Long Lay the World in Sin and Error Pining | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

5:14 Now, I'm sorry. If you're watching on YouTube, worshiping with us on YouTube, and they shut that out, I hope you can go back and find it somewhere else. We've put this together, but so many great artists. And so let's just see how you did. Here we go. So the answers are Mariah Carey was first. Johnny Mathis was second. And by the way, he's 90 years old, turned 90 this year. Celine Dion is third. Elvis Presley, if you said that for the fourth one, you were partially right. That was an AI version of Elvis Presley because Elvis never recorded this song. It was clearly a song that probably touched him, but he never recorded it. Carrie Underwood was next. And then Nat King Cole, and that was not an AI version of Nat King Cole. That was really Nat King Cole singing, though there's no video of it. So we had the video graphics that you saw there. Luciana Pavarotti and Placido Domingo were the two tenors that sang. And then Josh Groban and Jennifer Hudson. And that's a pretty great lineup. But you know, there's dozens of others we could have chosen from who've sung this song. So today, as we look at Advent through the lens of O Holy Night, we're gonna be considering two separate lines in the song.

6:12 The first, long lay the world in sin and error pining till he appeared and the soul felt its worth. And then this last one, And his law is love and his gospel is peace. All right, this is Peace Sunday. And we're gonna look a little bit at peace and O Holy Night and the Christmas story. Let's begin with this line, long lay the world in sin and error pining. Now, pining is a word we don't use very often. It may not be in your vocabulary, but to pine is to yearn for something. It's to yearn for something, to a deep longing for something. And so you've known pining, whether you use the word or not. And when we look at this song, what it's talking about is pining our yearning for a better world, a world where humans flourish, a world where there's well-being. In the Hebrew Bible, the word is peace, shalom. And shalom is not simply peace. It's more than peace.

7:04 It's flourishing. It's well-being. It's a state in which things are the way God intended things to be. That's shalom. And part of that is peace, the absence of conflict. Shalom appears 250 times in the scriptures, in the Hebrew Bible. And over and over again, and it's pointing toward us. Sometimes it points, it's just a greeting. Sometimes it points towards the absence of war, but more often than not, it's pointing towards something broader than that, the general sense of human flourishing or wellbeing. And this is what we yearn for. And when this hymn was written, when Placide Capoe wrote this song, as we learned last week, and when John Sullivan Dwight translated it into English in 1855, what they saw was a world that was missing this. The world was yearning. They were yearning. People who were worshiping in church on Christmas Eve were yearning or pining for a better world and a better kind of king. All right, in France, the problems were poverty and injustice and oppression. In America, it was oppression, it was slavery. And so people were pining for a better world and a better kind of king.

8:05 And today we feel the same. We experience this. I think of the war scenes we've seen in the last year. I mean, take a look at this one and see if you can name where this is. and if you said gaza uh that's a pretty good guess because most of gaza looks like that today but this isn't gaza this is actually syria but if you'd said parts of sudan you would have had a pretty good guess too because parts of sudan looked like that as well and there are other places around the world where where if you were to go there you would see communities completely devastated by war in the last couple of years thousands and thousands and thousands of people killed and many more wounded. I mean, we're living in a world where there are people in so many places pining for a better kind of world, pining for shalom or peace. The prophets pined for a better world. So when you read the prophets, they're almost all writing in a time when things are not going very well and they're addressing what's not going very well and they're trying to guide the people, God's people, to live in a certain way so that they could find this human flourishing, so they could find shalom.

9:03 Often they had turned away from God. God had withheld his protective hand over the people And as we learned last week in 722 BC, the Assyrian empire comes marching against the little country of Israel and then it's on the doorsteps of Judah and it destroys, utterly wipes out the northern kingdom of Israel, takes the people away into exile in Assyria. Actually, they just resettle them throughout Assyria and they lose their identity and the northern tribes are in essence lost. And before it was Assyria, it was Egypt who was coming from the south and they were invading this land. And so anytime the people turned away from God and God withheld his hand of protection, what happened was the foreign powers came in and they invaded. And so there was a great deal of hurt and pain and people were tired of war, war. Every spring they went off to war. The Israelites, the people in Judah, they went off to war and the people were pining for a better world. And when the prophets were pining for a better world, they spoke of what they were yearning for, looking for.

