Adopted for Life

All right, good morning, guys. We go ahead and start finding our seats now. It’s great to see everybody today. Like Becky said a second ago, man, I’m so grateful for all the all the sunshine and the warm weather. As as much fun as it was to be pelted with snowballs by my family a couple weeks ago, man, this is why we moved to Charleston. So really grateful for all this. Yeah, wanted to yeah bring us to our time of congregational prayer this morning.

It was introduced last week that the month of February is a special giving month for the George Newton scholarship. That is a fund that we support at Charleston Southern University. There’s a number of us in the room, though, that may not be exactly familiar with Mr. Newton, Preacher Newton, he’s known by. So I talked with Lee this this past week and just asked, like, “Hey, like for the folks in the room that aren’t exact sure who that was, can you can you help me fill in some of the details?” So Pastor Newton, Preacher Newton, truly remarkable man. He served two tenures here at Sauldam Baptist Church, totaling nearly 35 years. For the majority of that pastorate, he would preach here at Sauldam, but he would also preach at Hopewell Baptist Church and either Adams Run or Stono Baptist Church. So he was preaching three times times in three locations on Sundays, and he did that for what I understand is for years.

But it wasn’t just all about him. He made a very concerted effort to help establish other pastors and preachers as well. Most notably, perhaps, John Hamer at the age of 14 preached his first sermon in what we now call the old church. John Hamer would go on to receive a doctorate and be pastor of North Charleston First Baptist Church and be the first president of Charleston Southern University, what was back then Baptist College. Preacher Newton, though, he was not just about helping establish new pastors; he was about helping as many people as he could. One of those new pastors that he helped out was preaching his very first funeral, and Preacher Newton had heard that this pastor didn’t even have a suit and nice shoes. So Preacher Newton shows up to the funeral, what I understand, with a brand new suit and shoes for this young pastor. He was beloved by many and respected by all, and this fund was established in his name to help support more Christian education and preparation for future pastors and Christian leaders. So this month, as you are giving above your normal giving toward the George H. Newton scholarship, know that it is done in memory of a man that was is crucial to the current life of our church.

You know, God ultimately is the one that that has sustained and kept us here, kept us here at 5945 County Line Road, but humanly speaking, without George Newton, I’m not confident that we would be here today. In fact, there is a group of folks that I want to recognize that humanly speaking we are not here without. I’m not going to ask anybody to physically stand up, but if you are 65 years or older in this room today, can you just raise your hand because we need to recognize you guys, seriously. [Applause] There’s a whole laughter there’s a whole group of people in the room today that aren’t really familiar with our history and where we’ve come from and where we’ve been, and there’s a lot of very strong individuals that have held us and stabilized this church for so long, and I’m extremely grateful for you. So as we go into our time of prayer, I just ask you would grab a neighbor and that we would pray for this fund specifically, that it would help propel gospel ministry for a long time to come by our investment in students at Charleston Southern today. So y’all start praying, and I’ll put a bow on it here in a moment. Thank you.

Heavenly Father, we come before You today as extremely needy people. God, we might like to posture with ourselves, we might like to pretend, Lord, to play dress up with the clothes of success and having things all together, but we are extremely needy, Father. At best, the heroes of our faith, the Billy Grahams, the George Newtons, they are people that were deeply in touch with their neediness, and they brought that to You. God, thankfully, You said that Your power is made perfect in our weakness, not our strength. So we don’t bring our strength to You; we bring our neediness and our weakness to to you God it was because of your own greatness that you used Pastor Newton so well it’s because of you that four churches stand today and it’s because of you that we have any hope of a life with you Father I pray for the student that receives that scholarship fund and I pray Lord that they would have a legacy similar to His God that 70 years from now there’s some other church in some other town and they are celebrating the fact that You gave them that Pastor who strengthened and established and propelled them Lord thank You for him thank You for preacher Newton God thank You for the opportunity I have today to share Your word with this church Lord I pray that You would get the distractions out of our minds God I pray that we would be good soil ready to receive it I pray that You would would help all of us to be centrally focused on You Lord that as we walk out of here today that we would be just a little a little bit more like You and Father for the one that’s in the room today that does not yet know You as Savior and Lord Lord I I pray that You would get a hold of them this morning Holy Spirit that You would do something only You can that You would open their eyes to see You that the affections of their heart would be would be wet for You Lord please God we love You and it’s in Your name I pray amen amen

