This morning, please be turning
with me to Ephesians. Paul's letter to the Ephesians
will be in chapter two. It's always so nice to come down
and visit him. We've had such a nice time this
week. I've appreciated getting to see
all the ones of you that I have here and there through the week.
It's been very nice. All right, let's read Ephesians
chapter 2, the first 10 verses. And you hath he quickened who
were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past you walked
according to the course of this world, according to the prince
of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the
children of disobedience. among whom we all had our conversation
in time past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires
of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children
of wrath even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy
for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were
dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ By his
grace, you are saved, and I'd say that's, I reckon, that's
grace quickened together with him. And hath raised us up together,
made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that
in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of
his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For
by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves,
it is the gift of God not of mercy, not of works, lest any
man should boast. For we are his workmanship, his
product, his creation, created in Christ Jesus unto good works,
which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. Let's pray. Father, we praise you this morning
for your almighty power. And we praise you this morning
for your eternal plan, your eternal will, that we're living out this
very morning. Those who are here are here by
your appointment. Those of us, Lord, who are here
and know you, we know you by your appointment. And Lord, we
pray this morning that you would do everything that you have determined,
Lord, from before the foundation of the world to do today. May
not a single piece not a comma, not a period, not a smallest
piece of your eternal will be left undone. And how we pray
that in your greatness, and in your power, and in your love,
and in your mercy, that you would bless your children, all those,
Lord, whom you have joined to yourself in union with Christ,
and, Lord, those who are yet to be your children. whom you
have placed your love on from before the foundation of the
world, how we would rejoice if this were the day that you have
chosen to save them and to redeem them and to bring them to yourself. We pray, Lord, that the Holy
Spirit will reign, that he will do what he always does, and he
will point us to Christ, and that God will be all and in all.
For it's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. speaking this morning about a
new creation, a new creation. All around us, no doubt, people
are preaching a message of salvation of some kind or another. And
almost every one of them, no, I'll just go ahead and say it
as it is, every one of them, in their plan of salvation, in
their method by which their God supposedly saves people, it involves
something of that center before it'll work. Isn't that amazing
that a dead sinner is a critical part of the salvation, supposed
salvation, of his own soul? A dead sinner can do what? A
dead sinner can stink. A dead sinner can be religious
to the point of absolute obnoxiousness. A dead sinner can be so proud
that he knows something. And if God ever saves him, he'll
find out he knows nothing, nothing whatsoever. No. Preaching this
morning about a new creation. When God saves, he doesn't ask
your opinion. He doesn't ask for your vote.
He doesn't ask for the way you think this ought to happen or
where or when or how. I remember someone sometime way
back yonder, they said, Mark, When I hear you preach, I get
the distinct impression that you believe that God just saves
people. There you go. There you go. And what else is
he going to do? Deaf, dumb, blind, dead, sinner? What's he going to do? He's just
going to save them. There's nothing else to be done. They just need
to be saved. Religion can take many forms.
And it's produced many grievous heresies. And all of those heresies
are spiritually fatal. Every religion around us, all
the things they believe are deadly, spiritually deadly. Oh, I just
like to visit around, Mark. I like to visit around all the
churches, just meet the people. There's all such nice folks,
but listen to what they say. They're all dead. I'm not saying
this, Scriptures does. They're all dead in trespasses
and sins. There's nothing there, nothing
going on. In their blind self-sufficiency, their false sense of what they
call spirituality, and their twisted understanding of the
very person of Christ. Religionists have produced a
virtually infinite number of false doctrines, and they're
turning them out all the time. False teachings, false beliefs,
which they love to spend their time arguing about. Oh, how the
imagination of the flesh runs wild when the subject is the
Bible. Do you ever get involved in those?
I steer clear of them anymore. People at work will get in the
corner and be arguing some foolish religious something or other.
