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Scripture: John 20:1-18
Well, it is April Fool’s day today, and I guess I just want to say that the biggest fool ever was the satan who thought that he could end Jesus’ ministry in failure by having him crucified. April Fool devil! Christ is risen! But, on that first Easter, none of Jesus’ disciples were jumping for joy that morning. That came later. What came first, for them, a deep befuddlement.
Have you ever been perplexed? Have you ever encountered a set of circumstances that just couldn’t be explained by common sense ways of looking at it? Maybe you can remember a show in which a particularly good magician shows you his tricks and you can’t see how he does them. You know there’s an explanation. You know he’s just pulling a fast one on your eyes. But you just can’t figure it out. That might be an occasion in which you walk away wondering what just happened. But you’d have to amplify that feeling about a thousand times to know what Peter must have been feeling in that moment when he looked into the tomb, saw the strips of linen lying there with nobody in them and he had no way to explain it, no way to understand it.
Or think of this, how would you feel if a dear loved one close to you had passed away and three days later someone comes to tell you that the body is missing? Would that be a comforting thought? Would your first thought be, “Hey, this is great! He must have come to life again!” I don’t think so. I think most people’s first thought and feeling would be some kind of outrage over who dared to mess with the grave and desecrate the remains, showing no respect for the dead. The closest I get to any good feeling about someone being not where I expect them to be is when I call the hospital about visiting a patient and learn that he or she has already been discharged from the hospital. That’s great news. They must have gotten better. But nobody is ever discharged from the morgue. And nobody ever gets better after they spend some time in the cemetery! Except one time, and that was the time Peter and the rest of the disciples were trying to deal with this third day after Jesus was crucified.
Well, we might ask, why didn’t they just apply Jesus’ teaching and remember that he said many times that this is exactly what would happen, that he would be handed over to sinful men to be killed and that on the third day he would rise again? But seriously, if you had never ever seen a dead person come back to life again all by himself would you have ever thought it was possible? True, they had seen Jesus raise the dead, even Lazarus. That was the one other time that somebody got better after they spent some time in the cemetery. But those resurrections were cases in which Jesus, as a living person, ministered to somebody else, who happened to be dead for a while. But everybody knows a dead person can’t do anything. Once you’re dead, you’re not doing anything for yourself. No breathing, no moving and certainly no getting up again! So, before they actually saw the resurrected Lord greet them in the upper room and eat with them, they just had no possible way to imagine that Jesus intended for them to take his words literally when he said he would rise again from the dead.
But this is all very good for our faith. These things actually make the story more believable for us, because it is so unbelievable otherwise. Do you know that if they never met the risen Lord, they would have never believed he was risen and they would have gone on not believing it and we would have never heard from them? Do you realize that if Jesus’ followers had in fact stolen the dead body from the tomb so they could make up a religion about him and claim he had risen and demand the right to preach because they claimed Jesus was risen that it would never have gotten them anywhere?
Nobody is going to believe a small bunch of guys standing up to all of Israel and Rome to say, “Hey, a dead man came back to life! Now we have to keep on living the way he taught us.” And if these guys really want the story to be believed and it was all coming out of their own ambition to run a new religion, there was no way they were going to make themselves look bad by saying, “We didn’t believe it, but now we do.” No, if humans were making up this gospel, the part about them not believing it wouldn’t be in there. They would have been compelled to write it so that they looked like heroes of the faith, as if they had always understood what Jesus meant when they claimed they heard him say it and they always had believed it and never doubted.
But they couldn’t write that. They wouldn’t have anyway. They didn’t want to run a new religion. They wanted Jesus the miracle worker to stay alive and keep on working miracles. They knew they couldn’t do miracles like that. So, once Jesus was dead, they actually believed it was over and they would have to go and get their old jobs back. It wasn’t long before Peter actually did go fishing again. Even though he had seen the risen Lord, he still didn’t believe that Jesus being alive again actually was going to change the world. That faith didn’t come until after Pentecost.