well you go ahead and open up in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 1 I’ll join you there in a moment I want to start off by telling you a pretty amazing story of a gentleman named Lopez Lomong if unless you are an Olympics expert particularly in the middle distances you probably don’t know the name Lopez Lomong he was born in Sudan and at unfortunately at the age of six during the second Sudan Civil War he was taken from his church by a group of rebel soldiers as a six-year-old he was transferred to a prison camp and intended to become a child soldier child soldier in the Sudan Civil War thankfully he was befriended by a group of older boys and in the night one night they escaped ran 40 miles across three days to find themselves in Kenya where they just so happened to make it to a Kenyan refugee camp they joined approximately 4,000 other boys which internationally became known as The Lost Boys of Sudan Lopez would spend 10 years in a refugee camp in Kenya facing what were extremely difficult conditions the story of this life it’s called Running for My Life in it Lopez tells the stories about how he and the other boys would race on garbage days because that was the day that garbage was brought into the prison camp and they would pick through it to find edible scraps they lacked everything that they would need things that we would call need needs however in that refugee camp for some reason Lopez found a love for running running was how he would cope with life it’s how he would cope with his trauma it’s how he would process through all these things

Lopez eventually would be resettled into America through a refugee adoption resettlement program and he would continue his love for running and growing up in Kenya if you are unfamiliar has a higher elevation so the years he spent running in a Kenyan refugee camp he was conditioning for American track and field he would become an extremely successful athlete and he would run in college on scholarship and he would make it I think we have a picture all the way to the Olympics in 2008 and he would represent America on the Olympic stage multiple times adoption is central to Lopez’s story without adoption Lopez Lomong at best spends life in a Kenyan refugee camp really never to be heard from or heard of again at worst Lopez would have been put on the front lines of child warfare today as we continue our series in Ephesians we will learn a pivotal truth one that should rock your world it’s this all born again believers are also adopted we are adopted by God we’re going to learn why that matters we’re going to learn how that changes us you see as great as Lopez’s story is the story that God wants to write in your life can be just as incredible so read it with me this is Ephesians chapter 1 verse 3 blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ. Before I get too far into adoption, I want to say a few words about the next few verses. You see, verses 3 through 14. If you were to scan them in the Bible in your lap, you would see there’s a heading. It’s called God’s Rich Blessings. In mine, it naturally stops at verse 15. You’ve got verses 3 through 14. For Paul, when he’s writing this letter to the Ephesians, those verses are one sentence. Those verses are one sentence. Paul talking about the spiritual blessings that we have in Christ, Paul talking about this identity that you and me and we can all embrace, is just gushing about God’s grace. He is just like a kaleidoscope that you turn and you just see all the colors and all the shapes, and every time you turn it a little bit, the picture changes a little bit. He’s like a hawk that gets caught in an updraft and it’s just going, going, carefree. He is like a waterfall that is just gushing and constantly pouring. He is like a love-struck teenager writing a note to the girl that he’s got a crush on, if that even happens anymore. I’m going to save embarrassment for any of our teenage boys by asking that question out loud. In this one sentence, he mentions Christ over 14 times, and he uses this phrase “in Christ” 11 times. In Christ, in Christ, in Christ, Christ, 11 times. Christ is crucial for these spiritual blessings. There’s four truths that we will see about them as we unpack them over the next few weeks. If you’re a notetaker, this will be on the bulletin, it’ll be on the screen. Four truths about the spiritual blessings in Christ. The first is that blessings for us flow from God’s own blessedness. Verse 3, blessed is God. So God is blessed, and He blesses us with every spiritual blessing. God has an identity of being blessed, and He can’t help but to share that identity with you by giving you the blessings He has. And as He does this, the second truth is revealed: the blessings reveal God’s trinitarian love for us. We as evangelical conservative Christians believe that there is one God in three persons, which we call a trinity. God is comprised of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, and you’re going to see all three of them across these verses as God blesses us. The Father’s going to show His love, the Son is going to show His love, and the Spirit is going to show His love. The whole Trinity is working on this thing. The third truth that gets revealed is that these blessings are spiritual in nature. Verse 3, he says, “Blessed is God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” Now this is not heaven like the home of God right now, it’s not the heavens like the skies of Psalm 14. This is the spiritual realm, the unseen but felt interaction of the spiritual realm which is laid on top of us here in the physical realm. Paul will describe that spiritual realm as being inhabited by rulers, authorities, cosmic powers in this darkness, evil spiritual demonic forces. God so loves you, He does not just give you an eternal fire insurance plan and gets you out of hell. God loves you so much He also protects you from the hell that lives on Earth right now, a hell we can’t see, but the demons and the dark forces that would love to oppress and hold us and damage us. For those who are in Christ, they are secured from them. The fourth truth about these spiritual blessings is that they fuel praise. These blessings fuel praise. Praise is going to be brought up twice in these short verses. The whole statement is framed as a reason to praise God, and verse 16 says that because of all this, I never stopped giving thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I never stopped praising God for you. The ultimate sign that someone has received the blessings, which we’re going to study, is that they live a life of praising God. Praising God is just natural in their conversation, it’s natural in their demeanor, it’s natural in how they carry themselves. You show me someone who has experienced these blessings, and I will show you someone who naturally talks about how good God is. So let me give you a road map for the next five weeks, because we’re just going to handle each blessing in turn. We’re just going to take Our time with this, we don’t have to rush today. I’m going to talk about the blessing of adoption, verses 4-6. Next week, Lord willing, the blessing of redemption, 7 and 8. Then the blessing of the revelation of mystery. Fourth, the blessing of the inheritance via predestination—Paul’s word, not mine. And fifth, the blessing of being sealed in the Spirit. We’re going to cover these over the next few weeks, and we’re just going to let the Scripture speak for what it is. And here’s the thing: some of those words scare us. Looking at you, predestination. Thank you, one person laughed. You understood that was a joke. We never have to worry about defending what the Bible says, though. We let the Bible speak for itself. We glean from it. So all that being said, let’s examine today’s blessing—that is the blessing of adoption. Continuing the passage with me, verses 4-6: For God chose us in Christ, in Him before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before Him. He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He lavished on us in the beloved one.