Don't mess with that. There's nothing to that. When
the subject is the Bible, you never know what you're going
to get into. I believe I just come to some place where they
preach the gospel and just stay right there, where you hear nothing
but the Lord Jesus Christ and his power and his beauty and
his absolutely effectual atonement. Just stay right there. There's
nothing else out there. It's just junk. I was raised, however,
in those religions. I'm ashamed to even recall. the
debates that me and my classmates had in Bible college. There we
were just a bunch of dead, dumb, and blind would-be preachers
arguing about the glory of God and the mystery of life in Christ
as though we knew anything at all about it. We were just as
blind and dead as we could be. On the other hand, those religionists
who don't like to argue, well, they just tune out all the other
voices, and they usually reach one of two conclusions. Either
that all religions are right, at least in some way. A lot of
folks believe that. All religions are good. Or they
believe that there is a God and it really doesn't matter what
you believe about God. Or they reach the conclusion,
as some do, that they alone have gotten it right. And in most
cases such as this, they either produce a cult or they produce
a belief that everyone will be saved in the end anyway, regardless
of what God they believe in, or even if they choose to believe
that there's no God at all. Now, here's the point I'm making.
There's no practice, let me make that in big, bold letters, there's
no practice of religion on the face of the planet that is capable
of saving a lost soul. I don't care even if it's where
the gospel of God's sovereign grace in Christ is preached in
its absolute truth and in its glorious simplicity by a God-called
preacher who gets every point of doctrine right. Even the practice of the gospel
will not save sinners. It's a good thing we do here.
It's a good thing. It's a blessed thing when brothers
and sisters meet together. and look for Christ and hear
him preached and see him in the message and see him in the scriptures
and hear him in the songs. It's a wonderful thing that we
do here. But nothing that will go on here this morning, as far
as being done by us as human beings, will accomplish anything
in the spiritual realm. God alone, the Holy Spirit alone,
must do this work. I cannot do this work. Rupert's
been doing this work a long time, and we can't do that work. We
cannot save people. Can't enlighten people. Preach
the best message you could ever preach. Be as true as ever it
could be spoken. And it cannot save a sinner.
It's just not possible to do that. God hasn't set it up that
way. I've attended many such worship
services with a lost friend or a loved one, and I thought to
myself, I don't believe I've ever heard the gospel preached
that clear before in all my life. And I watched that friend and
dear soul walk out the door and congratulate the preacher on
a fine message and never give the doctrine of salvation by
grace alone and Christ alone a second thought. Just right
over their head. Didn't catch a thing. If the
truth alone, just the sheer, wonderful, glorious, simple truth
of the gospel could save, We'd be baptizing folks here every
Sunday, because that's what's preached here. If that message
alone could save, well, we'd have people coming in here like
crazy. We'd be baptizing them every Sunday. But it takes more
than a gospel message to save a lost soul. It takes, it requires,
it's essential that there be the sovereign act of God Almighty
who alone can transform a sinner into a saint. Nothing else. There's no step down. There's
no assembly line. There's no set of things that
has to happen. Nothing but direct divine intervention. will get the job done in saving
a sinner. Every one of you who are saved here this morning,
every one of your loved ones that you and I hope will be saved
before the end of this world was saved the same way. God Almighty
and the person of His Holy Spirit just absolutely against their
will joined Himself to that sinner and just said, I'll have that
one and I'll have that one. And I ask myself every time I
think about that, why would He even have, why would He have
this one? The choice is His, it's not ours. You know, that's
the only way that you'll find, the only way I've ever found
in all my 60 years, the only way I've ever found anybody truly
bow, truly bow to God Almighty, is when the Holy Spirit revealed
to them that they had no choice. That they had, there was nothing
they could do. There was nothing that they could say and that
there was no way possible for them to do anything about it.
God could save them or pass them by and the choice was up to him.
That's the only time I've ever seen anybody say when they had
no choice. And I've got a lot of loved ones
who believe they've got a choice. Matter of fact, we, you know,
we talk to them every now and then about that. You know, God
just saves whom he's pleased. No, no, everybody's got a choice.
Okay, give a dead person a choice. What good is it? What good is
it? I think that's the greatest overlooked
fact of salvation. You're dead. Spiritually dead
and trespasses and says, what can you do about it? My only
hope is that he did something about it and he resurrected dead
sinners and he makes us new creations in Christ Jesus. Now, In the
text, the Apostle Paul was inspired to reveal the essence of this
saving operation of God as an act of creation, created in Christ
Jesus. And it should come as no surprise
that saints must be created. He had to create the physical
realm. There was nothing. Everything that exists now, he
just put there out of nothing. And it took the same almighty
power And what a far cry this act of creation is from the descriptions
of salvation given by false religions. He accepted Christ. She gave
her heart to Jesus. He finally prayed through. The
truth conveyed in the inspired word, created totally eliminates
us and anything we may say or do, or anything we may think
we believe from contributing anything to God's saving grace.