Now, this is how the story really goes. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. It must be understood that the women took spices because they believed Jesus was still dead. They didn’t believe he could rise from the dead even though that is what he had told them several times. So, they weren’t bringing him breakfast, which they might have thought to do if they believed he was going to rise again. And not just the women, but everybody believed that Jesus was dead and that there was no such thing as a resurrection for him in the near future. Even the Pharisees remembered what Jesus’ had said about his own resurrection! They didn’t believe it either. Nobody believed it. But for the Pharisees to know about it, it must have been a regular part of Jesus’ public preaching and must have been repeated often enough for the Pharisees to worry that the disciples would try to fake it.
Matthew 27:62-66 says that the day after Jesus was crucified, “The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So, give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”
Can you imagine Pilate looking at them with wonder in his eyes as he pondered this new possibility? Who in the world would think to do such a thing? “Only those crazy Jews,” might be what Pilate thought. And it wasn’t the disciples before Pilate with any hope. It was the Pharisees claiming that some other Jews might be that crazy. So, who’s really crazier? The grief-stricken disciples or the Pharisees who can imagine that somebody might actually try that?
But, so that there is no question and no doubt that the matter will be settled, Pilate gives in again. “Take a guard,” Pilate answered. “Go. Make the tomb as secure as you know how.” And I imagine he laughed at the thought of that as they left. He never had to guard a dead man before. But the Pharisees were really determined to make sure that the disciples could not commit the fraud they imagined. So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting a guard.
This probably explains the real reason that none of the men among Jesus’ disciples went to anoint his body or pay their last respects at the first opportunity. If the men went, the guards would assume that they had indeed come to steal the body. They would not be allowed in. They would not be allowed to get near. They might even be attacked and chased if not killed. So, it may be that the men might have gone with the women if they weren’t so scared. But knew they could not.
All this serves to amplify everybody’s personal belief that Jesus was indeed dead. Besides the fact that they weren’t expecting a resurrection, it all verifies the fact that he had really died by crucifixion. He was universally known to have been killed by the crucifixion. Both his friends and enemies all knew with certainty that the finality of death had definitely taken place in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
All that remained for his followers was to mourn the loss and try to move on with their own changed lives. They had been deeply affected by Jesus’ life and ministry. Even if he didn’t come back to life their world at least would have been different from that point on. They would have lived with a new awareness of the cruelty of humans and how even the most religious looking Pharisees can be filled with sin that is willing to kill the innocent. They would have remembered Jesus’ miracles and mourned the loss of that too. Maybe they really would lose all faith in God who wasn’t able to keep Jesus alive, wasn’t able to administer justice, or didn’t care to. I think it would have been a very dark and heavy world in which to live. No more joy, only sorrow for a long time.
But then the wonderful begins to happen. The women find that the stone is already moved aside, and the tomb is unsealed and open. Not only that, but the body is gone! It seems that in spite of the Roman Guard, what the Pharisees had feared has happened! But who did it? While the women were wondering about this, they must have been startled when the lights came on. In the shadowy interior of the tomb, suddenly they were shielding their eyes from a brightness that gleamed like lightening. And there were these two young men standing beside them. In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground. There was no place else to go. Couldn’t run or hide. These men probably blocked the way out.
So, all bent over, faces to the ground, not daring to look, the women hear these words, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It is almost as if the angels are surprised that the humans take so long to understand and believe what Jesus had been telling them over and over again. But they go on to explain, “He is not here. He has risen! Don’t you remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee? The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.”
Then they remembered his words. These dear women, totally overwhelmed by this experience, now piece it all back together. “Oh, he could have meant this!? It wasn’t just a mysterious figure of speech? He did say he would die and be raised again. He did tell us on the night he was betrayed, that his betrayal would be that very night. He seems to have known all along about everything that what was going to happen to him. So could it be that he was talking about this too? Oh that would be wonderful news! If he is a live again, as he said, that’s amazing good news! We have to go back and tell the others!!!”
