Gateway Church Sermons
Alder Road Site | 30th June 2024 | Matthew Hosier | Impurity and worldliness
Good morning Great. What a wonderful time of worshiping God's presence. Before we get to open the word, I'd just like us to pray for this Thursday. Obviously the general election happening and to appropriate to pray into that be strange not to this morning. So I just want to leave this briefly and pray for that. I wonder if you stand with me and let's pray. Our Lord, as we approach this election, we recognize our great need of you. As we look at our nation and other nations having elections this year, India, South Africa, Mexico already, France today, the US in November. We see the limits and lacks of politicians and human rulers. We lament the way that things are and we repent where we to have torn down more than we have built up. This Thursday may we vote as an act of faith in you. We recognize and desire your ultimate Kingly rule. May our voting for earthly and temporary leaders be an act of submission to you, our heavenly and eternal captain. We ask you for mercy on our nation. We ask your mercy on those elected to office this week. We know we need your grace. Enable us to be faithful citizens, remembering our greater citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven. For to you belongs the Kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen. I take your seats again. Our texts, at least we're starting this morning, as we've done the last couple of weeks, 1 John 2 verses 15, 3 to 17, do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world's love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world's the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away but whoever does the will of God lives forever. We've spent or we're spending three weeks finishing today looking at what we're calling suburban sins. A description I've given to sins of respectability. The sins that nice people commit and often are really approved of. The kind of things that nice people like us and our neighbors, decent respectable people who turn up on Thursday to vote, pay their taxes, mow their lawns, wash regularly, the kind of sins people like us and our neighbors are prone to and we've looked at the sins of pride and unbelief and the sins of indifference and in gratitude and today we're going to be looking at the sins of impurity of mind and worldliness of goals. These are the things which go on right inside our heads and the challenge for us as we've been looking at these last couple of weeks is that the world schools us in ways to think and to act. As the Apostle John puts it the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, things which come not from the Father but from the world and there's a fight for our minds. There's a fight for our thoughts. This past week I spent four days at Coir Abbey on the Isle of Wight. It's a picture of a really beautiful place. A year ago when I was in Spasco I started my Spasco by having a few days at the Benedictine Monastery of Coir and I found it so helpful. I wanted to go back this year so I spent four days there this week and again found it really helpful and it's a very different environment. It's an extraordinary beautiful place as you can see from that picture and probably peaceful tranquil. The whole shape of the day is built around prayer and worship. Seven services a day. The monks sing the Psalms. So through the course of the week we start our services normally with a little portion of a few verses of the Psalms at the monastery. The Psalms or the whole all 150 Psalms are sung during the course of the week and so the service is start 5.13 in the morning as vigils you get together in singing the Psalms and the last service of the day. Seven services last from the day eight o'clock in the evening singing the Psalms and it's very different from our expression of worship and our experience of church life but I found it very helpful these last couple of years to be in that environment and be in that context of singing the Psalms and have the time in between to be speaking with God myself and hearing from him. The thing about one of the things about being at Coir is it's very different from a normal life because there is you're immersed in the Psalms and it's incredibly beautiful and there's no TV. There's no YouTube. There's no Adverts. There's the normal stuff that is washing our minds isn't happening there. There's no opportunity to watch England playing another boring game of football for which I was grateful. I missed it all. Maybe this afternoon something will happen and it will become wonderful who miracles can happen but it's a very different kind of environment. Now we can't live at Coir Abbey. We're called to live in the world so how can we do that without succumbing to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life in a world where we are constantly bombarded with worldly messages and this doesn't happen without a fight. We can't passively have pure thoughts. There's a fight that's going on. One John 2, 15 to 17 is our grounding scripture for this whole series but actually wants to look a little bit more into Romans this morning. Romans 13 verses 10 through 14. This is what the Apostle Paul writes to church in Rome. "Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law and do this love, understanding the present time. The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over. The day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in carusing and drunkenness, not in sexual morality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh. Clothe yourselves with Christ, do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh or, as it says in some other translations, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh. Just