Any confession that begins with God saved me because I, It doesn't
matter how you end the statement, they know nothing of the sovereign
Savior who transforms sinners into saints by the sheer glory
of his infinite being. A dead sinner can't give his
heart to Jesus. He can't pray through. He can't
accept Christ any more than a corpse can read his own eulogy. No. Spiritually speaking, a dead
sinner such as we're all born into this world can do absolutely
nothing to save ourselves. I can pray. No, dead people don't pray. No, if
we truly prayed, we prayed when God raised us from the dead.
Someone might be thinking, well, I can repent. Well, whether by
repent you mean to make up your mind to decide to become a Christian,
I think that's the way they still talk about that. Whether you
mean that you're gonna decide to become a Christian or whether
you mean that you're going to repent and be sorry for all the
sins you've ever committed, whichever of those two false paths you
choose. When's the last time you ever saw a corpse repent?
Corpses don't repent. Dead sinners don't either. Dead
sinners don't repent. You know the first thing out
of the mouth of someone that God raises out of the depths
of being dead in sin, you know the first thing they ask? Lord
save me. Lord save me. They don't get
saved, God just saves them. He just says I'll have that one
and he brings them to himself. Dead folks can't do anything.
And spiritually dead folks are unable to do anything toward
the salvation of their souls just the same. They're spiritually
dead. Now here's the teaching of the
Bible about every sinner on the face of the planet. As sinful,
fallen sons and daughters of Adam, we are all, some six billion
plus, it may be a lot more than that now, born into this world
spiritually dead. so dead that apart from the life-giving
grace of Christ, we'll leave this world spiritually dead and
we'll spend eternity having never known what it is to have the
grace of life in Christ. Without the divine work of spiritual
recreation that we so desperately need, We can do nothing to provide
for ourselves any more than Adam and Eve could have recreated
themselves in the garden. Let's try that one more time.
Let's back that up a little bit. Let's try it one more time. I'm
convinced that human beings being what we are, all the way back
to the first set, I'm convinced that you could reset that thing
a gazillion times. And we would have failed every
time. Because that's such is our nature. Such is our nature. What they lost in the garden
was not something that can be gotten back by a decision or
some study in a book or trying to go to class or Bible college
or whatever you do. What they lost was life. They
lost spiritual life. They lost eternal life. And that's the only real life
that there is. We have a passing life. We have
something of the energy of God in these bodies. And we've learned
how to do a lot of things with that. Some we probably should
have left unlearned. In these bodies there is a principle,
we'll call it, of life that God places within us. And that's
a wonderful thing. But in spiritual life, spiritual
life is only in God. And the only people who have
spiritual life are those with whom he unites himself. God can't
pinch off a piece of spiritual life and give you a little cell
of that by which you can live off that and be spiritual yourself.
No, he just does the whole thing. He just joins himself so wonderfully
and fully and inseparably to himself that we can't help but
live. We live in him. And He lives
in us. That's the best life that can
ever be done. A life that cannot be lost. But
it's a life that I can't make happen for myself. Well, let's
just give Him the glory and not worry about who did it. Let's
just say in His grace and His mercy, He just gave us life.
Stupid! Stupid, worthless sons and daughters
of Adam, and he would give us life. I can just look out across
the people around this world and find a lot. I don't have
to go down the street just a few steps to find somebody who's
a better person than I am. And yet he gave life to me just
because he wanted to. I don't know what you call that.