Maybe they still weren’t sure if he was really alive again. But they went to tell the others what they had seen and what those bright boys had said about it. The Apostles received this news without understanding it at all. To them words of the women seemed like nonsense. Whatever had happened, it was impossible for a dead man to come back to life. Everybody knows that. Nobody’s going to jump to the conclusion that he arose. But Peter did get up and go see the tomb for himself. By then the guard had cleared out. They were going to tell the Pharisees what had happened to them. And we know from Matthew 28 that the soldiers just fell back and fainted when the angels came to move the stone, and also that the Pharisees instructed and bribed the soldiers to say that the disciples had stolen the body. Which if you remember is exactly what the Pharisees had thought was the worst thing that could happen. But now that something worse than that had happened, they had to fall back on the only natural explanation open to them if they wanted to avoid believing the miracle.
Nobody believed that Jesus was risen. They were all like doubting Thomas. They were truly perplexed! They had encountered a set of circumstances that just couldn’t be explained by common sense ways of looking at it. Nobody believed that Jesus was alive again until they met him face to face, ate with him, even touched him.
But now that the facts have been established, by reliable testimony, we are able to believe it even if we don’t see him the way they did. This is good, good news! Jesus is alive! Have you met the risen Lord? Have you heard him call your name? That means he is here with us right now in a real spiritual presence that is so much more than what the current language about his means. You know when a loved one has passed on we are fond of saying they are still with us in spirit. But for most of us that means nothing more than that the dear departed is fondly remembered, with us in our hearts, having no real impact on our lives other than the legacy they left behind. We don’t want to talk about Jesus like that.
When we say that he is here with us, we mean quite literally that though he is invisible, he is literally as present as the oxygen that is present with us in this room. Also, in the same way that I know I would die without oxygen, may I know I need Christ in me to be fully alive. And since we know that he is here with us, let us turn our attention to Him as we close.
Thank you Lord, for being the living presence within which we live. We know by faith that we are in you Lord, just as you are in the Father and the Father is in you. You are so much more than a story that happened more than two thousand years ago. You rose from the dead and so you are still alive today. You are not just a historical figure we can learn about. You are a living person we can relate to, talk to and learn from every day.
We thank you for the testimony about you in your Word the Bible. That document contains the evidence of your life and resurrection. It is a faithful and believable record of your character, your work, your crucifixion and your resurrection. By it we know how much you love us!
We know that you were born as a baby, in human flesh and lived with a human family and worked as a carpenter until the time came for you to reveal yourself and live out your mission of grace and mercy. We also know from the Bible that you are warm and welcoming of those who had need. You are approachable. People can get to know you.
You said you are God, and the proof that you are is in the way that you loved, the power of your miracles, the forgiveness you offered from the cross, and above all your return from the dead! You rose from the dead and walked among men again to prove that you had power over death, and only God could do that! Praise and glory to you Lord Jesus for your perfect work and your divine power to give eternal life!
Lord Jesus you are our Savior! We believe in heaven and eternal life. We learned about sin and that we could never be good enough to make up for the evil in our hearts. We learned that God is holy and sin cannot exist in his presence. Therefore we would die and suffer eternally unless our sins could be taken away. But you talked about that, Jesus, and you said you could take away sin! You said you would willingly offer your own life in the place of each one who acknowledges the need! And then you died on the cross to do offer yourself for everyone who would believe in the meaning of your death and resurrection.
And now, Jesus, because of what you have done, God the Father has declared you to be the Christ, Lord of all! You have accomplished His will. He wanted all things to be reconciled to him, so that he gets what he wants, the glory and honor due his name from his humble creatures made in the image of God. Our very purpose and reason for being is to have fellowship with God and enjoy him forever. And because of you, we can do that! Who would have ever though that the creature could speak to the creator? It is amazing that we should even be allowed to talk to you. But you have made it so!
So Lord, all we ask now is that we would all believe that you are alive, that we would all talk to you all the time, with praise and thanksgiving on our lips and in our hearts for all that you have done. We pray that we would be able to pay attention to the world around us better because we know we are in you, Christ, as much as we are in oxygen. And we pray that out of the gratitude and joy with which we are filled because of your grace and mercy and yes, your presence too, we would live to serve you by serving our fellow creatures in love and with the gospel message that they too can be saved through faith in you. We know that is your will Lord and so we confidently pray this in your holy and precious name, dear Jesus, Amen.