9:59 And so I think about so many passages in the prophets which describe this ideal world, the world they were yearning for. And those became part of the messianic prophecies. These were the yearnings and the longings of the prophets. What they could see was the world as it should be. What they had was the world as it was. And we often talk about this closing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it's supposed to be. So listen to this. This is in Isaiah chapter two, verse four, and also Micah 4, three. So both Micah and Isaiah prophesying in the eighth century BC in the 700s quoted the exact same words, probably from another source of the yearning of the people. And this is what it was. Then in that day, this yearn for day of shalom. They will beat their swords into iron plows or into plowshares, their spears into pruning tools or pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation. They will no longer learn how to make war. I mean, you hear the yearning in this prophecy. It's like, we want this. This is what the world is supposed to look like, but it's not what the world looked like for them or in many places today for us. The prophets pined for a new kind of king. They'd had kings who had walked away from God, pursued injustice and oppression. And I just want to remind you, justice in Scripture is fairness, right? It's equity. It's making sure that the vulnerable and the powerless and the poor are treated, you know, with equity alongside the people who have means and power. And when we think about righteousness in Scripture, righteousness really, you know, we think of that as, you know, in my Pentecostal days when I was a kid, it was don't smoke, don't drink, don't chew, or hang around with those who do. But righteousness in the Bible was about compassion and empathy for the poor or for people who are struggling or people who were pushed down or marginalized.

11:34 And so this was the yearning that the prophet Isaiah had in chapter nine, verse six, he says, a child is born to us, a son is given to us, and authority will be on his shoulders and he will be named Prince of Peace. They were yearning for a king who would bring peace into the land. Or I think of these words in Isaiah chapter 11, verses three and four, delight the king that they yearn for would delight in fearing the Lord. He won't judge by appearances nor decide by hearsay. He will judge the needy with righteousness. There it is with compassion. and empathy and care for them and decide with equity for those who suffer in the land. That's the kind of king they were yearning for and hoping for. This became a part of the messianic hope of the people of God. And I think what I consider politics today or what it looks like in America and other parts of the world, it's part of what I pine for today as well. I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat, that really doesn't matter to me. There are things I think Democrats say and do that I think are right and things Republicans say and do that I think are right.

12:28 And I think each of them play an important role in our society, but it doesn't matter to me whether you're Republican or Democrat. What I pine for is people who have compassion for those who are suffering, people who don't judge by outward appearances, people who don't judge by or make determination by hearsay or who lump entire groups of people together and speak poorly about them. I long for a time when we don't use words like garbage to describe human beings in our country or in the world. The prophets call us to a time when the needy will be judged with righteousness. That is empathy and compassion. while deciding with equity for those who are suffering. I remind you when the angels announced the birth of Christ to the shepherds so long ago, the hopes of the child that had come, the hopes and dreams for this child that had come, this is what they said, glory to God in heaven and on earth, peace among those whom he favors. This is what this child they believed would bring.

13:22 The angels were announcing he is coming as the prince of peace that the prophets had longed for. Now, a Jewish friend of mine once said this. he said, a rabbi friend, he said, you know, I really love Jesus. I think he was a great reformer in Judaism in the first century. I could even say he was a prophet, but I don't think he was the Messiah. And the reason I don't believe he was the Messiah, because all of these things the prophets foretold, he didn't do them. Like he didn't bring an end to war. People didn't beat their plows into, you know, their swords into plowshares. He didn't stop injustice everywhere. And I think the Messiah is supposed to do that if you read the scriptures. And I said, well, here's what I think. is can you imagine any messianic figure who would come and be able to wipe out all human evil at the same time? No, because that's in our hearts, right? The problem is not something that's just out there. It's inside of us. And so a Messiah is not gonna come and take away our human freedom. A Messiah is not gonna come, the Messiah.

