Well, good evening. I recognize a lot of you from this week. A special welcome to the parents, family, brothers, and sisters who are joining us for this final time of the conference.
Now, I guess technically the conference is over. But the brothers have asked me to share one last time before we all start going our different ways.
So we just want to give this time to the Lord, because it has been a full week, and I know a lot of you are very tired. Quite possibly, you stayed up late last night fellowshipping, being excited about the week. I know I kind of did that myself.
So let’s just ask the Lord to cover this time.
Dear heavenly Father, we are grateful for this opportunity just to fellowship from Your Word. We do pray that this would not be a burdensome time where, at the end of the week, we are trying to stay alert. We just pray that, by the power of Your Holy Spirit, we would be enlivened. We just give this time into Your hands completely. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
I’d like to start with a couple of passages before we get started. If you turn with me to Colossians 1:18.
Speaking of Christ:
And He is the head of the body, the church;
Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead;
That in all things He might have the preeminence.
From the very beginning, I just want to draw your attention to this word, or this thought: that Christ might have preeminence.
And now I’d like to turn to an Old Testament portion, just a story that focuses a little bit on a king of Judah who had this in his heart: this preeminence of God. This is in 2 Chronicles 34:1-5.
Some of you who were in Richmond probably recognize that I talked a little bit about this with the young people. Hopefully, the Lord has given me a little more insight into the life of Josiah.
Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign; and he reigned thirty and one years in Jerusalem.
And he did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, and walked in the ways of David his father, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left.For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father: and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the Asherim, and the graven images, and the molten images.
And they brake down the altars of the Baalim in his presence; and the sun-images that were on high above them, he hewed down; and the Asherim, and the graven images, and the molten images, he brake in pieces, and made dust of them, and strewed it upon the graves of them that had sacrificed unto them.
And he burnt the bones of the priests upon their altars, and purged Judah and Jerusalem.
And a final portion before we begin, 2 Kings 23:25:
And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him.
Now, for the young people, we spent quite a bit of time this week talking about, “What is truth?” We also asked this question: “Who are You, Lord?”
Now, at the end of this time, I felt led that maybe we should spend some time on this question: “What shall I do, Lord?”
Because all of us have been, hopefully, challenged this week. And for those of you who were not at the conference, I encourage you to seek out the young people and ask them, “What did you learn? What did you hear? Share with us.”
Let me give you a picture of what this week was about. When you go into the military, you have to go through basic training.
If you’re lucky in basic training, they let you sleep in until four or five in the morning. But sometimes they’ll wake you up at one a.m. to do exercises. They spend weeks, sometimes months, training you. But for what purpose?
Now, in a way, the conference is kind of like that. How many young people this summer throughout North America woke up as early as you did this week?
How many young people had to wake up, read the Bible, pray, go to breakfast, go to a meeting, have a fellowship group, have lunch, get a short break, have a workshop, eat, go to another meeting, have another meeting, then go back to your room and pray—just to do it again the next day?
In military terms, they call that boot camp. You just finished that boot camp. What do we do now?
You know, I’ve watched several military movies, and I’ve read diaries. I’m a history teacher, so I’ve read some diaries of soldiers. I’ve noticed there is often a common theme right before the men go into battle.
For example, before World War II, the Canadians, Americans, and British—the Allies—were about to invade France to get rid of the Germans. The soldiers were awakened in the middle of the night.
Some of the men reflected on boot camp, and they said, “Well, I guess that’s why we went through all of that.” Suddenly, all that training, all those challenges, had purpose behind them.
And I hope today you can see that there is purpose behind this last week, because you are about to go out into battle.
I don’t want to frighten anyone, but things are going to start changing tomorrow. Brother Graham this morning said that there is going to be a crisis. Did you notice that he said there is going to be—not there might be? It is a spiritual war out there.
I want to use the story of Josiah to make a comparison to what you are going through. Josiah was a descendant of David, and great things occurred under David’s rule over Judah and Israel.
Why did God so bless David? Because David was a man after God’s own heart. Going back to our Colossians verse, David made the Lord preeminent.
David was succeeded by his son Solomon. We know the story. When God said to Solomon, “What do you want from Me?” Solomon said, “I want an understanding heart. I want to have the wisdom of the Lord. I want Your heart, Lord.”
