Audio restored with Diffio. Diffio processed the original archive recording to reduce noise and produce a cleaner listening version; the original stays available.
Speech quality score (model-estimated, SCOREQ): before 4.23 → restored 4.71
Use the player's Original switch to compare.How Diffio restores old speech recordings
And chapter twelve, And we'll read through the passage. Numbers chapter twelve. And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman he had married, for he had married an Ethiopian woman. And they said, Hath the Lord indeed only sp- spoken only by Moses? Hath he not spoken also by us, and the Lord heard it. Now the man Moses was very meek above all the men which were upon the face of the earth. And the Lord spake suddenly unto Moses and unto Aaron and unto Miriam, Come out, ye three, unto the tabernacle of the congregation.
And they three came out. And the Lord came down in the pillar of cloud and stood in the door of the tabernacle and called Aaron and Miriam, and they both came forth. And he said, Hear now my words. If there be a prophet among you, I, the Lord, will make myself known unto him in a vision and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches, and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold. Wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he departed.
And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle, and behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow. And Aaron looked upon Miriam, and behold, she was leprous. And Aaron said unto Moses, Alas, my lord, I beseech thee, lay not this sin upon us wherein we have done foolishly, wherein we have sinned. Let her not be as one dead of whom the flesh is half consumed when he cometh out of his mother's womb. And Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, Heal her now, O Lord God, I beseech thee. And the Lord said unto Moses, If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be ashamed seven days, let her be shut out from the camp seven days, and after that, let her be received in again. And Miriam was shut out from the camp seven days, and the people journeyed not until Miriam was brought in again.
And afterward, the people removed from Hazeroth and pitched in the wilderness of Paran. Let's look again to the Lord. Father, this is a difficult passage. It touches on some things that, uh, are problematic sometimes. But it's in your word, and you've brought it to us on this day. And so perhaps I need to hear it, perhaps someone here in the meeting needs to hear it. Help us to learn your heart and your will. We pray that we would hear your voice and not mine. We pray any thoughts of mine that would hinder would be taken out of the way. We pray in Christ's name, amen. I really didn't want to preach on this passage, but it's the next one.
And I promised you I was going to go through numbers, and we've got to this passage, and it's got some ticklish stuff in it. First thing, we've got the topic of interracial marriage. Ethiopians in the Bible are always black African people. Now this is in the actual original language is Kushite, so that is not necessarily that's someone they inhabited northern Africa and Arabia and some of India, but they were a different color skinned people than the children of Israel.
So that's hairy subject, not as hairy as it was back in the fifties, but it's still hairy. And then you've got inter-familiar relations, family relations, and don't we just love our family relations? I love some of my family relations at a distance because that's the only way I can love them. If I had to see them, I might high five them down a step, you know, boom, because some of my relatives aren't very nice people, and they bring out the worst in me. And so, in order to be Christ-like, I don't see them. Um, it helps me in my spiritual life not to s- to know, not to spend time with those relatives.
I hate to say that, but it's the truth. And all of us have relatives like that. Hopefully none of us are the relatives like that. But this was a difficult situation, and it had difficult topics, and I prayed a lot about it. So we're gonna go, we're gonna tiptoe through the tulips here. Hopefully I won't offend anybody. I'm hoping that I'll bring out the word of God, and if you're offended, that you're offended by perhaps the word of God, and not by something that I say, okay? Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses. The implication of that is that they went out into the camp and were speaking against the leadership of Moses.
That doesn't end well, ever, in this whole time. Uh, a couple of passages later, there are people that are swallowed alive into hell because they spoke against Moses. It, it never ends well in the tunnel of Exodus to spend, speak against Moses. So we know this is a bad idea, and they were speaking against Moses in a way to undermine his authority as God's leader for his people. So that's a problem. And the reason they were doing it is they were doing it because of who he chose to marry. He chose to marry someone who was not an Israelite.
Seems as if this is probably someone from the mixed multitude. Now I'm just gonna say we don't know anything about this person. He was married to a Midianite. Midianites are different than Cushites. There's a whole different genealogy. You go back into Genesis, you can see Midianites were descended from Abraham. Cushites were also, they were descended from, um, a whole other family. So it's not this, I don't believe it was the same woman. And the way it says it in the language, it sounds as if he had just married her. It was a recent marriage.
Now he's in his eighties, And you might think, what on earth? I- I'm certain this is what Miriam was thinking, because Miriam was older than Moses, and I can just hear her, in my sanctified imagination, hear her voice saying, that old fart, what is he doing at his age, at his time of life, marrying some woman. I can hear it in my head. And not only marrying a woman, but marrying a woman with a different skin color, marrying a woman from a different culture. And so they attacked his God-given authority as the leader of his people because of a family issue.
And a family issue about who he married. We might as well deal with the interracial marriage thing. I'm here. Let's just go with it. The Bible says that we all came from Adam and Eve, and then after that, we all came from Noah and his three sons and their three daughters. And the reason people have different color skin is because of adaptive, adaptive things in their body, genes that were present in Adam and Eve that enabled people to live longer in the places where they lived.
