Pastor Brian and Jacque Lother
Jacque: Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you, God. We thank you for your love and the cross. That was just the main way you showed us how much you love us. We thank you. Thank you. I just have to take a moment. I need a moment. It was good to sing that song again. Thank you for suggesting it. Another evidence of the cross of Jesus. Another thing he did for us on the cross was he brought healing. Didn't he? He said by my stripes, you are healed by his stripes. We are healed and we just want to praise God because Lee Langley, he was in church last Sunday. I remember seeing him put his things down on the chair and then walked to the prayer room while we were rehearsing. And then Monday he had a heart attack, but you know what? By Thursday, he was in open heart surgery and got three new bypasses. I'm looking at Carrie and he said to Carrie, last night, "Tell Brian and Jacque, I'll see them next Sunday in church. Lee is 83, right?
Brian: 84, 86.
Pam: 86. And so God is bringing him through such an ordeal. And we are so grateful. Thank you for that. God. Another family business thing is Nadine and Adam had their baby. We've been praying for that baby to come. We've been praying for her all through this pregnancy because they discovered thyroid cancer in Nadine during her pregnancy. So God has carried her through this pregnancy and she has a beautiful baby girl by the name of Adeline Fay. I love these old names coming back. Oh, they are so great. We are so happy for them, so happy for them. We just want to talk about this Good Friday.
Brian: Today begins holy week and this Friday we will have a Good Friday service to remember the passion suffering of our Lord. We'll have family communion. What we do here at Hope is we will have some worship that night. I think we should just miss the kids, right?
Jacque: Oh yes.
Brian: Kids, you can go to be with your teachers. Thank you. At the end of the service, we have communion. We have people up here in the front to pray for people and we serve communion individually to people. It's a very, very special time where we can remember what the Lord did for us, as well as maybe receive some kind of healing in our bodies or in our souls, in our, in our minds or spirits. That'll be this Friday at seven o'clock.
Jacque: I love the joy of children in the room. Oh, they are so great. I love that service. It's such a blessing. And then Easter Sunday, we come together for something brand new, never done here before. Do you want to talk about it? I'll talk about it.
Brian: You can talk about it.
Jacque: God has given us the most awesome team here at Hope. Our pastoral team is so fantastic. This Sunday, there will be three chairs up here, Pastor Robert, Pastor Jeff, and Pastor Brian. They are each going to share with us what Easter, what the crucifixion and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus means to them personally.
Brian: I'm really excited to hear what Pastor Robert and Pastor Jeff have to say.
Jacque: I'm excited to hear what you have to say too.
Brian: Well, I have to figure out what I'm going to say.
Jacque: There are so many things you could say, right?
Brian: Yes, there is. I have to stay in my time frame.
Jacque: You only get 10 minutes.
Brian: I get 10 minutes. So that's going to be tough. How do you talk about the greatest thing that ever happened in 10 minutes?
Jacque: Well, you are just talking about a part of it.
Brian: Yeah. I guess that's true.
Jacque: It's going to get carried on through your other team members.
Brian: Yes. I guess that's true.
Jacque: You started at the three amigos
Brian: Today is the day we remember, uh, what we call Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday is most notably remembered for the moment where Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a little donkey and the people raided Palm branches with their coats down the road and shouted hosanna to the highest. The fact of the matter is I want to talk about the other part of Palm Sunday. I want to talk about the other part. It's great to see you, man. How are you doing? Are you still playing football? No? I'm sorry for that distraction. I'm a little ADD, but it's great to see you, man. God bless you.
I want to talk about the other part of Palm Sunday because when we focus only on the entrance of Jesus into the city, we can actually lose sight of what he actually came there to do. He didn't just decide to ride into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. It really was the cult of a donkey. And then after he got there, he thought, well, now that I'm here, I better do something. He had a purpose in coming to Jerusalem that day. The fact of the matter is oftentimes, and I've been guilty of this myself that I didn't focus on really what he was there to do, but I my focus was on how he arrived. The fact of the matter is that our arrival can have some significance, but that can never overshadow the very reason for the arrival. I want to do a little bit deeper dive on that today because if you would have been in Jerusalem that day when Jesus entered into Jerusalem on, what we now call, Palm Sunday, the sounds and the sight and the smells all around Jerusalem declared something very significant.