Scripture: John 20:1-18
Well, it is April Fool’s day today, and I guess I just want to say that the biggest fool ever was the satan who thought that he could end Jesus’ ministry in failure by having him crucified. April Fool devil! Christ is risen! But, on that first Easter, none of Jesus’ disciples were jumping for joy that morning. That came later. What came first, for them, a deep befuddlement.
Have you ever been perplexed? Have you ever encountered a set of circumstances that just couldn’t be explained by common sense ways of looking at it? Maybe you can remember a show in which a particularly good magician shows you his tricks and you can’t see how he does them. You know there’s an explanation. You know he’s just pulling a fast one on your eyes. But you just can’t figure it out. That might be an occasion in which you walk away wondering what just happened. But you’d have to amplify that feeling about a thousand times to know what Peter must have been feeling in that moment when he looked into the tomb, saw the strips of linen lying there with nobody in them and he had no way to explain it, no way to understand it.
Or think of this, how would you feel if a dear loved one close to you had passed away and three days later someone comes to tell you that the body is missing? Would that be a comforting thought? Would your first thought be, “Hey, this is great! He must have come to life again!” I don’t think so. I think most people’s first thought and feeling would be some kind of outrage over who dared to mess with the grave and desecrate the remains, showing no respect for the dead. The closest I get to any good feeling about someone being not where I expect them to be is when I call the hospital about visiting a patient and learn that he or she has already been discharged from the hospital. That’s great news. They must have gotten better. But nobody is ever discharged from the morgue. And nobody ever gets better after they spend some time in the cemetery! Except one time, and that was the time Peter and the rest of the disciples were trying to deal with this third day after Jesus was crucified.
Well, we might ask, why didn’t they just apply Jesus’ teaching and remember that he said many times that this is exactly what would happen, that he would be handed over to sinful men to be killed and that on the third day he would rise again? But seriously, if you had never ever seen a dead person come back to life again all by himself would you have ever thought it was possible? True, they had seen Jesus raise the dead, even Lazarus. That was the one other time that somebody got better after they spent some time in the cemetery. But those resurrections were cases in which Jesus, as a living person, ministered to somebody else, who happened to be dead for a while. But everybody knows a dead person can’t do anything. Once you’re dead, you’re not doing anything for yourself. No breathing, no moving and certainly no getting up again! So, before they actually saw the resurrected Lord greet them in the upper room and eat with them, they just had no possible way to imagine that Jesus intended for them to take his words literally when he said he would rise again from the dead.
But this is all very good for our faith. These things actually make the story more believable for us, because it is so unbelievable otherwise. Do you know that if they never met the risen Lord, they would have never believed he was risen and they would have gone on not believing it and we would have never heard from them? Do you realize that if Jesus’ followers had in fact stolen the dead body from the tomb so they could make up a religion about him and claim he had risen and demand the right to preach because they claimed Jesus was risen that it would never have gotten them anywhere?
Nobody is going to believe a small bunch of guys standing up to all of Israel and Rome to say, “Hey, a dead man came back to life! Now we have to keep on living the way he taught us.” And if these guys really want the story to be believed and it was all coming out of their own ambition to run a new religion, there was no way they were going to make themselves look bad by saying, “We didn’t believe it, but now we do.” No, if humans were making up this gospel, the part about them not believing it wouldn’t be in there. They would have been compelled to write it so that they looked like heroes of the faith, as if they had always understood what Jesus meant when they claimed they heard him say it and they always had believed it and never doubted.
But they couldn’t write that. They wouldn’t have anyway. They didn’t want to run a new religion. They wanted Jesus the miracle worker to stay alive and keep on working miracles. They knew they couldn’t do miracles like that. So, once Jesus was dead, they actually believed it was over and they would have to go and get their old jobs back. It wasn’t long before Peter actually did go fishing again. Even though he had seen the risen Lord, he still didn’t believe that Jesus being alive again actually was going to change the world. That faith didn’t come until after Pentecost.