Because of David’s heart and Solomon’s heart, Israel was blessed greater than most countries in the history of the world.
But you know what happened during Solomon’s reign? Solomon and the people began to make God prominent.
All of a sudden, there was the Lord—God—who was very important, but He was not preeminent. After Solomon, things started falling apart. Suddenly, the kings started turning to idols. They started even sacrificing their children to foreign gods.
Rehoboam was Solomon’s son, and under his rule, the temple was actually invaded. The enemy took all the gold away. It really became a sad time in the history of Israel.
One of the reasons this happened is because Israel had become so prosperous. They had rested in their traditions. They suddenly thought they knew how to govern Israel, and all of this brought about a great decline in Israel.
Now, what does this mean to all of us? This is exactly where North America is today. I don’t have to go into the details, but you know what school is like and what you are going to be going back to.
I think we can all say it was pretty easy to say, “I love You, Lord. I worship You, Lord. You are wonderful, Lord.” You can all wear the gray T-shirts that have the name of the Lord on the back.
But will you be able to wear those shirts next week, or next month, when you go to school? When you go to college, or into the workplace, are you going to have the liberty to turn to someone at a difficult time at work and say, “Well, at least we know the Lord is on the throne”?
We are in a very dark age in the history of the world. But I want to challenge all of you out there: you are the Lord’s army. This gives us purpose. Hopefully, this excites you.
I don’t know what the future is going to bring. Remember what Dana said yesterday? The Lord can’t show you His whole purpose. If He showed you what next year is going to look like, you may faint.
But you experienced this week what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit. We want to look at the story of Josiah and see what a young man did in his time to combat the evil of the time.
It says in 2 Chronicles 34:1 that Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign. We then go down a few more verses, and we see that he actually started bringing great reform when he was sixteen.
As I was meditating on this, I asked the question: Why was he ready to make such great reforms in Judah when he was sixteen?
Well, he was ready at sixteen because he was being prepared as early as eight.
We will not turn there, but if we go to the passage in Kings, we see that he had a mother named Jedidah. I have no doubt that she was praying for her son.
If you are a parent in this room, or if you are planning to be a parent someday, we need to think about the condition that Jedidah must have been in. Her father-in-law was an evil king. Her husband was an evil king.
One of the common practices at the time was to sacrifice the firstborn to the god Molech. Do you think she was praying for her son? You know she was praying for her son, because there was a chance that her own husband would sacrifice this son.
So, a challenge to all of you parents, or all of you who are around young people: we need to pray. As we pray, we will see that the young people are prepared for this battle.
We need to start following the Lord. We need to start making the Lord preeminent when we are young.
Now, that does not let any of us off the hook. Because if you think about it, today is the youngest you will ever be. So thank the Lord, you are all young. Today is the day we make the Lord preeminent.
The next thing that I want to look at regarding Josiah’s life is this aspect: he followed in the ways of his father David, and he turned not to the right or to the left.
Now, we’ve all heard in Sunday school that this path of following the Lord is a narrow road. There are many temptations to go to the left or to the right.
Now, I want to take just a few moments to look at what that means: to turn to the left or the right. In most cultures, left is not a good thing. Even as a young person, my teachers always tried to move everything to my right.
I don’t know about other languages, but in Latin, left means sinister. It means evil. So, in many cultures, left has something sinister, evil, or bad to it.
But we see here in Josiah’s life that he did not turn to the left. What is the Lord telling us in this? Let’s be honest with ourselves today. Is there an entangling or besetting sin that is causing us not to go on with the Lord?
You know, we go through a conference, and sometimes in the middle of the conference we can hear some things and start feeling a little guilty. Maybe we know that we have a bad habit of cheating in school.
I cannot tell you, as a teacher, the scourge that has come into the education system through cheating. We have completely justified it because, “You have to cheat to get ahead, to get to that university.”
If that is an issue of yours, it is something you need to take care of with the Lord. You need to turn from the left and get to the narrow way.
Take it to the Lord today. Tell Him, “Lord, I can’t, but You can. I know when the pressure comes, I am going to fall into temptation.”
If greed, money, or the love of money is an entangling sin, bring it before the Lord. If anger or wrath is causing difficulty in the family—between husband and wife, or parents and children—this is an entangling sin. This is a sin off to the left that needs to be dealt with.