What that declared was that there was one place and only one way for people to receive God's forgiveness. There was one place and only one way where people could receive forgiveness of sins. When Jesus came on the scene and he would say things like your sins are forgiven, he was not just being a source of encouragement to those people he said that to. These hurting people, these broken people that needed a sense of value and Jesus would say, your sins are forgiven. He was helping people connect with God's grace and he was helping people connect with God's mercy. He was helping people understand that forgiveness is something that directly can happen between God and us. But when the religious leaders heard him say these things, your sins are forgiven, they were completely and understandably outraged. We see this in a story that Matthew writes about in chapter 9 verses 2 and 3.
Jacque: Some people brought to him a paralyzed man on a mat. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, be encouraged. My child, your sins are forgiven, but some of the teachers of religious law said to themselves, that's blessed for me. Does he think he is God?
Brian: And the answer to that question is yes. He did think he was God. He knew he was God. I find this story really interesting. This was a story where they actually took the roof off and lowered the man down. The crowd was so big. They couldn't get into the house. This man was obviously being brought to Jesus for healing. And yet Jesus completely bypassed that and said to the man, your sins are forgiven. Jesus saw the greater need in this person. Even though outwardly compassionately, we would want this man to be able to walk, Jesus knew that the greatest need this man had was what then forgiveness of his sins. And so he said, your sins are forgiven. And then, of course, the religious leaders who were following them and making their way into the house or whatever were outraged and they started to say this is blasphemy. This is blasphemy that this man is saying this person's sins can be forgiven.
And then Jesus responded, of course, by saying, to show you that I have the authority to forgive sins. I'm also going to heal this guy and he did. We see that Jesus was coming to bring forgiveness. Jesus was coming against a system that actually didn't really allow a person to actually feel as though they were forgiven. What Jesus did during this story and what Jesus did at other times was tantamount to basically thumbing his nose at the religious system. Jesus was offering people what only God through the temple system could offer people. Jesus was beginning to offer to people, individuals, wherever they were at. They didn't have to be in Jerusalem. They could have been in some little hamlet, some little town, somewhere out in the outskirts of Israel and he would say, your sins are forgiven.
What he was doing was he was replacing the temple system with himself. He put himself in the center of God's relationship with humanity. He basically said you can have a relationship with God if you come to me. You can have a relationship with the creator through me. He was putting himself in the place of the temple in a, all of the temple system. He was saying this: now God will forgive your sins, not through the temple or through a system, but through me. God will forgive your sins through me. I kind of think of Jesus as a one man counter temple movement. He was a one man counter temple movement. He, Jesus, now embodied all that the temple stood for and he was offering through himself what only the religious system of his day was supposed to offer. And that being God's grace.
The fact of the matter is if you looked at the countenance of the people who were part of that system, or at least the recipients of what that system offered, their countenance showed that they didn't feel much grace. Their countenance showed that they didn't feel very forgiven. This grace that Jesus was offering was actually the very last thing that any of them were receiving at the temple. I'm telling you my friends, religion can't give you grace. Religion can only give you law. Religion can only give you requirements, and when you don't meet the requirements of the law, then they give you condemnation and judgment. That's what religion does.
Jesus didn't come to start another religion. He came to eliminate all religions and let him himself be the conduit that we could have a relationship with God. Offering forgiveness to sinners directly was in a way, both creative and destructive at the same time. It was creative in the sense that for those people who were receiving forgiveness, it created within them joy. It created within them a purpose of life. It created within them, hope. But for those people whose livelihoods were reliant on a system of doling out forgiveness, like the Pharisees and the sadducees, to them, it was a very destructive thing. Forgive sins, in their minds, was very destructive. It was destructive to their own means of income.
At the same time that Jesus was building people up, he was also tearing down religiousness and religion and religious systems. It was actually on Palm Sunday that this "Jesus versus temple" theme kind of reached its climax. It was really on Palm Sunday. Rather than blessed the religious system of his day, a whole different side of the meek, mild Jesus was on display on Palm Sunday. A whole different side of the meek, mild Jesus was on display as he turned over the tables of the money changers and as he formed a whip and as he drove those people out of the temple, as he actually released many of the animals that were being held there for sacrifice. We see this in match you chapter 21, verse 12 through 16. So let's read this.
Jacque: Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out all the people buying and selling animals for sacrifice. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. He said to them, the scriptures declare that my temple will be called the house of prayer, but you have turned it into a den of thieves.