If you’re a notetaker, if you need something to chat about over fajitas for lunch, this would be it. The main point of today, what I want you to take away from this, is adoption is being chosen in the Chosen One. Adoption means being chosen in the Chosen One. We’re going to examine what that means, but for the full weight of that statement to land on us, we need to understand how it would have sounded originally to the Ephesians. And none of us were alive 2,000 years ago, so I’ve had to consult some study resources on this. What I’ve learned, though, was pretty shocking. For one, there was no Hebrew word for adoption. As great as the Jewish people were, they didn’t have a term to explain or to state me legally claiming someone else’s child and bringing them into my family. There was no term for that, so it would have been new to the Jewish people, at least in that sense.

There were three forms of adoption in Greco-Roman society, however, all three were primarily concerned with my estate planning or continuing my family name. That was not concerned with helping rescue children out of Kenyan refugee camps. It wasn’t concerned with giving troubled kids a better future. It was concerned with making sure someone didn’t get my money when I died, or making sure that my last name got to continue. The three forms of adoption that were happening when this letter was written was about a transaction. It was a way to pay people off, or to make sure they didn’t get paid. It was a way to make sure my name got continued. Because of that, there would have been some shortfalls with this system, right? The first is this: at that time, only males could be legal heirs. So if you’re looking for somebody to collect your estate, you’re only going to adopt a boy. And related to that, adoption candidates, because it’s transactional in nature, they would have been chosen based off their ability, their skills, their social networks, even their attractiveness. So you think about this: only the best of the best would have been adopted. And usually, you’d want to give a child some time to prove themselves, so you’re adopting a teenager.