We need to stop hiding it. We need to confront it and bring it before the Lord.
In this day and age, we always have to bring up the scourge of social media and even pornography. It is something that is wiping out the Lord’s soldiers, the Lord’s people whom He wants to rule and reign with Him.
This is a day that, before you go to bed tonight, you can just tell the Lord, “Lord, I can’t, but You can.”
I don’t want to spend too much more time on the left, because a lot of us are off to the right. Now, what is the right? It is self-righteousness.
Oh, it is so easy to look at everyone on the left and judge. We look good, we dress nicely, we do everything we are supposed to do at the fellowship and at school. Everyone says we are such a good person, but we are full of self-righteousness.
All those sins are so subtle that people do not recognize them. Yet this is something that is allowing—or keeping—the Lord from being preeminent in our lives. He is righteous. He cannot commune with self-righteousness.
Now, let me give you an image that might help with this narrow path and being off to the right. I have only driven through Toronto this week a couple of times, but I do know that Toronto has horrible traffic.
I actually do a lot of driving, a lot of road trips and stuff like that. Especially if we are driving across the country, one of the worst feelings is when you come over a hill and just see taillights.
I turn to my wife and say, “Whoa, what’s going on? Check your phone.” In the old days, it was kind of nice—you did not know anything, so you just had to sit there. But now, you ask, “Okay, what’s going on?”
And the most irritating thing to hear is, “Well, there’s an accident on the other side.” Why is it slowing us down? We all know why. I do not know if you call it this in Canada, but we are all rubbernecking.
We cannot help ourselves when there is an accident on the other side. We have to look. Rubbernecking is a scourge of traffic.
But the Lord gave me a picture as I was meditating on this. So much of our Christian walk, so much of what the Lord has for us—the blessing, the filling, the joy—is slowed down and stopped because we are busy looking at others.
“Oh, can you believe what the prime minister is doing now?” “Oh, did you hear about that new liberal parade that is going on?” “Can you believe people are acting that way?”
All that does is slow us down. Sometimes, when we are driving and there is an accident, we are called to go over there and help. But usually, we are just too busy judging.
One of the things we see in Josiah—and we will see it later when we look at a later verse—is that he was not self-righteous. Oh no, he was willing to humble himself and say, “I am a sinner.”
You know, this is very liberating. One of the crises that Mac was talking about earlier today is just recognizing that you are a sinner. Bring that to the Lord, accept the covering of His blood, and move on.
This is the narrow way that Josiah was able to walk.
Another aspect that Josiah understood is that he sought godly counsel. If you look at the chapters that cover his life, Josiah is always asking somebody else, “What is your counsel? What is your counsel? I am just a young man. I need to hear your wisdom.”
We know Rehoboam rejected the godly counsel of the elders, and it cost him his kingdom. In this room, there is such a wealth of godly people.
Now, I want to point something out, even in how we are sitting today. This is okay for tonight, but all the young people are up here, and many of you wiser—I do not want to say older; I get in trouble—many of the parents are in the back.
That works for tonight. This is how we set things up. But young people, seek out the older ones.
At a lunch opportunity, at the fellowship, seek out someone who is older and ask them about their testimony. Ask some of the older ones, “What would you do in this situation that I am facing at school?”
I will guarantee you this: if you have not done this before, it will be awkward the first time—for both of you. But we need to get over that.
Parents, seek counsel even from your children. As they get older, ask them, “We have a family situation that is coming up. Why don’t you consider praying about that? Actually, let’s pray about it together, and maybe next week come together and see what the Lord is showing us.”
You have no idea what that does to the relationship between parents and children, and older saints and younger saints in the fellowship.
I can remember to this day the first time my dad turned to me and said, “You know, I have this situation at work. Will you pray for me?”
That was as powerful as when he first gave me the keys to the car. My dad was seeking my prayer. Do you know how much easier after that it was for me to go to him and say, “Dad, will you pray for me?”
Do that in the fellowship. Josiah did, and he received great counsel.
This also leads to trusting the Holy Spirit. We are always seeking. You go to an older person and say, “Can you pray for me?” “Yes, let’s seek the leading of the Holy Spirit on this.”