I call that grace. I call that grace and mercy. That's the very
life of God. What we lost was life. The only
real life there is, the life of God. Like them, by the true
nature of things, we're at the very mercy of God. And we have
no say in the matter. The world is full of spiritually
dead preachers telling spiritually dead sinners to secure for themselves
a place in heaven by doing some religious act which they don't
have the ability to perform. And I'm telling you that dead
sinners can't even hear a word I've said this morning. and make
any sense of it because they're dead. And like all dead things,
they aren't even aware of their state. They live this life and
they're making good money and they're driving nice cars and
they're having a lot of fun and they don't even know that they're
dead. I thought I was alive when the Lord found me. He found me
as a lost religionist. I was an outstanding graduate,
I'm ashamed to say. of a free will Baptist college
institution. I thought I was on my way. I
really did. I thought I understood everything
until the Lord saved me. Until the Lord saved me. I remember asking Henry Mahan,
I had just come home from overseas and I was telling Henry, I said,
Henry, I'd like to, if there was a little church around here
I could just pastor. And he looked at me I got about that tall real
quick. He looked at me and he said,
he said, Mark, you don't even know the gospel. How could you
preach it? And I just melted and dribbled
down into the floor and slipped out of the office. I was dead. I was dead, fully dead in trespasses
and sins. I knew no better. I didn't know
any better than that. How would, how would a dead person
know any better than that? Life would have taught me different
if I had no life. Just a religionist. Just a practicer
of religion. All that is is just looking a
little better. You're gussying up the corpse.
You're fixing up the corpse. But he's still going to stink
because he's dead. You might can recite scripture,
but you'll never know what the meaning is. You may do some good
deeds for others, but you know nothing of the spiritual reality
of the righteousness of God, there's only one way by which
we must be saved. God must make us a new creation. Now, what part can a spiritually
dead sinner play in that? I can't repent. I can't change
my mind about how God saves sinners, not if I'm spiritually dead.
I can't change my old wicked heart, not if I'm dead. I can't transform my sinful nature
into one that's good, not if I'm dead. Only an act of God
Almighty will transform this vile sinner into something that
he will approve of. I need to be recreated all over
again. I don't know you all very well.
I may be speaking to someone who needs to be recreated this
very morning. All I can tell you is this. You
can't do a thing about it. Well, I'm reading my Bible. Bet
you don't understand much of it, do you? Well, I pray every
night. And God doesn't listen to your
prayers. Because he only hears those who are found in Christ.
Christ actually, isn't that something? We're still such worthless sinners
that if the Lord Jesus Christ doesn't reinterpret our prayers
to God, we really don't want him to get there. I want the
Lord Jesus to intercept all my prayers and make them what they
ought to be. I don't know what to ask for.
The Bible says that. We know not what we ought to
ask for. I pray that the Lord will be
the one who corrects my prayers, makes them what they ought to
be. No, I need to be remade in the image of God. And only when
God has done his gracious work and remade me in Christ's image,
I'll be satisfied then. I'll be satisfied. Salvation
then cannot be by personal decision, because spiritually dead sinners
have no mind to make up. Only a mind completely dead in
trespasses and sins. Neither can salvation be obtained
by an act of repentance, because dead sinners have no true sense
of sorrow for sin. They have some mild regret being
found out, but they have no true divine sorrow for sin. And salvation
can certainly not be initiated by an act of the will, for a
dead sinner has no will by which he or she can desire anything
that's holy and just and true. It just doesn't appeal to our
kind by nature. So in spite of what false religion
teaches, I'm as dependent on the sovereign grace of God to
recreate me as I was when he created me the first time in
my mother's womb as a natural man. And the essence of salvation
then is simply this. God must make of us a new creation
by his power if I am to be saved. Now let's spend the rest of this
time together taking a look at the necessity of a new creation. In verses one through three that
we read a while ago, they summarize the necessity of being made a
new creation. While false religion still pushing
their self-righteous pipe dream of progressive sanctification,
the first three verses of our text reveal that fallen sinners,
even religious ones, can only get progressively more sinful.
And as herein lies the faulty foundation of religion, based
on the depraved will of sinful sons and daughters of Adam, the
vast majority of religionists that we meet along the way share the delusion that they're
gradually becoming less and less sinful, more and more righteous,
and salvation is defined for them as a decision that they
must make before God will save them. They believe that as fallen
sinners, they still retain some ability, at least enough ability
to choose good over evil, and that they can choose to be saved,
and by that choice, they can obligate somehow, put him in
an arm lock, they can obligate God to save them. They feel no
need of being recreated. They only need to improve the
creation they were born as. I just need to fix a few things.