Now, this is how the story really goes. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. It must be understood that the women took spices because they believed Jesus was still dead. They didn’t believe he could rise from the dead even though that is what he had told them several times. So, they weren’t bringing him breakfast, which they might have thought to do if they believed he was going to rise again. And not just the women, but everybody believed that Jesus was dead and that there was no such thing as a resurrection for him in the near future. Even the Pharisees remembered what Jesus’ had said about his own resurrection! They didn’t believe it either. Nobody believed it. But for the Pharisees to know about it, it must have been a regular part of Jesus’ public preaching and must have been repeated often enough for the Pharisees to worry that the disciples would try to fake it.
Matthew 27:62-66 says that the day after Jesus was crucified, “The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So, give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”
Can you imagine Pilate looking at them with wonder in his eyes as he pondered this new possibility? Who in the world would think to do such a thing? “Only those crazy Jews,” might be what Pilate thought. And it wasn’t the disciples before Pilate with any hope. It was the Pharisees claiming that some other Jews might be that crazy. So, who’s really crazier? The grief-stricken disciples or the Pharisees who can imagine that somebody might actually try that?
But, so that there is no question and no doubt that the matter will be settled, Pilate gives in again. “Take a guard,” Pilate answered. “Go. Make the tomb as secure as you know how.” And I imagine he laughed at the thought of that as they left. He never had to guard a dead man before. But the Pharisees were really determined to make sure that the disciples could not commit the fraud they imagined. So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting a guard.
This probably explains the real reason that none of the men among Jesus’ disciples went to anoint his body or pay their last respects at the first opportunity. If the men went, the guards would assume that they had indeed come to steal the body. They would not be allowed in. They would not be allowed to get near. They might even be attacked and chased if not killed. So, it may be that the men might have gone with the women if they weren’t so scared. But knew they could not.
All this serves to amplify everybody’s personal belief that Jesus was indeed dead. Besides the fact that they weren’t expecting a resurrection, it all verifies the fact that he had really died by crucifixion. He was universally known to have been killed by the crucifixion. Both his friends and enemies all knew with certainty that the finality of death had definitely taken place in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
All that remained for his followers was to mourn the loss and try to move on with their own changed lives. They had been deeply affected by Jesus’ life and ministry. Even if he didn’t come back to life their world at least would have been different from that point on. They would have lived with a new awareness of the cruelty of humans and how even the most religious looking Pharisees can be filled with sin that is willing to kill the innocent. They would have remembered Jesus’ miracles and mourned the loss of that too. Maybe they really would lose all faith in God who wasn’t able to keep Jesus alive, wasn’t able to administer justice, or didn’t care to. I think it would have been a very dark and heavy world in which to live. No more joy, only sorrow for a long time.
But then the wonderful begins to happen. The women find that the stone is already moved aside, and the tomb is unsealed and open. Not only that, but the body is gone! It seems that in spite of the Roman Guard, what the Pharisees had feared has happened! But who did it? While the women were wondering about this, they must have been startled when the lights came on. In the shadowy interior of the tomb, suddenly they were shielding their eyes from a brightness that gleamed like lightening. And there were these two young men standing beside them. In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground. There was no place else to go. Couldn’t run or hide. These men probably blocked the way out.
So, all bent over, faces to the ground, not daring to look, the women hear these words, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It is almost as if the angels are surprised that the humans take so long to understand and believe what Jesus had been telling them over and over again. But they go on to explain, “He is not here. He has risen! Don’t you remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee? The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.”
Then they remembered his words. These dear women, totally overwhelmed by this experience, now piece it all back together. “Oh, he could have meant this!? It wasn’t just a mysterious figure of speech? He did say he would die and be raised again. He did tell us on the night he was betrayed, that his betrayal would be that very night. He seems to have known all along about everything that what was going to happen to him. So could it be that he was talking about this too? Oh that would be wonderful news! If he is a live again, as he said, that’s amazing good news! We have to go back and tell the others!!!”