Enough said. It is a challenge. Ask the Lord if He would ask you to be so bold as to do this.
Another item I see in Josiah’s life is the absolute destruction of the idols that surrounded him.
I was actually a little upset, and I talked to a couple of brothers about this, because I read a commentary—actually, many commentaries. One commentary said, “You know, Josiah kind of went a little too far here.”
So this is just a warning to all of you: even when you read commentaries, always bring it back to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Ask, “Does this sit right in my spirit?”
It did not sit right in my spirit. So I am going to say this this evening: we have got to be violent with the idols in our lives.
What happened to the nation of Israel? When they came into the Promised Land, they started looking around and seeing the prosperous tribes around them. They said, “You know what? We better borrow from their gods.”
“We will still worship the Lord, but we are going to borrow a few of the gods and idols of the nations.” We are no different.
I cannot tell you the number of young people who love the Lord, go to the Toronto Conference, and are completely given over to the Lord. Then they get that acceptance letter to a university.
They are so taken by that university, so taken by the graduate opportunities, so taken by the work opportunities, that twelve years later, I have never seen them again—always with the intention of coming back, but never finding the time to do so.
This is something we can even talk about in our families. In this decision, are we making this university or this money decision into an idol?
We have all heard this. We have heard about money, profession, and universities becoming idols. But if we look carefully at the story of Josiah, there are a lot of different idols. They are very descriptive.
There are wooden idols. There are idols carved out of stone. There are idols formed in fire. This also has to do with how we worship.
We are supposed to worship in spirit and in truth. We heard it many times this week. And you touched that this week.
When we were worshiping this week, perhaps you felt your heart beating faster and faster, and you just could not help yourself but say something—even if it was just the title of the song. Amen. That was from the spirit.
But just a warning: a big trap in worship is suddenly moving into worship from the soul.
One scheme of the enemy—and if you were in our workshop, we used that word quite a bit—is to snatch out our young people with emotional worship. That is like a molten image, a molten idol: this fiery emotion that causes us to say, “Oh, I have to leave this fellowship because I just have to have a drum.”
A wooden idol is an intellectual idol—one that we can use our brain to shape and form just the way we want to intellectually. “I have to have a piano. It is a very intellectual piece, and I only worship with a piano.”
I do not want to belabor this or go into it too long, but we are to commune with the Lord when we worship.
If you are coming here and worshiping with your family because that is just what we do, then you need to go before the Lord and say, “Lord, I want to worship in spirit and truth. I want to see You, no matter what, in this place.”
There are millions of people your age right now who do not have an opportunity to sit in this room and worship. As uncomfortable as those pews are, they would do anything to be there right now just to worship the Lord.
They would do anything just to have a little scrap of paper that had a new song written on it. Let’s not take this for granted.
Sunday is going to come around. You are going to be back at your home fellowship, and you might fall back into that, “Oh, do we have to wake up this early?”
This is your opportunity to fight this battle with the Lord, to declare to the heavenlies that the Lord is on His throne and He is preeminent in all things.
So just ask the Lord: What does that look like when we get back home?
One of the things Josiah started doing, as he was obedient and following the Lord, was repairing the temple.
I do not want to go into the details. It is fascinating. One of the things he had to do was get rid of all the bronze and bring back gold. There had been a lot of mixture. A lot of man had come into the temple.
But the most beautiful thing happened when he was doing that. The men who were rebuilding the temple, fixing it up, found the Word of God. It had been lost.
You know, this Scripture, this Bible, was a pretty important part of your life this last week. Do you know why this was such an important piece? Because the administrators took your phone.
“What do I do with my hands? I guess I better open this thing.”
How do you lose the Word of God? Ask yourself, because I guarantee you the enemy is going to work overtime these coming weeks to make this disappear.
It might be lost because the phone becomes preeminent. In a few weeks, your textbooks are going to be preeminent. Suddenly, this is not a cool book to carry to class anymore.
How many of you this week saw someone walking to the cafeteria or walking to the dorm, holding this, and thought, “Ha, look, he is holding a Bible”? No one, because that is who we are. This is what we are all about.
This is the Word. This is truth. This is the Lord Jesus speaking to you in reality and truth.
But in three weeks, you walk down the hallway of your high school, your college campus, or your office building. It even has gold on it, so it cannot be missed. “What is that?”