Brian: We are going to talk about that in a moment. But Jesus was actually quoting a person of scripture from Jeremiah here when he said that, but after he cleared house or cleaned house of all of the religious people, who was left?
Jacque: The blind and the lame came to him in the temple,
Brian: The people who had needs, the people who actually were desperate for a touch from God, the people who were in need of mercy, the people who were in need of grace. For as you see, the religious leaders never thought that they needed mercy, nor did they ever need grace. We go back to the story of the man who was born blind and in this long discourse that they are having with him, how did this happen? Who healed you? At the end, when he said, well, do you want to worship him too, they became indignant and said, you are nothing but a sinner, implying that they were not. They weren't in need of mercy. They weren't in need of that. And so when Jesus came, he said, I've come for those who are, are actually in need of healing. Those people who were blind and deaf and, and lame and sick and in need of forgiveness, those people who knew the destituteness of their own hearts.
Blessed it are those who, you know, are poor in spirit for theirs as a kingdom of God. When a person recognizes how destitute they are in their own spirits and in their own hearts, that's when they are ready to come into the kingdom of God. That's when they are ready. And Jesus said, you are blessed when you come to that place because now the kingdom can come to you. Jesus was bringing his kingdom into all of these very wounded, marginalized people. The vacuum that had been created with the Exodus of the money changes and the religious people that Jesus drove out of the temple courts and stuff that vacuum was filled with needy people, people who didn't feel the value that God saw in them, people who didn't know that they really mattered, people who didn't really feel as though they had any place to belong. God brought them in. God made space for them that day. And what do we see? What happened?
Jacque: The blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. The leading priest and the teachers of religious laws saw these wonderful miracles and heard even the children in the temple, shouting "praise God for the son of David." But the leaders were indignant. They asked Jesus, do you hear what these children are saying? Yes, Jesus replied. Haven't you ever read the scripture? For they say you have taught children and infants to give you praise.
Brian: Jesus was challenging the whole religious system, and temporarily, basically he shut the whole thing down that day. He shut the whole thing down. He challenged the people who were left there to rethink the whole concept of divine forgiveness and how it was applied to their lives. And many, I believe, came to forgiveness that day, many believed in him. Jesus said that he was this river, that if they were thirsty, he would come to them and they would not thirst any longer. It's very similar to the encounter with the woman at the well.
The fact of the matter is one of the things that Jesus was doing that day was he was changing the theology of those wounded and broken people. I remember Pastor Robert said this, and I've said this as well: theology doesn't determine your experiences. Your experiences often determine your theology. I have an incredible experience of a water baptismal service in Haiti. That completely changed the whole segment of my theology when I had that baptismal service that day, because my experience was greater and my thinking. What happened was these people, these wounded marginalized people were there in the temple. They were trying to make their sacrifices, hoping to not have any more weights and burdens laid on them and Jesus kicked all the religious leaders out. They don't actually get a chance to go through their sacrifices and buy their doves and all this sort of stuff.
Jesus does something in their hearts that they had never experienced before. Their theology began to change that day because of their encounter with Jesus. They began to understand that forgiveness actually comes directly through Jesus. It doesn't come through a manmade system. It doesn't come through any kind of person, but it comes through God directly. Jesus, that day, scorched them when he said, you have made my father's house into a den of thieves. He was actually quoting Jeremiah chapter 7. I want to read that really quickly.
Jacque: The Lord gave another message to Jeremiah. He said, go to the entrance of the Lord's temple.
Brian: So here he is saying, go to the entrance of the Lord's temple.
Jacque: And give this message to the people. Oh, Juda, listen to this message from the Lord. Listen to it, all of you who worship here. This is what the Lord of heaven's armies. The God of Israel says even now, if you quit your evil ways, I will let you stay in your own land, but don't be fooled by those who promise you safety simply because the Lord's temple is here. They chant the Lord's temple is here, the Lord's temple is year, but I will be merciful only if you stop your evil thoughts and deeds, and start treating each other with justice, only if you stop exploiting foreign, only if you stop your evil thoughts, deeds, and start treating each other with justice, only if you stop exploiting foreigners, orphans, and widows, only if you stop your murdering and only if you stop harming yourselves by worshiping idols, then I will let you stay in this land that I gave to your ancestors to keep forever. Don't be fooled into thinking that you will never suffer because the temple is here. It's a lie. Do you really think you can steal murder, commit adultery, lie, and burn incense to bail and all those other new gods of yours, and then come here and stand before me in my temple in chant, we are safe only to go right back to do those evils again? Don't you yourself admit that this temple which bears my name has become a den of thieves. Surely, I see all the evil going on there. I, the Lord have spoken.