So when the Ephesians are hearing the word adoption, they’re thinking about a system for rich families to continue their legacy through well-to-do boys. The Ephesians’ perspective on adoption would have been so dramatically different than ours. You know, we hear the term adoption, and I’m thinking about a young family at our old church back in Colombia who already have a couple kids of their own, but they just feel burdened to share their love with a child that they did not give birth to. And it’s fun to rally around. There’s like a GoFundMe page set up so people can directly contribute financially. I’ve got very positive feelings about adoption. Sometimes we hear the adoption stories of guys like Lopez Lomong, who were these incredible world-class athletes digging through trash heaps just to get fed in Kenya. We have extremely positive feelings about adoption because we’ve got hundreds of years of Christians responding to God’s kindness in Jesus and showing that through adopting others. We have an incredibly warm perspective on adoption. But think about what the Ephesians would have been considering. Hold on, God…

adopts me? Is it because He wants to get something from me? Or hold on, God has adopted me. I must be—I must be worth something. I must have something I can contribute to Him. Or maybe I’ve earned it somehow. When the Ephesians hear that God has adopted them in Christ, I can’t imagine that it would have been an entirely positive feeling. So that’s why Paul writes about adoption in verses 4-6 in such an incredible way. Remember adoption being chosen, the chosen one. So what was so special about God’s adoption? It starts with that first line in verse four: God, He chose us in Christ. Imagine it. God gave Jesus to gain you. John 3:16 says that God so loved the world that He gave—not demanded, not took, not transacted. God so loved the world that He gave. And what did He give, Sam? He gave His one and His only Son. One of many? Caroline? No, one and only. God gave because He loves you so much. He gave His very best. He gave His one and His only. Jesus is the beloved Son of God, the chosen one, if you will, the ultimate Son, the one with whom God is well pleased. That’s how God would speak about Him at the baptism before His public ministry. To gain us, the Father would have to give up Jesus. Someone in the room needs to hear this: God does not adopt us to take from you or to withhold from others. God adopts by giving His Son so that you can have life, and you can have it abundantly. You can live free from the pain of sin, or the wages of sin, and the pain of death. To God, you are not second best. You are not the last pick. You are not the runt of the litter. But you are wanted, prized, and adored. God loves you so much He sent His Son to rescue you. He would give up what is the best thing in the world to gain us. What special—thank you—what’s special about adoption is the incredible lengths to which God went to make it all happen. When did He do this? When did God plan this rescue? Paul says, before the foundation of the world. Think about it. God decided on you before you could prove yourself to Him. God determined this adoption plan before creation, before you could grow up, before you could show—show yourself worthy, develop any marketable skills, before you could earn it through your religious good deeds, before you could ever try to just be a good old boy. God chose you. Think about it this way: when God was dreaming of making stars and wildflowers, sailfish and F-150s and mountain ranges—pick your poison—when God was dreaming about that, He was dreaming about you. He was thinking about you. And before He started making creation, He chose to make you His child. Man, God loves you. God determined this adoption to take place before you could ever get up on some sort of box and be examined, before your name could ever be put in some sort of adoption brochure, before you could ever prove yourself worthy of it. Before all of that, God planned to adopt you. So what ought to happen to His adoptees? Paul says that they would be holy and blameless in love before Him. That statement says a lot. It says that God pursues the unholy and the blameworthy. Here’s the deal: you and me, Billy Graham, Prentiss, your grandma—we’ve all sinned. The Bible says that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. It says that we’ve all gone astray like sheep without a shepherd. It says that there is no one righteous, no, not even one. We’ve all sinned. We’ve—we’ve all done things that would merit, that would earn God’s wrath on us. None of us deserve God’s kindness or His love. But—but God, who is rich in His mercy, because of the great love that He has for us, makes us alive with Christ, even though we are dead in our trespasses. You see, God determined in love to make us His own when there was nothing in us that would merit that, that could earn that, nothing in us that would make God look at us and say, “Oh, I can work with that one because they’re so good. I can work with them because, man, they’re—they’re—they’re head and shoulders above the rest on that sin category.” That’s not us. The Bible talks about sin in a couple of ways. There are differences in the consequences of sin. Telling a A white lie would hurt your relationship with a couple people. It could damage your trust with a group. But murdering someone has a bit of a different real-life consequence, right? Right. But before the Lord, all sin is the same, for all have sinned. The moment you choose to lie, the moment you choose to go against God’s way for you, it’s like a gulf or a chasm or a canyon opens up between you and the Lord, and there’s nothing you can do to jump that gap. There’s no bridge you can build through religion. There’s no way around it with your good works. There is no family relationship that can toss you over it. The only way that your soul gets across the gap caused by your sin between God over there and you right here is if God over there chooses to cross it and come to you.