So it starts going in your backpack. Then there is not enough room with your calculus textbook, so it is left in your room. Then it is thrown in the drawer. “Well, I have the phone, because I always have my phone to read my Bible anyway.”
But the Bible app just is not as cool as the Instagram app. This is how the Word of God gets lost.
Brothers and sisters, we have to be violent with this Book. It will get lost.
But I love the story of Josiah, because Hilkiah the high priest finds it, runs, and brings it to the king. Josiah says, “What should we do?”
The prophetess says there is a very important thing that you need to consider about this Word: it needs to be obeyed. It says that Josiah rent his clothes.
We need to be careful not to read the Word and just skip over that: “Okay, so he tore his clothes.” I want you to picture a king in your mind. Do not close your eyes, because you will fall asleep, but picture what a king looks like.
He probably has a crown. He probably has a robe. That robe gives him access anywhere in his kingdom. It opens all doors, wherever he wants to go in his kingdom.
There is nothing more humble that a king can do than to rent his clothes. He is saying, “I am nothing. I am a sinner.”
Oh, that is a beautiful thing. This Book will do that to you. All those idols that I talked about, all those challenges, will melt away as you become enamored, as you become consumed, as the Word becomes preeminent in your life.
We all have the same thing. It may not be a kingly robe, but we have a lot of things that we put on that open doors for us.
I work in a high school, and everyone knows who gets a new car, especially if it is a BMW. One day there is this kid and no one really knows him. The next day, suddenly he is walking around with his chest out, kind of smiling. He has got a Beamer.
It is a subtle thing that we like to have these things that open doors and impress people.
I do work in a high school, and I meet a lot of parents. One of my least favorite introductions is this: “Hi, I am Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so. Our son goes to Yale.” Or, “Hi, I am so-and-so. My son is a doctor, and my daughter is a doctor also.”
It is so common. I would love to meet a parent who says, “I am Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so, and our son loves the Lord Jesus.” I have yet to have anyone introduce themselves that way.
But mom and dad out there, would that not be your heart’s desire for your child?
You do not have to go to school if the Lord does not want you to go to school. If you do go to university, make the best grades you can to please the Lord.
If you have not had this conversation with your child, I encourage you to have it very soon.
Forgive me if I have shared this with you before, maybe even in this congregation. But I will tell you a very precious gift that I was given.
I was mowing the lawn with my dad. We could mow the lawn very quickly because he wanted to get it done quickly so he could go back into his office and read the Word.
I will never forget: he was edging, and I was mowing, and all of a sudden the edger stopped. He came up to me. This was very unusual because he liked to do it quickly so he could go read the Word.
He looked at me and said, “Son, I do not care what you do in your life. You can pump gas the rest of your life, as long as you love the Lord with your whole heart.”
He went back, started the edger, and started mowing. I do not know where that came from.
My dad has given me many, many gifts. That was one of the greatest. I did not know it at the time. I just thought he was working on a message or something.
But I cannot tell you the number of crises I have had since that time. What he was saying is found in Deuteronomy.
If you turn with me to Deuteronomy 6:4-7, it is interesting that these verses are exactly how Josiah is described in one of the last verses of his life.
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart;
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
We could read more, but what a beautiful gift. What my father did there was that he rent his clothes before me, and he encouraged me to do the same. Rent the clothes and come before the Lord naked.
Now, if the Lord wants to put on a robe of a degree, a robe of a job—whatever the Lord wants to bless us with, He can—but it has His insignia on it.
So I challenge you with that.
Two more things before I end. Josiah also found the ark. The very presence of God that David so wanted in the temple had been lost.
As you leave this conference, as you start going home, be before the Lord. As Brother Dana shared with us just yesterday, ask for that pouring of the Holy Spirit upon you.
You can be filled with the Holy Spirit even in calculus class.
I will tell you kind of a goofy story. I was in a meeting—one of my least favorite meetings. It was an administrative meeting at school.
I really did not like the way the meeting was going. It should have been twenty minutes; we were working on two hours.
Literally, I just said, “Lord, please bring this to an end.”
You think the Lord would answer the prayer that way and just end it. But He said, “I am sufficient. My Holy Spirit is with you. I am your Comforter.”