There's an interesting story, I'll do this real quick. The closest relative to the Maasai tribesmen. Do you know who the Maasai tribesmen are? Um, the Mutombo, the great big tall Sixers basketball player, Maasai tribesmen. They're some of the tallest people in the world, except for their very closely related relatives in Finland, who are almost genetically identical, but who have blonde hair and blue eyes. And when they ran the d- DNA, it turns out that at the separation, probably at Babel, one group went south, one group went north. They're very closely related.
They look the same, except their sin- skin, skin, eye, and hair color. What happens is, if you're in a place where there's hot sun, people with light skin get cancer and die. And they die quicker, and so people with darker skin are able to have more children, and eventually the whole population comes darker skinned. In the north, dark skin, it's an adaptive thing. I'm sure Jenny could tell us much more about this. I went into great detail in it in an anthropology class, and the point that this professor made was there is one human race, one human race.
There are not Caucasians, uh, Asiatics, that other word that you're not allowed to use anymore. There's one human race. Paul says in Acts chapter seventeen, he has made of one blood all people of the earth. And so we have an unfortunate history of slavery in this country that has made, in some parts of the country, views about marrying people who look different than us or sound different than us or from a different place than us, a problem.
But it's not biblical. There is no biblical warrant to ever get on someone's case about the color of someone's skin. There is a biblical warrant to get on someone's case if they're marrying an unbeliever. There is a, a case to get on someone's case, case from the scriptures if they're marrying someone who says they're a believer but are not living like it. And sometimes, wisdom from parents can let you know that you can be unequally yoked together with a believer. How- what do I mean? You can marry, if one of you feels really called to the mission field and the other one feels really called not to the mission field, and it's a really strong desire, you got to think about, okay, God's calling one in this direction and one in that direction.
Do you really want to get married to each other? You need to think about that. You need to pray about that. It's important in marriage that you be equally yoked, not just with believers, but the equal yoke is really important. I am so thankful that a good, all of the people that I dated except for Becky, I didn't marry, because I still know them, and I really dodged a couple of bullets. Um, actually, I dodged a bunch of bullets. Um, I would not be hap- a happy person. We have to believe that Moses, being one who spoke face to face with God, talked to God about this woman that he was getting married to.
It's the most important thing that you do. And so I believe, it's not said in the scripture, that God didn't have a problem with him marrying her. I think God would have said something because they had personal conversations all the time. Don't you think that would have come up in conversation? I'm, I'm not going to be dogmatic about that, but I just did, it follows logic. If he and God are going to have personal conversations, wouldn't you think God would have said, um, I know you think you love her, but could you perhaps not marry that one? You, you would think God would say that. We don't see that anywhere in the scripture, and the events that happen throughout this passage lead me to believe that God didn't mind and was okay with it.
So, hopefully the elders won't flog me out behind the meeting, but I have basically done my best to say what I believe the scriptures say about interracial marriage. There is no interracial marriage because there's only one human race to be truly interracial marriage, you'd have to marry like a chimpanzee or something, and that's just a bad idea no matter how you, you, anyway. So, they came and they not only did they, they speak against Moses, but they spoke against God's speaking to him.
They were undermining God's communication with him. Moses is the lawgiver, and they're undermining God's communication. They're saying, in a way, in the way that the serpent has always done, has God really said... Mm. I want to point out something to you. The translation in this, this translation is not entirely accurate. Verse two, the pre- the pronoun there is not and they said, the pronoun there is and she said.
Miriam said, has God indeed only spoken by Moses? Now, I don't want this, this is not meant to bash on women. That's not where I'm going with this. Miriam's the oldest one in this family. As the British would say, she changed his nappies, you know? She's changed the boy's diapers. She was old enough to watch out for him in the bulrushes, and... and when the Pharaoh's daughter came, she got him back with the mother. She feels responsible for this boy's continued existence.
Not only that, but also his training with his mother, because she brought them back together. She's got a feeling that she has a right to tell him what to do. She's the matriarch of the family. Aaron is also older than Moses. Moses is the youngest in the family. And so, we're not sure, I'm not sure where exactly this came from, but I do know that it is difficult sometimes to be related to someone who is doing something big, whether it's a worldly thing or a spiritual thing.
It's difficult to be respected sometimes by your family. I'm not going to use earthly examples. Let's just look at David. His brothers were all there when he was anointed king, right? Sometime after this, they're at the battle, dad sends him with some cheese and a bunch of other stuff to give him, send him lunch. He goes, and he's there greeting his brothers, and Goliath comes out, and he makes a few comments, and his oldest brother just rips into him. And then, of course, he goes and kills the g- the giant. How do you think that made the older brother feel?