14:15 Jesus was not gonna come and totally take away everything that's dark in our world. What he was gonna do is change people's hearts one person at a time. He was gonna call people to follow him. That's how it was gonna work. He was gonna transform the world one heart at a time. That's what Jesus came to do. And so we become a part of these messianic prophecies. We become, you know, we hear Jesus and we read what the prophet said and we look at the world as it is and the world as it's supposed to be. And we say, how do we close that gap? What's my role to play in doing this as a follower of Jesus, who is my king? How do I serve him by working in this world to accomplish the things he wants to see happen? I think about St. Francis of Assisi and that wonderful prayer. And I'm going to invite you to join me in this. If you would just say it out loud with me. The words are on the screen. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.

15:08 Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy. How do we bring about the world that we pine for? I mean, I think we all watch the news. We all see what's happening in our world around us. and I hope that we pine for a better world. And it's not that Jesus was gonna come and miraculously with all the angels suddenly turn things around. What he was gonna do is be a king to show us what the world is supposed to look like, to call us to follow him, to suffer and die on our behalf, to show us what selfless love looks like, to allow his Holy Spirit to work inside of us and to give us a vision of what the world could be like and call us to be about pursuing it, right? So we not only pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done, we act in that way. So this is what we're about. And when it comes to peace and ending conflict, part of this is for us to be able to look around and to see and to ask the question, how do I practice justice, kindness, and compassion for people who are in need?

16:07 How do I practice, or that's actually righteousness. How do I practice justice? That is fairness and equity towards other people. We identify places of pain. And this is what we constantly do as a church. We're constantly, every Sunday, we have some way we're inviting you to help us because we're looking to see where are the pain points? Where are there places that people are suffering? And then what do we do as followers of this King Jesus so that we can close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it's supposed to be? When it comes to conflict in the world, Jesus said he gave us the answers to conflict in our own lives and in the world. He tells us to forgive. And he calls us to turn the other cheek, right? And he tells us to pray for those who wrong us. And even the epistles, you know, they talk about how we're supposed to do this. We don't return evil for evil, but blessing instead, the scriptures say, right? And that's hard at an international level. There are times where you have to speak up and stand up with people who are suffering or being abused. But when it comes to our relationships and even most international politics, if we practice the things that Jesus said, how many of the wars would have been averted?

17:04 If we were doing what the prophets called us to, how many less people would die every year in violence and war? Okay, I want to remember the original French version of this hymn. As you remember, it's called Minuet Chrétiennes. I think that's how you say it in French. It's Midnight Christians. And again, it was sung at the Midnight Mass and later it was called Cantique Noel, the Christmas carol. And here's the English translation of the first verse. And I wanna remind you, this is a more literal translation than what we know as Holy Night. Holy Night is more of a paraphrase of this, but here's the more literal translation. Midnight Christians is the solemn hour when God as man descended unto us, God as man descended unto us to erase the original stain and to end the wrath of his father. The whole world thrills with hope on this night that gives it a savior. Kneel, people, await your deliverance. Christmas, Christmas, the Redeemer is here.

18:00 Now, Capote was trained in a Jesuit school and so he knew his theology. And when he talks about original stain, I wanna pause there for a moment. When he speaks about original stain, this is what is usually referred to as original sin. In original sin, there's a lot of debate theologically that happens? Was this literally passed down through a literal Adam and Eve? Or is it just a part of the brokenness of human beings, however it came about? But inside all of us, there's one thing you can't really debate, and that is that there is something in us that has a tendency to go in a direction that God doesn't want us to go. You know that, and I know that. If the speed limit says 75 or 65, let's say, I'm going to go 75. When I see something, I remember being in a museum once, and I saw this big sign in front of the statue that said, don't touch. And immediately, I had not thought of touching this sculpture until I saw the sign that said, don't touch. And now I desperately wanted to touch this thing I was told not to do. We know that there's a lure to the things that we know we're not supposed to do. There's something in us that leads us in this direction. It doesn't matter whether you're an atheist, agnostic, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, we all have this common human experience. And of course, we struggle with what the church classified as the seven deadly sins. Let me just remind you what they were. Lust, gluttony, greed, indifference, rage, envy, and pride.