That's all I need. And they mistakenly call that
sanctification, a work that in the scriptures only God can perform.
But they believe that by force of effort through the practice
of religion, they can further their progress of gradually becoming
less and less sinful and more and more righteous. They feel
no need of starting all over. as a new creation in Christ Jesus,
created after God in perfect righteousness, absolute holiness.
They only need to just work a little harder, try to sin a little less,
and do a few more righteous deeds. But nowhere in the Bible does
it allow that sinful men can do that. Apart from God, we can
only do that one thing. We can sin and we do it well.
And we do it continuously. And we can't stop. God must make
us a new creation in union with the Lord Jesus Christ if we are to ever stop being
just a sinful descendant of Adam by nature. The nature of a new
creation are found in the first verses four through seven of
what we read earlier. These words are at the same time
the cause and the means and they're the substance and the fulfillment
of the new creation, and this is the only way we'll ever get
there, but God. Not but I. I've heard those testimonies
growing up in free will Baptist churches. I was lost but I. No one was ever saved by that
way. I was lost but I, well, I started
going to church. I was lost but I started reading
my Bible. I was lost but I decided I needed to make sure I didn't
go to hell. No one was ever saved but I,
but all who say, who trace their salvation back to but God. I have some confidence in those,
but God. I don't know about you, but the
religion I was raised in left me with a strong impression that
God would rather send me to hell than to save me. They spoke of
his love. But never without the reminder
that sin, any sin, even the most unintended sin, like a sinful
thought or a misspoken word, was enough to send God into a
frenzy and He would just be delighted to send me into a burning hell.
And needless to say, free willism, with its pay-as-you-go emphasis
on avoiding God's wrath by making sure that you've got yourself
all prayed up, left me with a God whose mercy I couldn't expect
because I was sinning all the time. He revealed himself, however,
in the middle of all my confusion, all my religiousness, all of
my good works, I thought he revealed himself to me to be the God of
all grace. But God being rich in mercy,
because of his great love with which he loved us. Where did
that come from? How did we, how did we believers,
how did we who know the grace of God, how did we, how did he
come by that? But God, why you? Why me? How did we come by that? All
I know is that God's grace is at His discretion entirely. There have been many people who've
worked a lot harder than you and I have in religion. God didn't
save them. There's been a whole lot of people
all down through time who've worked a whole lot harder at
being righteous people. God didn't save them. Why would
He save us? Simply, all we have is the simple
statement of God's nature. But God being rich in mercy because
of his great love with which he loved us, I'd say we probably
just ought to leave Y alone. Why? I'm just content that he
did. I'm just content that he loves
his people and that somehow or other he loves me as one of them. I would have lived and died in
the bondage of religion, but God. That's all I can say about
that. But God being rich in mercy set
his love on this sinner. I have no questions. I have no
need for explanations. All I need to know is that God
loved this sinner and I'm so thankful for it. But not only
is God the cause of my salvation, he's also the means of it. For
what the law could not do and that it was weak through the
flesh, God sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh
and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness
of the law be fulfilled in us." Now I can't begin to fathom the
depths of union with Christ. It's one of my favorite studies
and the one I delight in most, being found in Christ. I don't
understand how the perfectly holy Son of God could or would
so join Himself to this sinner that all my sin actually became
His sin. And all of his righteousness
became my righteousness. I don't understand any of that.