Brian: We see this is where Jesus got the phrase, den of thieves. He quoted this portion of scripture. Jeremiah had pronounced that very declaration over the temple in his day and now Jesus does the same thing in his day. The den of thieves is actually not a place where thieves go to rob people. You know that don't you? A den of thieves is not where people go to Rob people, but rather it's a place to hide out after they have robbed somebody and the religious leaders were robbing the people. They were not giving them the mercy and the grace that God had for them. They were extracting payments. They were getting wealthy off of everything on the backs of the people. And then they were hiding in the temple, in a sense, as they are hide out, hiding behind this religious wall.
Jesus came on the scene and said, my father's house is to be a place where people pray and they have a relationship with me and they receive the gifts that I have for them and you've made it you into a hideout for thieves. What an indictment. This whole system that the religious leaders of Israel had now been operating in. They used it as a spiritual hideout and rather than the temple being a place where people's lives were changed, having mercy and compassion and so forth. It was a place where they hid and they basically connived how they could continue to operate in this way. This is one of the reasons why Jesus said to them, go learn what means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. I desire mercy and not judgment. He said that to the religious leaders, go figure out what this means. Go learn this. What they did is they simply added a few more religious activities, I guess you would call it, to allow themselves to feel good about themselves.
A kind of a modern day example of this, believe it or not is I'm sure most of you have seen the movie, The Godfather. It was like the godfather going to mass Sunday or going to confession. As soon as he left mass, as soon as he left confession, he went out and continued to do a life of crime. That's what the religious leaders were like. They would hide behind their religiosity, but then they would extract and rob and steal from the people and actually not give them what their position was supposed to be giving them. That's why God said back in the book of Malachi, I will give you shepherds after my own heart. I will do that. I will give you shepherds after my own heart.
Religious systems make it all too easy for people to find comfort in rituals, familiar rituals, especially without experiencing a change of heart or somehow committing to a life of love. Jesus was always talking about this life of love that he wants you and I to live in. I dare say if all of you were interviewed by a third party that didn't know, or you didn't know or anybody didn't know, and they asked you, when this happens to you, how does it make you feel? When this happens to you, how does it make you feel? Does it make you feel loved? Does it make you feel judged? We have a thing, I call it the knower, inside of us. There's a knower inside of all of us that knows when we are being judged and knows when we are being loved. We all do. What God is asking of us is that we drop the judgements and we start walking in a way of truly loving one another for the value of what they are, who they are and who they belong to, meaning our heaven father.
Jesus went on to say that he was the hinge upon which this door of change was now going to come. Jesus was this hinge. There was a doorway that was being swung open to change where man no longer needed to go to the temple. We talked about that last week in the scripture about the river flowing out from the throne and it went into the Dead Sea and it went to all these different areas of the world and it basically nourished the world, brought life to the world. That's what Jesus is. He is that temple that does this. God does not have a plan to rebuild the temple so that people can go back there and worship and sacrifice animals. That is not God's. I know that's going to ruffle some people's feathers, and I hope I don't ruffle yours, but I'm telling you, Jesus changed it all. Jesus changed it all. The early followers of Jesus who were part of the early church were all Jewish and they know that. They were going to the temple and offering sacrifices and also worshiping Jesus. Jesus was the new sacrifice. Jesus was the lamp. God is not going to reinstitute a sacrificial system. I don't know why I'm beating this drum.
Jacque: We agree with you,
Brian: But I tell you what, I get frustrated. Can you tell? I get frustrated when anything is taken away from the glory that Jesus deserves. I get frustrated with that. At first, it was really hard for the followers of Christ to grasp this change because when religion is so deeply embedded in us, it's hard to change. Jacque and I have been talking about this. I've been hammering on this nail of religion for a long time now. And then all of a sudden, I see something that I'm doing that's religious again. Even in the sermon last week, Jacque wrote down on her notes about a situation she is going through and said, "My problem is I've been approaching this from a position of religion rather than a relationship." So this is not an instant, complete change. There's no magic wand that can be waved over our heads. All of us have been steeped in religion our whole life, especially if we've been in churches. We've been steeped in religion.