19:15 Even the best of us are going to struggle with these things on a regular basis. And so when we look at that, this is part of what our human condition is. It's part of what we wrestle with as human beings. It's part of the reason why there's suffering in this world. It's because when we end up going in the direction God doesn't want us to do, we bring suffering on ourselves or other people. So I want to turn to Matthew's gospel, the Christmas story. And this is actually, this is the Annunciation story where the angel Gabriel shows up to Joseph. Now, Joseph has just found out that the woman he's engaged to, Mary, is pregnant. And he knows the child is not his and he's gonna divorce her quietly. He's gonna put her away quietly or separate from her quietly. He doesn't want her to be hurt, but he's hurt and he's not gonna stay married to this woman who's conceived a child without him. And so the angel Gabriel shows up to him in a dream. Actually, Matthew doesn't tell us his name was Gabriel. Luke tells us that, but the angel shows up and speaks to him in a dream. And this is what he says, Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. You will call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. The word Jesus comes from the Hebrew word yashah, which means to save, or to deliver, or to rescue. So his name literally means Savior. That's the name that the angel gave Joseph and Mary to give to their child. Call him Yesha, Yeshua, as it is in Hebrew, for God will save his people from their sins. And Yehoshua is a little bit longer word, which means Yahweh saves. But in this case, Yesha and Yeshua is just quite simply Savior. Now, I want you to notice something. We often think of Jesus saving us from our sins means he's going to forgive our sins.

20:57 Well, there's a different Hebrew word for forgive. The Hebrew word is salak. Salak means to forgive or to pardon. So the angel didn't say, call him Salak, for he will forgive people their sins. He says, call him Yesha, or Yeshua, for he will save them from their sins. Now, certainly part of the salvation that Jesus offers is forgiveness for our sins. And part of the salvation he offers is saving us from being eternally separated from God. But I take the scripture at its word when it's speaking, and when the angel says this to Joseph, that Jesus came not just to forgive our sins, but to save us from sinning, to save us from doing the thing we shouldn't do. So how does that work? I don't want to just be forgiven and keep going back and sinning over and over again. I want to actually be different. I want to be the person God wants me to be. I want you to be that too, which is why I preach here every week. So how do we keep from sinning? How is it that he helps us to, or delivers us, or rescues us from sinning? And part of that is that we hear his call on our lives.

21:57 We see Jesus. We hear what he did and said. We watch and see how he was crucified for us and raised from the dead. And we say, I wanna follow him as my king. So that's a decision we make. We make a decision to follow Jesus. And then as a result of that, the Holy Spirit begins working in our lives. So we invite the Holy Spirit. Every day I invite the Holy Spirit to be at work inside of me, God's Spirit to change me from the inside out. That's a transformation that happens in our lives and it's an ongoing transformation. So at some points in scripture, you hear the word save or saved as though it's something that happened in the past. And there's a sense in which we accept Christ and we've been saved or rescued and from one life to a different life, but we are also being saved, which means we're being changed or transformed over time. This is the spiritual life. And so it's the Holy Spirit. It's the spiritual disciplines. It's taking the time to read the scriptures every day. It's taking the time to pray and to talk to God and to listen. It's being in worship, what you're doing right now.

22:50 So being in worship is a part of what God uses to save us from ourselves and from our sins to, by the Holy Spirit's power, rescue us and deliver us and sanctify us. Now, I've been your pastor for, this is now my 36th Advent. So the first Advent was year zero and we're in year 35. So this is the 36th Advent that I've been your pastor. And I know that we all have a tendency, even those who are most deeply committed Christians, there's a little part of us that could easily drift away. And this happened during COVID when many people stopped going to church. Church wasn't happening in person. People stopped going to church. We came back and, you know, it's easy for us to sort of go once in a while or not really be as engaged as we once were. You've known this in your life way before COVID, where it was easy sometimes when you got into high school or college, you drifted away. Maybe you had a strong faith when you were a young person and then you drifted away. But when we start drifting away, there's something that changes in us. We say, well, I still believe in God. Okay. But when you're not actually encouraging, you're not inviting daily the Holy Spirit to be at work in your life. You're not talking to Christ. You're not pursuing your relationship with him. You're not in a place, in worship where you're remembering your true north and hearing the words spoken and hearing the music and singing and praying, when you're not doing those things, your faith begins to weaken.

