at how it ends. This is so crazy. How do they respond? They bowed down and worshiped.

Can I just tell you this? And this was the most convicting part for me this week, was this final verse. They’re not free. This isn’t they’re in the middle of the wilderness.

This isn’t they’re past the Red Sea. All at this point that has happened is they’ve heard two guys, Moses and Aaron, that they may or may not be familiar with, tell them that God loves them and that God sees them and that God cares about them. All of these people that are bowing down in worship are about to close their heads or close their eyes and go to bed and wake up the next morning and still be slaves.

In fact, they’re gonna be doing this over the next few days and weeks and months. God, how did you give them the ability in that moment to not look to anything else but you? God, what was it that you were able to bring over their minds and over their souls that brought comfort and hope that ultimately the response became worship of their one true God? And it convicted me because I wonder when I’m going through hardships, when I get frustrated at the circumstances in life, when things aren’t going the way that I want them to go in my family or with my friends or with the things here at Shepherd’s Gate, is my response to bow down in worship or is my response to go to some other source or some other thing that I think can bring me hope instead of the only person that can bring me true hope and true peace, which is Jesus Christ? And so we’re gonna end our time this morning by worshiping our God. And I know many of you, you’re mourning today because you so wish the Detroit Lions were in the Super Bowl today.

Some of you wore your Lions gear, most of you didn’t. Are they gonna win a Super Bowl before Jesus comes back? Only the Lord knows. But I was thinking about this because if the Lions were in the Super Bowl, how many of us later today would have been screaming at our televisions, would have been rejoicing with all of our beings, would have been cheering on and praying that Dan Campbell doesn’t kick or does kick a field goal when there’s a fourth down instead of going for it, right? And I just wonder for a few moments, for a few moments this morning, instead of that, what if the focus was on our God? And what if we lifted our voices and in this final song, we enthroned him with our praises and we cried out to him and we laid our concerns that we keep trying to solve on our own at his feet and we let him do his work, his finest work in his time and in his way.

And so that’s exactly what we’re going to do this morning. And I would encourage you if you have a loved one, a family member that’s far from Christ or that has walked away from their faith, this is also your opportunity to once again lift up their name to God and to know that he sees them, he knows them. And even if they’re in a state right now of a heartening of a heart, that God is the one that can break any human heart on this planet, amen.

So you bow your heads and close your eyes with me this morning. Heavenly Father, I thank you for my friends that are here today. God, I thank you for your word because you wrote it.

And even though sometimes there may be passages that we’re so tempted to skip over or not want to address, but God, you tell us all of your word is spoken out by you and that is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting and training in righteousness. So God, as you have spoken to us this morning, would you help us once again to put down our pride, to stop relying on our own knowledge and wisdom or even life experience, that God, ultimately, you are the one that dictates our lives, our marriages, our households, our families, and this church, and that you will see things as you see fit in your time and your way. God, I pray for those that may have loved ones that are on their hearts, and it hurts.

It hurts to see them so far from you. And we want nothing more than for them to come back to know you as Lord and Savior. And so even now, I pray that you would just say their names to God in your hearts and in your minds.

He knows it. And God, would you bring other Christian influences into their lives, people that believe in you. If they won’t listen to us, then maybe they’ll listen to you or listen to them.

God, ultimately, we know and trust that you’re at work. And so now, even as we stand and we lift our voices to you, that you receive our praises, our sincere praises, once again, enthroning you, knowing that you are our good and gracious and loving God. We love you, we thank you, we pray all these things in your most holy and precious name, amen.