It doesn't matter what denomination you are from. You can be Catholic Protestant and everything in between. We are going to be steeped in religion and we have to let Jesus speak to us on when we are being religious and when we are not being like him. We have to do that. It was hard for the early followers of Jesus to grasp this because religion was so embedded into the everyday fabric and life of the disciples and of the people of Israel. They were not used to such a portable, relational, deinstitutionalized spirituality. Let me say that again. They weren't, they weren't used to such a portable, meaning it wasn't in one location. They weren't used to relational because it became just programmatic nor were they used to something that would be so deinstitutionalized, deinstitutionalized spirituality. It was hard for them to relate to that. We see this incredible, striking example of this in a scene recorded by Mark in Mark chapter 9. This is the story of the transfiguration.
Jacque: Six days later, Jesus took Peter, James and John, and led them up a high mountain to be alone. As the men watched, Jesus's appearance was transformed and his clothes became dazzling white, far whiter than any earthly bleach could ever make them. Then Elijah and Moses appeared and began talking with Jesus. Peter exclaimed, rabbi, it's wonderful for us to be here. Let's make three shelters, memorials one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.
Brian: I wonder why he said that. Well, the answer to that question is the next part of the verse.
Jacque: He said this because he didn't really know what else to say, for they were all terrified.
Brian: Yeah. He had no filter. He had no filter. Have you ever come across somebody like that? They just blurted out all sorts of stuff. They don't have this filter.
Jacque: He actually interrupted Moses. Then a cloud overshadowed them and a voice from the cloud said, this is my dearly beloved son. Listen to him. Suddenly when they looked around, Moses and Elijah were gone and they saw only Jesus with them.
Brian: What an incredible scene: two key leaders from the old covenant, Moses, who was given the law, Elijah, who was often referred to as the prophet, the greatest prophet of the Old Testament. These two men, Elijah and Moses came and met Jesus. I believe what they did was they were offering their blessing on the transition to Jesus. They were offering their blessing to the coming of the new and the end of the old. At the end of the scene, they fade away. At the end of the scene. They fade away and all that is there is Jesus and the cloud that the voice of God comes out of that says, this is my beloved son. I'm very pleased with him. And then he said, this remarkable thing: listen to him, listen to him. Isn't that how it's supposed to be with all of us that he must increase; we must decrease. And that God speaks and says, listen to Jesus; listen to Jesus.
Peter doesn't know what in the world to say, so he just, in typical Peter fashion, like I said, has no filter on the things that he would speak. He reveals his religious roots, the religion that is embedded in him. He reveals that in this statement And he echoes a religious mindset, in general, a religious mindset that permeates the world today, which is this: whenever we have a spiritual experience, we should build a building. We'll build a building to commemorate it. We will build a building, so people can come to see where this experience happened. We'll build something here because we think somehow God is in that building, is in that place. Let's build this shrine For the spirits to live in. And then maybe generations of people will be able to make homages to this site, to this holy place.
But God does not speak out of a building. He doesn't speak out of a location like that. He, she doesn't even speak out of the lips of some special class of religious people. He doesn't do that. He spoke out of a cloud that refused to be captured by architecture. He spoke out of a cloud that refused to be captured by a geographical location. This voice from the cloud said, listen to Jesus. And that's what God is saying to us today: listen to Jesus. Listen to Jesus. Jesus did not come to replace the temple With other buildings or another building or another structure. He came to replace the temple with himself. '
It was in him through him that we could encounter the father. I know at times in our lives, we get frustrated with the behavior of people and we want to get them to just be right and act right and do the right thing. I've been there myself. Sometimes we see the destruction of how they are living and we get so frustrated. We just want us shake them and say, do it this way. And it's a power over approach to change. But Jesus comes here in our hearts.
I believe that Jesus is big enough and strong enough, smart enough, and has just the right words to say in the right language to be able to speak to anybody who we feel needs to change. If we would just love these people and give them the value that God sees in them, I believe that will open up a conduit for people to feel a fresh wind of the holy spirit, a new sound of Jesus speaking to them. We all know people who need to change. We all know people who need to change. We should also think of how we should change. When we say Jesus, would you please speak to me, please speak to me and he won't come with, well, how could you have done this. He comes with a gentle, encouraging word. And then he says, and I will help you do it. Let's let our motto be I'm going to listen to Jesus. I'm going to listen to Jesus.