need to clarify that word flesh because we can read that and we might probably think we flesh, we think bodies, that there's something actually wrong, impure about the physical human body. That's not what is meant. The word flesh here, Greek word sarks, which is translated usually as flesh in our Bibles, is it's talking, it's meaning the sinful nature, everything in us that would oppose God, anything that is fleshly worldly, that's the things which are opposed to godliness and following after the way of God. And there's a binary here and either or, you either indulge, gratify the flesh or you deny, make no provision for the flesh, for the sinful nature. And the decision we make, that decision to gratify or not to gratify the flesh is shaped by, as the apostle writes there, how you understand the present time, understand the present time, be awake to what is happening. Now over the past week we've had some amazing beautiful summer weather, Tuesday and Wednesday particularly, so wonderful, warm, sunny, hot, it's lovely. The trouble is that kind of weather can make you drowsy and have to open the windows and turn on the fans in order to stay awake. Now the concern here and the greater concern is for spiritual drowsiness. And that can happen easily, we can get comfortable, complacent, we can fail to see the dangers of the world in which we live, we can fail to understand the present time, we can fail to understand our salvation, all that means for us, how we're to rejoice in that, celebrate that as we've been doing this morning, we can start to gratify the desires of the flesh and we can submit ourselves to impurity of thoughts and worldliness of goals. And the thing is we don't have to go looking for impurity, away at the mastery this past week is harder to find it because if there is none of the normal worldly influences, but in the world in which we live normally, you don't have to go looking for impurity, impurity comes looking for us, we're surrounded by it. One of the issues over the last couple of years has often been in the news, has been a concern about sewage discharges into the sea, it's appeared a little bit in some of the election campaigns and messaging as well. Over the last couple of years I've joined that group of people who swim year round, so it's been swimming two or months of the year and before I go and swim, especially in the winter, when the sewage discharges happen, I've got an app on my phone, the safer season river service, this is this morning, it's all blue ticks, you're fine, you can go swimming today, there's no sewage discharge, but sometimes there would be a red cross because there's been a sewage discharge and then I don't want to go and swim then because I don't want to end up swimming in sewage, because you swim in sewage you get, people get sick, some people got really sick from swimming in the sea once there's been sewage discharges, so always check the app, is the water clean enough to swim in today? We live in a world where spiritually there's constant sewage discharge and the thing is that we can get used to that, we don't have an app, tells us warning spiritual sewage discharge, actually, I mean to be honest our phones themselves are a great sewage outlet, there's all kinds of sewage which can very quickly and easily come through our phones and we can get so used to this, we just think it's normal, even we can start to want it, we can want to gratify the desires of the flesh, of the sinful nature, but the instruction of Scripture is clear, put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light, that's that is such a beautiful expression, put on the armor of light, clothe yourself, be armored in light, think of the imagery the apostles using, it's such a powerful image, armored in light, be clothed in such a way that what is impure and ungodly gets exposed, so the armor of light is like we're clothed in a spiritual sewage warning app that would tell us, this is this is polluting, this will do you harm, be clothed, be armored, armor is protective, be armored in light, such a powerful, such a beautiful image, to do that we need to understand the times, understand the times, even when it's dark, verse 13, even when it's dark, behave, live as daytime people, let us behave decently as in the daytime, even when the days are dark, live as daytime people, armored in light, now when the apostles says this to the church in Rome, live as in the daytime, there's probably a contextual reference because when they think about the context of the early church Christianity was not the religion, Christianity was very much a minority belief and it was a pagan society which was swimming in sewage spiritually and literally although the Romans said relatively good hygiene, but there's a world swimming in sewage in every sense and so the believers wouldn't have been able to gather like we do, they'd have probably, I mean a lot of them would have been slaves, they wouldn't have had, they would have been literally slaves, a lot of them, so they wouldn't have had free time like we did, so they would have gathered in at night, the one opportunity to like a gather, and they would gather for what scripture calls love feasts, they would gather to worship and to eat together to break bread, celebrate the Lord's Supper together and probably in the context of Rome this looks somewhat suspicious, you have this group of people and a strange group of people because it's people from different, you've got Jews and non-Jews coming together and you've got slaves and non-slaves coming together at night, this looks really odd, what are they up to and probably the suspicion would have been that they're up to something no good, they're up to some kind