24:01 I was exercising a lot a few years ago. And this last year, I've gotten so busy, there's not been time to exercise. One of the exercises I was doing was a lot of pushups. So I got to where I do 60 pushups and I felt, you know, I had a pretty strong upper body. And then the other day, I thought, I gotta get back to exercise. And I get down there and all I could do is 30 pushups. And I'm like worn out. and my muscles are sore the day after that because I had not been regularly pursuing the discipline of exercise. And the same thing is true if I'm walking and I can walk for miles if I'm regularly doing it, but when I don't do it very often, I find myself short of breath. The same is true when it comes to our spiritual life. And when we drift away from God, we find other things begin to sneak in. Those seven deadly sins begin to roar back in our lives. Listen, I've been with people, resurrection members, as they were being sentenced to prison. And when I think about, what happened? Well, if you ask them, they would say, I kind of drifted away from God, right? I've been with people who ended up having extramarital affairs, and what happened? You know, and they looked like they were pursuing the spiritual life on the outside, and yet temptation comes, and you know, when we're not really tending our heart, we find our heart can be drawn in places where it shouldn't be, right? It doesn't mean we're a terrible person. It just means that we weren't paying attention to the things that help us to be saved from sin. 1 John 1, 7 says this, if we live in the light in the same way that he, Jesus, is in the light, we have fellowship with each other. And the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from every sin. So if we live in the light, if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with him, friendship with him. We cultivate our friendship with him. And the Holy Spirit, you know, works in that environment. And then we find that he cleanses us. That is, he washes away, not just giving us forgiveness, but washing away our tendency to sin. All right, so Advent is a time to return to our Savior, right? This whole month is about remembering why he came, remembering why we need him, and then readying ourselves to rightly celebrate the return of our King one day when he returns, and to rightly celebrate his first coming at Christmas. All right, so I want to remind you of how John Sullivan Dwight translated one line in O Holy Night. As a result of Christ's coming,

26:09 He says the whole world thrills with hope on this night that gives it a savior. This night that gives it a savior. Oh, holy night. All right. So what this means, in part, in two weeks, we have candlelight Christmas Eve. And last year, there were over 100,000 people in the Kent City area who worshiped with us on television, online, or in person. And then people from across the country beyond that. But we had something like 150,000 people just in the metro area. That was like one out of every 12 people who worshiped here. You know why they came? Is somebody invited them. Most of those people are people who don't normally come here to church. We don't have 150,000 people a weekend in worship. We have 25,000 people, including TV. So there's 125,000 people who don't usually go to church who showed up on Christmas Eve. And the reason why they came was because one of you invited them. And I want you to be thinking now, who am I gonna invite to church to celebrate the coming of the Savior?

27:02 That these folks, your friends, the people you love, might find hope and joy and peace. All right, I want to end with a story on this Peace Sunday. So we lit the peace candle. This is Peace Sunday in Advent. We talked about in the beginning, the absence of peace, the absence of shalom, and how peace is more than just the absence of warfare, but it's also human flourishing and well-being. But I want to end with a story that does have to do with war and peace, at least a temporary peace. So the tradition is that in 1870, in the war between the French and the Prussians. The war lasted only nine months, I believe. It started in July and ended in the end of January of 1871. So 1870 to 1871. But it lasted long enough for 238,000 young Germans and Frenchmen to kill one another. And another, I think, 300,000 people who were wounded.

27:57 Maybe it's 180,000 who were killed and 250,000, something like that, who were wounded as a result of this war. And the tradition is that one day on Christmas Eve, there was a Frenchman who stood up from the trench where they were both, the Germans and the French, were facing off to one another and began to sing, O Holy Night. And at least for a night, the war stopped. Now, we don't have much evidence for that event happening, but we have a lot more evidence for what happened in 1914 in the First World War. The First World War started in the summer of 1914. a whole lot of tragic things that happened that led to the beginning of this war. And most of them rooted and grounded in the seven deadly sins. I would say all of them rooted and grounded in the seven deadly sins. Pride and arrogance and violence and just so many things that led to a war that would have devastating consequences for Europe and America. So it was Christmas Eve of 1914.