Before God, we are all sinners, and there is no way for us to cross that gap over to Him. We desperately need Him to cross it for us, and that is what He did in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, the God of the universe crossed the uncrossable gap between Heaven and Earth, and God sent His Son to come and live a perfect life in our place, knowing full well that even once we accept that grace, we would still sin against Him. And after living a perfect life in our place, Jesus, the perfect Son, the perfect chosen Holy One, would die a sacrificial death for you and me—something we deserve to die because we are all sinners, but something we don’t have to die because God is so stinking rich in His grace and His mercy and His kindness for you. And He didn’t just die wiping away sin in the past. Jesus, after dying, came back to life, and He made a way for you to be secure forever. Is anyone else excited about this? God loves you. He’s got grace for you. And when God adopts you, the holy and the blameless, God comes and puts His arm around the unholy and the totally blameworthy.

You think about all the moments in the Gospels where Jesus left the religious crowd and He walked to the irreligious, and He would physically embrace the unclean. He would show kindness to those who had been discouraged. He would leave the temple premises to go to be with the people that could never be caught there. That’s God for us. We all have to recognize that we’re in this camp. We are in this group of people that are totally helpless before the Lord because there’s nothing we could do to make ourselves right before Him. God does that for us. He makes us His kids when there is honestly nothing in us that looks like Him.

I want to show you a picture of Lopez with his adoptive parents. You see, the funny thing about adoption is that usually the adoptive kids don’t look like the parents that they now call their parents, right? You can see the difference, right? Lopez’s smile is so much wider than the other smile. Now, I mean, all joking aside, what does happen though is that Lopez, through the years of spending time in that family, would have adopted the dialect of his parents, would have adopted some of the customs, he would have adopted some of the same culture, and even the fashion style. The same thing happens with us and God. When we first meet God, there is not a whole lot of resemblance between us and Him. We look a little bit like that picture right there. But as we spend time in God’s family, His identity becomes our activity.

The passage says that God is holy and blameless. Think about this: holy means the presence of God’s goodness, being filled with all the right stuff. When we come to God, we’re filled with all the wrong stuff. God, as we get to know Him and spend time around Him, He starts to put the right stuff in us. Blameless would mean the absence of our badness. You and me before the Lord, we are blameworthy, and what God does for us is that He gets all the bad stuff that we contribute to this relationship, and He gets it out. We begin to be filled with God’s goodness, and we begin to be emptied of our badness. So that means that we show that we are sons of God by how we grow to look like Him in our holiness and our blamelessness. The question is, are you growing in those? Is the identity of Your adoptive father becoming your activity? Why would God do this? What would move the heart of Heaven to adopt us? Paul says, verse 5, check it out at the end, it was according to the good pleasure of His will. In other words, Jeremy’s version, God wanted to. You see, God is happy to claim you. God is happy to make you His own. God did not need to adopt us to continue His family dynasty. He didn’t need to adopt us to have an estate planning solution. He did not need to adopt us to make Himself look any better. No, God decided to make us His sons because it was the happiest thing God could have done. Zephaniah 3 says this, that God sings and dances over you. The Heavenly Father, when He looks at you, He is delighted. He’s a dad that gets on the floor with His kids and rolls around. He is a teacher who just adores her students and she cannot wait until Monday comes to see them again. God smiles over us. It was, man, it made God happy to adopt us. It wasn’t just a duty or a discipline for Him to do that. It wasn’t just something He forced Himself to do. No, it was something He wanted to do.

Got to recognize that not all of us had dads that treated us like this. Some of us had the the the really hard type and it was just rules, rules, rules. Some of us had the absent type and maybe you wanted a few more rules because you wanted his presence. Some of us had really well-meaning dads that even though they got it right sometimes or most of the time, they still failed because they’re just dads. Regardless of your experience of your father, there is a Heavenly Father who is perfect. He is consistent. He is always there for you. He’s got rules and standards, but He’s also got so much grace and kind kindness for you.