of immoral and corrupt practice and so Paul says to them, live as though in the daytime, Christians are called to be daytime people even if spiritually it feels like night and even if you're meeting in the night, be daytime people, put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light, the thing was that Rome was not a nice place, certainly not at night and that started right from the top down, we're told that the Emperor Nero would disguise himself and go out to bars, taverns at nights and start fights, he was such a violent, drunkard man and so right from the top of Roman society there was a spiritual darkness and the apostle says to the church he'd Rome, don't live in darkness, live as though in the daytime, be a community of love and grace, don't indulge in the normal nighttime activities of Rome, God's new community is called radical love even when meeting at night do so as daytime people, make no provision for the flesh, don't live in the Roman way, be a community of love and grace, be a people who are pure in all your thoughts and all your actions. Now when we talk about this there can be something of a nervousness for us in talking about this in our context because we're at this church, our kind of church, we're very alert to the dangers of legalism. If you've been reading Galatians this week, if you're doing out at the bread readings reading the Bible together, you've been reading Galatians and Galatians is the less the apostle Paul writes to the church of Galatia which is a warning against legalism, it's they have fallen away from trust in Christ and they're trying to put their trust in what they're doing, they're putting their trust in not in the righteousness of Christ, being the one who cleans them and holds them secure in God but they're looking at works righteousness, the things physically they do in order to try and get right with God and Paul is doggedly, brutally clear with him, is disaster if you go that way, if you put your hope into that rather than in the righteousness of Christ all is lost, you've got to come back to grace, you've got to reject legalism, it's very easy to fall into legalism, it's very easy for us to make something other than the righteousness of Christ what we're trusting, it's very easy to make our actions the way we behave, the things we do, the thing on which we put our trust, it's disastrous spiritually, we've got to keep coming to the grace of God in Christ and his righteousness in us. So there's a knife edge here, the knife edge is that we mustn't, we can't, we need to be alert to the dangers of legalism, the deadly dangers of legalism. So easily we can start to say don't do this, don't do that and it can become a legalistic thing as the preacher is a pastor, I could so easily stand up here simply by Sunday and say if you're a Christian you mustn't do this, you mustn't do that and it could so quickly and so easily become just legalistic and dead teaching. So easily it becomes become about, this is what happens in legalism, it comes, my personal judgments, my personal tastes and preference, the standard by which I live must be the standard by which you live and the thing the way about legalism, how it works is the line is always just a little bit beyond where I am. So this is, this is my standard behaviour and if you adhere to this you're going to be okay step over it, you do that, okay, I need to do this, so easy to fall into legalism and some of us have come from, some of you have come from legalistic church backgrounds and when you step out of legalism and step into grace, step into really grasping what it means to be forgiven by Jesus, to be covered by his righteousness, to not be governed by those kind of constraints and patty regulations and rules and laws, there's just the freedom of grace, the freedom of coming into the grace of God, his welcome of us, his embrace, not because of what we have done, because of what he's done and not speak instructed and told and bossed about by what you have to do and how you have to live and whether you can eat in an ice cream on Sunday or whatever and all the crazy stuff that sometimes churches are falling into, hallelujah praise God for his grace to us. But it's not grace if what we're doing is gratifying the desires of the flesh. Titus 2 verse 11, "Grace teaches us to say no to all ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled upright and godly lives in this present age, where we wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify himself of people that is very own, eager to do what is good. Grace teaches us to say no, Jesus came to purify us, to prepare a pure people for himself, a people who are eager to do what is good. So here's a question for us, are we saying no? By the grace of God are we saying no to the desires of the flesh? Legalism is a real problem, but so is license. When we misinterpret grace and say we think grace means we can do whatever we like. No grace teaches us to say no to all ungodliness and worldly passions. It's so easy for us to just fall into an easy accommodation with the ways of the world, that the point of grace is that we are free. We have a freedom to say no to ungodliness, to the desires of the flesh. In the letters of the Galatians, this is made crystal clear, Galatians 5, 13. You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free, called to freedom, but do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh, rather serve one another humbly in love. We don't want to fall into legalism, don't ever want to get into an experience of church life where we're policing one another's lives. But there are lines that need to be drawn somewhere because there are things which will not honor Christ and which won't do us good because