Jesus came into Jerusalem that day, not to model a new type of entourage in parades. He came into Jerusalem that day to start making a major shift in how people understood forgiveness of sins. It was going to come through him. It wasn't going to come through an institutionalized building method or approach that was all being done away with. It was going to fade away in the same way that Moses and Elijah faded away on the amount of configuration and all that was left was the only thing that matters, and that was Jesus. That was Jesus. Pastor Jeff, would you come?
Jeff: The first thing we want to do is just open up the opportunity for anybody who's here today, anybody who is watching by live stream. Jesus came because he is the purveyor of, he was the carrier, he is the one who brings forgiveness. If you need forgiveness, let's get it now. All we have to do Is close our eyes, set our minds on this person who came and died and rose. And all we have to do is say, Jesus, I need forgiveness. Every one of us, as we sit here, is all two aware of the failures in our lives. No one has to tell us. But with all that awareness of the failures in our lives, we can come right now and we can say, Jesus, I need forgiveness. Please forgive me.
In the moment of saying those simple words, he comes and he washes us, he embraces us and he welcomes us as his children. That's all it takes to become a child of God. It's just saying those simple words. Whether you are here watching by live stream or watching this months from now, those are the words that begin a whole new way for you, a whole new pathway, a whole new life. If you say those words for the very first time, let us know, please, because we would love to embrace you as part of the community of faith and be part of your life. But the other thing that really struck me, Pastor Brian, I don't know what's got into you, but he is preaching good.
Brian: Thank you.
Jacque: Passion.
Jeff: If Jesus came to confront religion 2000 years ago, if he came to dismantle the structures of religion and to replace religion with himself, if he was doing that, when he was on the earth, what do you think he is doing today? He is doing the same thing. He will always confront religion and he will always call us to himself. As Pastor Brian shared this morning, the disciples were slow to get it, but I'm not any faster.
Brian: I agree. Neither am I.
Jeff: The religion is all in me too and it's in you. And so what we want to do is we want to take what Jesus, the stories that we are hearing from Pastor Brian as they are reading the scriptures of Jesus in the temple and Jesus on Palm Sunday and Jesus when he healed the lame man, we want to take him right up to present day and we want to realize Jesus is confronting religion in us too.
We want him to clear it out. We want to come to him only. Do you want to get there? Just raise your hands. Close your eyes. Pray this with me. Jesus, I'm listening. I want to hear from you. I'm blind to my own religion. Please open my eyes. Please, let me see where I am a Pharisee and didn't even know it. Because I want to be like you, a person in mercy. I want to become love like you. I want to be your child and reflect that in everything I am. So I repent. I turn away from what has been and choose to follow you into what's new. Thank you Lord. Pastor Brian.
Jacque: Brian, I just want to say one thing. I just think someone needs to hear that you can't exhaust God's love. You can't exhaust it. And no matter where we are, Jesus is waiting. He is waiting.
Brian: That's really good. Thank you, Jacque. We have attributed so many human qualities to God. Just like a parent would say to their child, you just tire me out. You exhaust me. But that's a human quality. That's not something that God says. And so I thank you father, just as we close, that your love never runs out. It's not that you don't have feelings because your heart can be broken at times by our wanderings. But your responses to our wanderings and your responses to your broken-heartedness is not vindictiveness. It's not anger. It's not retribution. But it's tender mercy being extended.
The joy that fills your heart when one person decides to follow you, the word says that there's rejoicing in all of heaven. I dare say that heaven knows how to put on a party better than any place on earth. You know how to reach Joyce in heaven far better than we know how to rejoice here. When one person comes to you and says, I want to follow you, Jesus. I want to listen to you, all of heaven rejoices, not just a segment of heaven. The news is broadcast to every being in heaven and how all of heaven rejoices. They celebrate the value of one person. So we thank you for that kind of love. It's the kind of love that changes our hearts. So I bless your name today. Let's raise our hands. Let me bless you.
And now may the Lord bless you. And may the Lord keep you May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his peace. And may you listen to the sweet tender voice of Jesus. This, we pray in the name of the father's son and holy spirit. Amen. God bless you. Have a wonderful day. Hopefully we will see you on Friday for the good Friday service. And then next Sunday will celebrate "He is risen".
Jacque: If you would like to have communion, Dave and Deb Thompson will be serving communion. If you would like some individual prayer, there will be some people up here to pray with.
Brian: God bless you. Thank you for being here today. It's in 120.
Jacque: Okay. God bless you all. God bless you all.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 4-10-22. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.