God adopted us because it made Him happy. So what was the cost? What was the cost of this adoption? Verse 6 says that it was all to the praise of this His glorious grace that He lavished on us in the beloved one. You see, adoptions cost money. If they were free, then maybe more folks would do it. But here’s the thing, adoptions cost money, and our adoption was the most costly of any that ever was. Grace, what God had to give, is His undeserved and proactive goodwi- it is the fact that God is going to move toward you when you don’t deserve it. That is what God gave, and He gave it in His son by sending His son Jesus Christ for you, a gift of grace. And God lavished grace on us. That’s what the verse says, He lavished grace. That word lavish means to completely engulf in. God didn’t give a little bit of grace like the bare minimum grace, that’s not what He gave. He didn’t even give like a lot of grace but He kept some back for Himself to live on next month. No, God gave all the grace He had.

God is like the children eating pancakes at breakfast this morning and they are ding those bad boys in syrup. That’s what God is like. God wants you like smothered and covered and dripping in His grace, and He did that in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was not the bare minimum He could have given for you. Jesus and the grace of God in Him, it’s like you’re dunked in Him, you’re fully submerged in Him. He lavished this grace on you because He loves you and He wants to make you holy, and He chose this before any time had ever occurred, and He does all this because of Jesus Christ. What a blessing we have.

Do you know the Father like that? Or better yet, is God your adoptive dad? You see, God has fatherly feelings toward every single soul on this Earth. God, we learned in the Psalms, has personally and lovingly crafted every single person. God, every person on this world is a child of God because God has made every single person. However, God wants to be father in fact to you. He wants you to embrace Him. He wants to have a relationship with you. He wants to be able to walk with you like He did with Adam and Eve. He is calling you even right now. If you do not know God as your father, He is calling you to turn away from whatever you’re clinging to, to stop living for whatever you’re living for, and to call on the name of the Lord in which you will be saved. God wants to be your dad. The holy, perfect, powerful God of the universe wants to call you His son and His daughter, and if that doesn’t excite you, then I can’t do anything for you. God loves you, and He loved so much that He would move all of Heaven just to have you. If you do not yet know God that way, I’d love to begin a conversation. We can have it right here during the final song, we can have it over lunch or over coffee this week, or just over the phone or sitting in the office. I would love to talk with you about what it means to know God that way. I don’t have it all figured out. Talk with my family, and you’ll get a resounding “Amen” to that one. What I can do is I can point you to my dad, the Heavenly Father, who sent His son for me because He loves me, and He loves you.

So why did Rob and Barb Rogers adopt Lopez Lomong? If you would read the story, you would learn that they are devout Christians. They were at church one Sunday, and they saw an adoption flyer on the bulletin board about adopting from these Lost Boys of Kenya, and as they were praying about it later that week, their hearts were just moved. They just couldn’t help. They’re like, “We, we have to at least go to some, go to this information meeting. We have to just learn more about this.” And God, through that process, introduced them to Lopez.

You see, Rob and Barb Rogers had been adopted by God. God had changed their activity. He was changing their, or He had changed their identity. He was changing their activity. They become children of God. They could not help but to live for God as well. God was making them holy and blameless. God was doing a good work in them that He had planned from before time. When God was planning to adopt the Rogers, He was planning on using the Rogers to adopt Lopez. When God adopts us, He changes us, and we start to do the same things God does. We start to bring more people into God’s family. We start to sacrifice out of love. We grow in our holiness and in our blamelessness.

So for the person that came in here this morning holding God at an arm’s length, my question is: Have you been adopted by God? Have you given your life to Him? Is Jesus your Lord and your Savior? God would love to cross that 30-inch gap and to come up close to you and just to show you how good of a dad He can be. And for the one who does know God that way, my question is: Is your life characterized by sacrificial love and holiness and blamelessness? Are you becoming like your dad? Once again, God would love to cross that 30-inch gap and come alongside you and say, “Hey, this is, this is how we walk this one out.”

Pray with me, please. Father, thank You for the spiritual blessing of adoption. Only You could have thought of something so beautiful and so perfect as making wayward children into Your own. Father, I pray for the one in the room right now that does not, You, does not know You, and I’m asking God that You would save them. God, as we sing “Is So Sweet to Trust in Jesus,” that they would say those words in truth for the very first time, that they would learn how great it is to trust You and to live for You and to cast their burdens on You. And Lord, for the one in the room who does know You, who does know it’s sweet to trust You, who does have a relationship with You, I pray that You would grow them to look more like You, that the natural fruit of their lives would be to do what You do. Lord, for anybody that’s feeling that tug right now, I pray You would bring them forward in the final song, help them begin a conversation. Amen.