fundamental their sewage, which will make us sick, and won't do others good. Is it the context here? Titus, Galatians, Romans, the context is always love. How do we demonstrate love to our neighbor? How do we demonstrate love to our brothers and sisters? It's by choosing the way of godliness. They were able to live in love towards others. Gratify and the desire of the flesh denies love to others. There are things that gratify the flesh which we are called not to do. We're not meant to give into impurity of mind. To Corinthians 10.5, we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Take captive every thoughts. I think one of the verses I've always found most challenging, every thought, make it obedient to Christ. And then Scripture tells us what that looks like. This is an active pursuing of what will do us good, of what is pure, of Philippians 4.8, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable. If anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Deliberately turning our minds away from impurity and towards purity. That doesn't mean going off and becoming a monk and living in a monastery. But it does mean bringing purity into our minds, into our homes, into our lives, into our experience, in the way we conduct ourselves with others. Now my personal experience, I feel that times, honestly, that I've at times leaned too much into life since, in a sense that watch stuff, read stuff which actually doesn't help me have a pure mind. And I know that when I lean the other way and reject those things, that actually a lot of the temptations which I experience seem to diminish. At the monastery, it's easier to have a purity of thought with all the temptations just on there. But you can bring purity into your mind, wherever you are, by what you think about, what you focus on, if you're focusing on what is noble, true, right, lovely, admirable, rather than things which are impure. And I know from experience that when I focus on those things, a lot of the other temptations just seem to diminish, don't become such a problem and an issue. And this is very practical. This is where the knife edge is in terms of legalism, because it is around things like, like, legal about what we watch. It's that kind of practical stuff. And so there are things which we're free to watch. But do they do us good? Do they help us in purity of mind? A few weeks back, Grace and I sat down and we watched the first episode of a Netflix series which lots of people have enjoyed and said it's great. And we thought we'd watch it. And we enjoyed it. It was a good storyline and it was intriguing. It would have been interesting to see how the story developed. But at the end of that first episode, we just looked at each other and said, don't think we're bother. Just because there was too much in it, which wasn't true and lovely and admirable. There was too much in it, which just didn't help me have purity of mind, actually. I felt like I was in a bit of sewage, to be honest. And I'm free to watch it. I could watch it. But I'm free to say no as well because what I want is to not make provision for the desires of the flesh, but to find myself in purity of thought, which helps me to honour Jesus and bring me closer to him. So here's a question. To what extent are we allowing ourselves to be conditioned by the world, by the world's output and expectations? As I explained a couple of weeks ago, the genesis of this series was when I was away. Exactly a year ago, I left to go and spend two weeks walking in the Pyrenean mountains and that experience of being away from the normal stuff for two weeks, then coming back to the underground in London and just being struck by the torteiness of worldliness, the sinfulness of so much that I was seeing in the advertisements and all the stuff. And how much are we allowing ourselves to be conditioned by the stuff the world is constantly pumping into our minds? There is a problem of shifting baselines. There's a rising tide of sewage. Think again about practical stuff. The reality is that what passes a fashion photography today in the 1950s would have been regarded as pornography. But today's mainstream TV would have been thought objectionable 30, 40, 50 years ago. Wouldn't have been allowed. Think about the the literature idiocy of intimacy coordinators. Where now in so many movies, TV shows and the rest, love scenes, sex scenes, intimacy coordinators, employees to guide the actors to make sure that nothing's happening which makes them feel uncomfortable. Here's a rule of thumb, not wanting to be illegalistic. But if we are watching things which require the employment of an intimacy coordinator, that is probably a clue that what we're watching is not true and noble and lovely and admirable. There's probably a rule of thumb there which isn't legalism that might just help us navigate the sewage which we're constantly having pumped out at us. Now speaking primarily to those of us who are Christians, disciples of Christ and wants to be faithful disciples of Christ. But this is so relevant to those of you as well who don't yet know Jesus because do you want to live your life swimming in sewage? You might be getting, you might enjoy that entertainment. You might get the gratification of the flesh is gratifying but you know who you are, you are made in the image of God. There's a preciousness about you and your soul which is eternal. Do you want to be living in what in the end is sewage is poisonous or do you want to step into what is pure and lovely and beautiful and admirable and true and noble and rights and which is about life, about life now and forever? This isn't about hiding behind Victorian petticoats. It's not, oh I'm so shocked at these, no. One of the things which kind of