28:55 And I want to show you exactly where this happened. And so this is the line here, the Western Front. And this is the German Empire over here. And this is the French and the British. And eventually the Americans in 1917 would join the battle. But it was right here on the border between France and Belgium, right across from the British Channel, where in 1914, in the evening, the soldiers on both sides were cold and they were miserable, but there had been gifts that had been brought to the front line by the Germans and by the British and the French to try to support and encourage their soldiers. And on that night, something strange happened. There was, and most of what we know about this has to do with silent night. So we hear about silent night being sung. Now there was about a 30 mile stretch where these truces broke out. And so in one particular place, somebody sang silent night. And that's something we remember most often is they sang silent night, the Germans did, and then the French begin to sing, and then and they both began to sing, and then they came out of their trenches, and they greeted each other, and they shared gifts. But there was a British journalist, a war journalist, who reported where he was. It was a French opera singer who stood up, and this French opera singer began to sing O Holy Night. Take a listen. A British war correspondent reported that later the soldiers heard a clear voice singing the beloved French carol, O Holy Night, the singer Victor Grenier of the Paris Opera. The night watch must have lifted their eyes toward the heavens as they heard his plaintiff call.

30:37 Thank you. There is one man so as an Indian woman was ill. What do you think? For those of you who are younger adults, the man you heard as the narrator was Walter Cronkite, and many of us grew up watching him for decades, watching him tell the news, one of the most trusted people in journalism. And he was sharing this performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. What happened that day, as it was reported across the line, so whether it was O Holy Night or Silent Night that was sung, is people began to come out of the trenches.

31:40 And they came out, they were scared at first, would somebody shoot them? But they didn't shoot, they laid down their arms. And they came across into no man's land. And that night, and into the next day, they exchanged gifts, told stories. They shared meals and foods with each other. They gave each other their phone numbers, and their names are phone numbers, their names and contacts so they could contact each other after the war. They even began to play soccer. I mean, here's a few of the photographs that were taken at that time. And this is no man's land with enemy combatants standing with each other on that Christmas day after hearing, oh, holy night or silent night, playing soccer with each other, football. And then the fighting started up again, and the miracle truce of 1914 was over. On the 100th anniversary of this truce, in 2014, Sainsbury, the grocery store in Great Britain, put together a television commercial just to capture part of this story.

32:38 And I want to show you just a little bit of it that captures what happened on that day. Take a look. My name is Jim. My name is Otto. Pleased to meet you Otto. I'm glad. Rose, she's called. He's so nice. All right, let's go, let's go!

33:28 Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas! Frohe Weihnachten!

33:58 These kids who were 17 or 18 or 19, they didn't want to kill each other. they needed a different kind of king. and so they went back to fighting, and their officers chastised them for fraternizing with the enemy,

34:34 and four years later, by the time the war was over, 17 million teenagers and young adults had killed each other. Jesus came to be the Prince of Peace. He came to show us a different way. He came to call us to follow him and to walk in the light as he is in the light. He showed us what it's like to lay down his life. and he invited us, in essence, to close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. And that's part of the message of Christmas and part of why a weary world rejoices when it remembers that God is man descended down to erase the original stain. so my invitation for you is to follow Jesus to follow Jesus to put your trust in him to daily say Jesus I want to follow you I want to live for you I want to I want to follow your marching orders this is what it means for Jesus to be Lord it's to be master sovereign ruler Jesus I want to follow your marching orders I want to love my enemy I want to love my neighbor I want to show kindness and compassion to people. I want to do what's right and just. Help me to do that, oh God.

35:56 And as you pursue Christ and your relationship with Christ and you're involved in a church and you're worshiping and singing and praying, you take the time to read scripture and you daily seek to follow him, you will walk in the light as he is in the light. You'll have fellowship with him and he will cleanse you from all unrighteousness. A little bit at a time as you walk with him. Let's pray. God, we thank you so much that you care about this world, that you laid on the hearts of the prophets visions of what the world could be like in the midst of so much pain and heartache that they saw and experienced. That those yearnings and longings, the pining for a better world and a better king, all was finally fulfilled when Christ was born. who brings peace on earth and goodwill to all people, who became light for us and salt for us, or light for us, not salt, we calls us to be salt, but it became light for us that we might walk in his light.

37:00 Jesus, we pray that you would forgive us. In fact, I'm gonna ask you wherever you are, of any of our locations, online or TV, would you simply whisper this prayer? Jesus, please forgive me. and help me to follow you? Help me to love you. to walk with you, and to do your will. I offer my life to you in your holy name.