Maybe they still weren’t sure if he was really alive again. But they went to tell the others what they had seen and what those bright boys had said about it. The Apostles received this news without understanding it at all. To them words of the women seemed like nonsense. Whatever had happened, it was impossible for a dead man to come back to life. Everybody knows that. Nobody’s going to jump to the conclusion that he arose. But Peter did get up and go see the tomb for himself. By then the guard had cleared out. They were going to tell the Pharisees what had happened to them. And we know from Matthew 28 that the soldiers just fell back and fainted when the angels came to move the stone, and also that the Pharisees instructed and bribed the soldiers to say that the disciples had stolen the body. Which if you remember is exactly what the Pharisees had thought was the worst thing that could happen. But now that something worse than that had happened, they had to fall back on the only natural explanation open to them if they wanted to avoid believing the miracle.
Nobody believed that Jesus was risen. They were all like doubting Thomas. They were truly perplexed! They had encountered a set of circumstances that just couldn’t be explained by common sense ways of looking at it. Nobody believed that Jesus was alive again until they met him face to face, ate with him, even touched him.
But now that the facts have been established, by reliable testimony, we are able to believe it even if we don’t see him the way they did. This is good, good news! Jesus is alive! Have you met the risen Lord? Have you heard him call your name? That means he is here with us right now in a real spiritual presence that is so much more than what the current language about his means. You know when a loved one has passed on we are fond of saying they are still with us in spirit. But for most of us that means nothing more than that the dear departed is fondly remembered, with us in our hearts, having no real impact on our lives other than the legacy they left behind. We don’t want to talk about Jesus like that.
When we say that he is here with us, we mean quite literally that though he is invisible, he is literally as present as the oxygen that is present with us in this room. Also, in the same way that I know I would die without oxygen, may I know I need Christ in me to be fully alive. And since we know that he is here with us, let us turn our attention to Him as we close.
Thank you Lord, for being the living presence within which we live. We know by faith that we are in you Lord, just as you are in the Father and the Father is in you. You are so much more than a story that happened more than two thousand years ago. You rose from the dead and so you are still alive today. You are not just a historical figure we can learn about. You are a living person we can relate to, talk to and learn from every day.
We thank you for the testimony about you in your Word the Bible. That document contains the evidence of your life and resurrection. It is a faithful and believable record of your character, your work, your crucifixion and your resurrection. By it we know how much you love us!
We know that you were born as a baby, in human flesh and lived with a human family and worked as a carpenter until the time came for you to reveal yourself and live out your mission of grace and mercy. We also know from the Bible that you are warm and welcoming of those who had need. You are approachable. People can get to know you.
You said you are God, and the proof that you are is in the way that you loved, the power of your miracles, the forgiveness you offered from the cross, and above all your return from the dead! You rose from the dead and walked among men again to prove that you had power over death, and only God could do that! Praise and glory to you Lord Jesus for your perfect work and your divine power to give eternal life!
Lord Jesus you are our Savior! We believe in heaven and eternal life. We learned about sin and that we could never be good enough to make up for the evil in our hearts. We learned that God is holy and sin cannot exist in his presence. Therefore we would die and suffer eternally unless our sins could be taken away. But you talked about that, Jesus, and you said you could take away sin! You said you would willingly offer your own life in the place of each one who acknowledges the need! And then you died on the cross to do offer yourself for everyone who would believe in the meaning of your death and resurrection.
And now, Jesus, because of what you have done, God the Father has declared you to be the Christ, Lord of all! You have accomplished His will. He wanted all things to be reconciled to him, so that he gets what he wants, the glory and honor due his name from his humble creatures made in the image of God. Our very purpose and reason for being is to have fellowship with God and enjoy him forever. And because of you, we can do that! Who would have ever though that the creature could speak to the creator? It is amazing that we should even be allowed to talk to you. But you have made it so!
So Lord, all we ask now is that we would all believe that you are alive, that we would all talk to you all the time, with praise and thanksgiving on our lips and in our hearts for all that you have done. We pray that we would be able to pay attention to the world around us better because we know we are in you, Christ, as much as we are in oxygen. And we pray that out of the gratitude and joy with which we are filled because of your grace and mercy and yes, your presence too, we would live to serve you by serving our fellow creatures in love and with the gospel message that they too can be saved through faith in you. We know that is your will Lord and so we confidently pray this in your holy and precious name, dear Jesus, Amen.
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