And you know what? I giggled. It was so embarrassing, because I had no idea what they were talking about. I can only hope it was something funny, but I know it was not, because everyone was staring at me.
They thought I had my phone out, maybe I was doing something instead of paying attention. But isn’t that interesting? I did not have my phone. I had something so much greater than anything on the phone.
It is the Holy Spirit. It is the Comforter. It is the very presence of the Lord Jesus. Oh, it is a beautiful thing.
Now, the ark was not too far away. It had just been shoved aside. There were some Levites who were very good about their job, and they preserved the ark, but it was not in the middle. It was not preeminent.
Ask the Lord to be preeminent, even in your homework.
One last recovery of Josiah: it says that they celebrated Passover in a way they had not celebrated it since the time of Samuel.
As great as David was, this Passover celebration was even greater than the time of David. You young people out there have an opportunity to experience something of the Lord, to bring something into the Lord greater than even those before you.
I had an opportunity at the conference, being in the same townhouses with Jim and Dana, to hear some of their stories—to hear about revival, to hear about healing. All I could think was that the Lord would have something even greater for us.
The Passover was celebrated greater in Josiah’s time than in the time of any of the kings before him.
One of the keys to the Passover is that you have to have a lamb. It is roasted all day long.
As I was meditating on this, I could not help but think of the smell of that roasted lamb. If you ever study psychology or medical things like that, you will find out that smell is the greatest sense for memory.
This is why you roasted the lamb all day: that smell would be smelled, and the people would remember the Passover Lamb, the Lord Jesus.
And guess what? Even when they were not celebrating Passover, a lot of people ate lamb. Every time they smelled the lamb, they were to remember the Lord Jesus.
Can we do that in our lives? Every circumstance, every situation: “Ah, the Lord Jesus is so wonderful.”
You are going to go home, and you are going to remember the conference. You will probably share with people, “Oh, it was a great conference. I really touched the Lord. I really experienced the Lord.”
It is a wonderful thing to be in the presence of the Lord continually.
Now, I do not want to go into the whole story of the Passover, but I want to challenge you with this: Do you want to go home and experience the presence of the Lord continually?
There is no greater experience. Our Lord does want to reveal Himself to us.
Looking at Josiah’s life again: the importance of prayer, the importance of seeking out counsel, the importance of the Word of God. I hope that this week is only just the beginning. You are not too young.
This is one of the challenges that you are going to face. Now, Josiah’s story does end with one sad note.
At the very end, a war broke out. Josiah was not asked to go fight that war. But he had been so successful in so many things, he went out, and he lost his life.
Now, I do not say that to end on a sad note. But go home. Go out and trust the Lord.
You do not have to do it all. You do not have to carry this down the hallway and make sure everyone sees it so you get picked on at school. You do not have to have an hour-and-a-half quiet time every single morning.
You do not have to sit on the front row during worship time and just say, “Spirit and truth, spirit and truth, worship, I worship, I worship.”
If we think we can do it, that is pride.
Before you go to bed tonight, just ask the Lord to show you one thing from this week, one thing from tonight, and say, “Lord, can You make that real in my life?”
“Lord, tomorrow I am going to be old. Today I am young. I do not want to go another minute without seeing You.”
But when you wake up, tomorrow becomes today. When are we supposed to serve the Lord? Today.
Do not worry about yesterday. Do not worry about tomorrow. Our Lord Jesus is sufficient. He will be with you always.
The Father did not sacrifice His most precious Son to abandon you. He gave up the Son so that He could gain all of you. What a treasure.
Dear heavenly Father, we are grateful for this week that You have given us. We are thankful for the brothers and sisters that You have given us. We are thankful for Your Word that You have given us.
We are thankful for the Holy Spirit that You so willingly want to pour forth. We are thankful for the indwelling Holy Spirit. We are so thankful for the sanctifying life that You have given us. We are so thankful for the corporate life that You have given us.
We love You, Lord. We are so thankful that this evening we can say, “We can’t, but You can.” It is impossible with us, but it is more than possible with You.
We are thankful that You called us into Your army, and You leave us armed with the Lord Jesus. Lord, if we have only made You prominent, we pray tonight that You would reveal Yourself as the preeminent One.
We abandon ourselves to You. We worship You and praise You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.