amuses me about Kear Starmer who's an atheist, he's highly moralistic, he's an atheistic moralist. Have you noticed how often he sucks in his cheeks and says it's shocking, it's disgraceful. I'm not interested in atheistic moralism, I want life and life comes from a relationship with God and that means rejecting the desires of the flesh, rejecting worldly goals and impure thinking and turning to Jesus. It's about a desire for life. Godly thinking re-orients us, we aren't our goals from worldly flesh to ones, our goals, our ambitions, our desires, our motivations, the things we're shooting for in life. Here's another question. In our goals are we actually any different from our unbelieving neighbours, our nice respectable neighbours, are we any different from them really in the goals, the things we're living for? And again the danger, the knife edge danger of legalism, but let me try and make this a little bit explicit, what are worldly goals? Let me give some practical examples, worldly goals are things like this. If you are single and your primary goal is to find a partner or if you're married and your primary goal is to make your spouse happy or to make them make you happy or if your parents and your primary goal is that your kids excel at sports or in school or get to university or on the housing ladder or if you're in the workplace your primary goal is to get ahead or even just to get by or if you're retired and your primary goal is to kick back and live as much fun as you can with the funds that remain to you until you die or if you're voting this Thursday and your primary goal is partisan politics, those are all worldly ambitions and goals. And for the disciple, if you're single your primary goal is not to find a partner but to be a faithful disciple of Jesus. If you're married your primary goal is not to make your spouse happy or to make them make you happy to help one another be faithful disciples of Christ. If your parents your primary goal is not that your kids excel in sports or at school or get into university or in the housing ladder but that you help them by God's grace to know and love Jesus and be his disciple. If you're in the workplace your primary goal is not to get ahead or even to get by but to be a disciple of Jesus who demonstrates what that means by the way that you work. If you're retired your primary goal is not to kick back and have as much fun as your money allows you but to use the time remaining to you to be a faithful disciple of Jesus and lead others to him. And if you're voting this Thursday your primary goal isn't partisan politics but recognition of Jesus, King Lee, rule and reign and submission to him. It's a difference of orientation, it's a difference of thinking, it's a difference of goal. Now the other stuff can be good if you are single and you want to get married and God provides you with a marriage partner that's a blessing. If you're married and you make your spouse happy and they make you happy that's a blessing. If you're a parent and your kids are doing well that's a blessing. If you're retired and you've got some money to go and do some fun stuff that's a blessing to live in a democracy and be able to vote is a blessing. These are all examples of God's grace to us but it's fleshly worldiness when those things become the things for which we live when they determine the decisions that we make and the way that we live. I want to pull this together, pull the whole series together these three weeks as I did last week by looking at four hours, resist, repent, receive and reform. First of all, resist. We do need to actively resist impurity of mind and worldliness of goals because these things are pressing in on us all the time. The sewage outlets are open and pumping and so we need to actively resist impurity of mind and worldness of goals. If we're passive, if we're not fighting, if we're not closing ourselves in the armor of light, we will be overwhelmed by impurity and worldliness of goals. Instead we need to actively put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. A question to ask if you think about resistance is this, what does being clothed in Christ? What is putting on Christ and putting on the armor of light? What does that look like for me right now? In what areas of my thoughts and my goals do I need to exercise some resistance? What does that look for you? What does that look for us as a community? What does that look like for us at the moment? To clothe ourselves in Christ, to put on the armor of light and to resist the sewage tide of worldliness. A second hour is to repent. Now, this isn't, don't need a prophetic gift to say this. There's definitely some repenting that needs to happen this morning because for many of us this week there's been impurity of thought and worldliness of gods. And where that's been the case there needs to be some repentance. And what we need is to see the how much bigger and more beautiful is the grace that God offers us than what the gratification of the flesh offers us. We need to get a bigger picture of who God is. Repentance helps us to come into that place of recognizing the beingness of God. Dane Auckland says there is only one way to know that we are sinners and that is to have some dim, glimmering conception of God. When you see what God is really like, when you see His holiness, we recognize how sinful, how lost we are without Him. Our lethargic apprehensions of the uproarious joy of divine pardoning, lower the ceiling of whom we perceive God to be. Two things go together. You've got to see who God is, how big He is to get a glimpse of how lost we are without Him, how sinful we are without Him. But if we don't understand how amazing His forgiveness of us is, then we're going to