And all this secured before the foundation of the world, made
sure and steadfast and unchangeable. But by his redeeming grace, I
have been made to understand at least this much. I who am
nothing but sin was made perfectly righteous because he who knew
no sin joined himself to a host of sinners just like me, assumed
the guilt of our sins as his own sins, and God the Father
poured out the wrath that should have been ours on the person
of his son, that we sinners. Oh, to think that how terrible
of a tragedy it is to think that if we just, in essence, say I'm
sorry, that's what people are hearing all around town today,
he'll just be sorry for being that sinner. Somehow we sinners
are able to make that death count for us on judgment day. Believers
don't believe. It's totally backwards in religion. Believers don't believe in order
to be saved. Believers believe because God
saved them. Belief is the result of God's
work, not the cause of it. If we're thinking that somehow
we are saved because we did something, we initiated something, no, that
was initiated a long time back. Everyone for whom Christ died
must be saved. Everyone who was found in Him
on that day on the cross must be saved because their sins became
His sins and He put them all away. Further, the Lord Jesus is indeed
finally the very substance of our salvation. For the law of
the Spirit, of life in Christ Jesus. Salvation is not being
zapped by God. He did something to you. It's
not anything like that. It's not some feeling. It's not
some experience where you go to some Holy Roller meeting and
you get the things going up and down your back and you get to
some funny feeling. It's not about that. Salvation
is a person. No, the very substance of our
salvation is the Lord Jesus Christ. For the law of the spirit of
life in Christ Jesus, that's all our salvation. We live in
Christ Jesus. Has made us free from the law
of sin and death. The Lord Jesus Christ is, in
his glorious person, the living fulfillment. He's the absolute
reality in the entire sum and substance of our salvation. Here's
what he said about that. I have finished the work, Father,
which you gave me to do. Their sins are gone. Their righteousness
is secured. All they desire to do now is
to glorify God. How could a salvation like this
possibly ever be undone, where God the Son could stand before
God the Father and say, their sins are gone. I have hope in
that. Just as the Lord Jesus was made
sin through union with his people, we were made the very righteousness
of God through union with him. In him, his righteousness becomes
our righteousness. His holiness is our holiness.
His love is our love. His faithfulness is our faithfulness,
and His perfection is my perfection, and all His peace is my peace. Everything I receive, everything
I experience as a believer with confidence in Christ, I receive
from union with Him. When He said it is finished,
it was finished for Him, it was finished for me, and it was finished
for every elect sinner found in Him on the cross, and it's
done. The life of anyone then who has
been recreated, made a new creation in union with Christ Jesus is
the life of a two-natured person. Union with our Savior is such
that we are still everything we were born as. Oh yes, I'm
still a son of Adam. You're still a daughter of Adam.
Everything we were born as, we still are. All of the wretched
sinfulness, all of the ungodly self-righteousness, and yet at
the same time, believers are everything that we were born
again to be through union with our Savior, our Master, the Lord
Jesus Christ. Being one with Christ then means
that our spiritual life and every blessing that comes with it actually
predated us because He did this work a long time ago. Isn't it
a nice, refreshing thought? isn't something that rest your
troubled soul to realize that your salvation was not last year
or five years ago or 20 years ago. Our salvation was accomplished
thousands of years ago. And our salvation was settled
in heaven an eternity ago. And it cannot be changed. No. Though in terms of our natural
state, we are the same old sinners we've been Ever since we were
born, nothing's changed. Nonetheless, in Christ, by his
grace, we are everything that he is. We've done everything
he accomplished because he made us new creations in himself.
Now, if someone is thinking I'm ready to die because I made a
decision to be saved, I decided I wanted to be saved, I said
I was sorry for my sins, let me give you a better prayer to
pray. Lord Jesus, I confess that by nature I'm dead in my trespasses
and my sins. And that the only hope I have
of salvation is that you joined your glorious self to my wretched
self on the cross before I was ever born. And you joined yourself
to my wretched soul when you saved me. I pray that the Lord
might be pleased to teach us to live as new creations in Christ
Jesus. Do not be deceived by what you
see with your natural eyes. There is much more beyond what's
in this natural world. We live and breathe and move
and have our being in union with our Savior. Whatever we see or
whatever we don't see, whatever you doubt or whatever you believe
fully, those in Christ have everything that He is, and we are blessed
with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ
Jesus. Let's pray. Father, I'm so thankful. I'm
thankful for two things this morning, Lord, that you've done
a marvelous work of salvation that cannot be done undone. It cannot be figured out. It
can't be. It can't be analyzed away. It's
beyond every one of us. Lord, I thank you for that. And
I thank you, Lord, for not only providing salvation, but for
guaranteeing salvation. for everyone for whom you die.
And Lord, if there's any this morning, Lord, who do not know,
they do not know your work. They do not understand your work.
And Lord, if there's someone that you have, that you took
their sins upon yourself when you died, I pray, Lord, you might
reveal that to them this very day. And may they find no place
to turn, no place to look. except to that one who puts sins
away for all of his people and that forever. For it's in Christ's
name we pray.