have a shrunken view of God. There is such a great phrase, the up-roarious joy of divine pardoning. Jesus loves to forgive us. Jesus went to the cross that we might be forgiven. He died in our place that we might be forgiven. Heaven rejoices when a sinner repents. The father rejoices when his children come to him and say, "Lord, forgive me again this week, impurity of mine. Well, this is a girl. I've bring it before you." There's up-roarious joy in heaven when people come. And as we do that, we get a bigger picture of who God is and we receive grace if we receive fresh grace. We've got to get a bigger picture of God and a greater comprehension of His grace. How wonderful, how beautiful. God offers us His grace and you're going to spend your evenings watching that. Are you mad? It's crazy. It's grace available to us. The third R is receive. Receive all the blessings of life. Receive God's common grace. All the blessings He pours out indiscriminately on all kinds of people. No matter how good or bad they might be, just the blessings of life. If you can go and swim in the ocean and there's not a sewage discharge, if the water's clean, it is on our beaches today. Praise God, that's a blessing. If you come and play ball games tomorrow night and have fun doing that, that's a blessing. Get a hang out with friends at the beach and Friday night there. That's a blessing. If your kids are doing well at school, that's a blessing. Receive the blessings of God. Receive them. That's not wholeness. That's not gratifying the flesh. As long as our motivation and orientation, our goals are set as they should be on Jesus, we're meant to receive the good things of life. Receive them. The rain this morning, our hearts raining, have been sunny. Well, receive the goodness of the rain, the gardens near the rain. Receive the goodness of the rain. Receive all of God's blessings. And then the third R is to reform. The gospel reforms. The gospel changes things. The gospel brings things into line with what they will be like in the kingdom of Christ. And this reformation, this change, isn't something that we force by our own efforts. But we are reformed as we submit to God's grace. It is grace, Titus 2. It is grace that teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions. It's grace that teaches us to live self-controlled uprights and godly lives in this present age. It's grace that teaches us these things while we wait for the blessed hope. It's grace that enables us to do these things. Christianity isn't some religion where we're trying to just discipline our minds, learn self-control. It's not Buddhist meditation or Islamic ritual. It's coming and receiving the grace of God. As we receive the grace of God, we're transformed. As we respond to God's grace, we're empowered and able to say no to what is impure, ungodly, unhelpful. It's as we receive the grace of God that we're able to put on Christ. As we receive the grace of God, we're able to armor ourselves in light. It's all grace as we respond to God's grace. And as we do that, we're reformed as a people who don't go with the flow of suburban sins. Go away, Church, as we live here in BCP, nice, respectable people surrounded by nice, respectable people. Let's not just go with the flow of suburban sin, but let's be a community of God's people amazed at God's cosmic grace, which has been poured out in us in incredible, abundant measure. Let's live in humility and faith with diligence and thankfulness and impurity and godliness as we seek to know and worship and honor our King. Amen. That stands and prays together. We're going to take communion as we normally do in a moment. I'm going to pray and then once I pray, I'll ask you just to come and take the bread and wine, come back to your seats, then when we've done that, I'll lead us. As we take the bread and the wine, this is a moment for us to bring all these things before God. It's a moment for us to come to Jesus and say, "Lord, help me to resist the worldly garbage which surrounds me. How we put you on again." As I take the bread and the wine inside me, let me see myself cloaked in Christ again. This is the obvious place to repent, to say, "Lord, this week, that impure thoughts, that worldly girl, I lay it before your cross again and receive fresh grace, or receive from you, receive from you, or receive from you, grace healing life." As we do this together, and this is a meal for those who know Jesus. If you don't know Jesus, ask you not to take part. This is for something for those who know Christ. We are formed, reformed as God's people again. One body, one people, you nice to Christ, eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ in celebration and remembrance of him. We're joined together and we're reformed as his community, but together we might represent him in the world as we're called to do. So Father in Heaven, thank you so much. We come to you, the Holy God who welcomes us, doesn't reject us, draws us near. Jesus, Savior, may we again know the saving power of the cross in our lives to stay. Holy Spirit, would you come and fill us in Paris again, or we know we can't live pure lives, pure thoughts. Take every thought captive of Christ, how? We can't do that ourselves, but Holy Spirit, you empower us. It's by you working in us that we are enabled. Wow, to walk in the power of God, to know what it is to be clothed in the armor of light. So I pray that for us, I'll pray as we take the bread and the wine again now that we we would be reformed as the people of God once more. The people shaped in the image of God's living for Christ and powered by the Holy Spirit, walking purely in a corrupt world showing the freedom and life that is ours in Christ. In your precious time, we ask you. Amen.