And then later in his life, his oldest sister, Zeruiah, has a bunch of boys, Joab, and I think Abishai and a bunch of other ones, and they become his generals. And Joab never did what David told him to do, except one time where he had him murder somebody. And Joab was a violent, pathological killer. Matter of fact, when David was dying, the last thing he said to Solomon was, don't let his gray hairs go down in peace to the grave, have him killed. And Solomon obeyed his father and sent someone to, he hung on to the horns of the altar and wouldn't let go, so they killed him in the temple courtyard, or in the the tabernacle courtyard, because of the violence that he had committed.
And he was a thorn in David's flesh all of his life. This is David's oldest sister's son. This is David's nephew. Didn't he got no respect from his nephews. Our Lord Jesus' brothers didn't believe he was the Messiah until after he was raised from the dead and appeared to them. He- they lived with him. His mother, his brothers, and his sister, he was preaching at one point, and they came and tried to take him, carry him away because they said he's lost his mind. He got no respect, and Moses is having the same situation here. This is something you have to be careful about in your family relations.
Now, I don't know if this is something that's appropriate to anyone here. I don't know all of you well enough to know about your family situation, but we've come to it in God's word, and I'm here talking to you about it, so I have to feel that it applies to somebody. God wouldn't lead us to get to it. There's a purpose in what God does. Don't let your family relationships interfere with the work of the Lord. Don't you, because of your family relationships, attempt to interfere with a family member's work of the Lord.
Miriam did it. Look what that got her. Can you imagine you're out there saying, well, Moses ain't all that. God speaks to me too. I don't understand. We shouldn't have to listen to him, blah, blah, blah. And then the, the, all of a sudden the cloud comes down and the voice comes out and says, Miriam, Aaron, Moses, you come over here. You've all heard your dad use that tone of voice. Imagine it coming from the voice of God. And so they came over, and and he set them straight.
He said, yes, you've prophesied. You see dreams, mystic things, you don't know exactly what they mean, so you're a prophet. Okay, fine. Moses is not a prophet. I speak face to face with Moses like a friend, mouth to mouth, and he sees the similitude of my presence. Let's look at second Corinthians just real quickly. There's a- there's something that I- I didn't think about until I started studying this. Um... In, um, verse thirteen, second Corinthians chapter two three verse thirteen, it says, and not as Moses, which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished, but their minds were blinded.
For until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament, which veil is done away in Christ, but even unto this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart. Moses would put a veil over his face because every time he went in to speak with God, his face would glow. And he con- it says he continually wore the veil because it continually happened. He would go into the talk with God, they would speak face to face, he would see a similitude of God, and his face- he would come back out and his face would be glowing again. So much so that he had to put a veil because people, it was so bright that people were afraid to come to him.
Now imagine if that was your brother. Seriously, come on. So I get a little bit of what Miriam did, but this is a f- this is w- when we studied leprosy, when we looked at leprosy, when they put the leper out of the camp, leprosy is not just a picture of sin, but it is a picture of sin when it takes control of a person and pushes out and affects their behavior. And this is a classic example of that. Remember Uzziah? Talked about Uzziah. Uzziah was lifted up with pride, thought he had the r- he should have the right to go in and offer incense, went in to offer incense, and leprosy burst out in his forehead.
He thought more highly of himself than he ought to think, and he usurped the place of God's priests because of his pride. And the leprosy came out in the spot where the symbol of a person is lifting up their their own head. So we see Miriam causing this problem, and there's this visible consequence. It's not a consequence. Consequences is when you do something and... if you leave your rake laying with the tines up, or if your daughters move your rake, as happens to me many times, and leave it with the tines up, and I walk into my garage in the dark, and you step on the tines of the rake, and it hits you in the kisser.
That's a consequence. Okay? And there are some people that believe in natural consequences for... discipline for children. And they just, you know, they let them put their hand on the stove to teach them not to do it, or they let them fall down the flight of steps to teach them about gravity and things like that. I have learned a lot because of experiencing consequences, but this was not a consequence, this was a direct judgment. There's a difference in life between consequences and judgments. One of the consequences, I believe, of this is we never read of Miriam again until her death.
She's removed, I believe, from service to God as a consequence of this. Not that she was put out by Moses, but I don't think God spoke to her anymore. Because... you don't hear about Miriam. I- I looked. It refers to her death, and that's it. For the rest of the time, that's a consequence. This was a divine judgment. God smote her with leprosy. It's this, these phrases, wherefore were then ye not, wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?
I, I get a little bit chilled when I think about that. And then it says, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he departed. You know, you have the old saying, don't go away mad, just go away. Well, the Lord went away mad. And when he left, he, she was leprous. And what is the solution to this? If you're in this situation, if there's a family issue, what is the solution? What we see here, Aaron says to Moses and asks him, please don't let it go like this.
And Moses, imagine they've just been undermining your God-given authority. Not only were they undermining your God-given author- authority, but they're out there inciting a rebellion against you to remove you from that authority or to force you to share. I don't know if any of you have been in that situation. I have. It's one of the reasons I've decided I'm never going to do a management role ever again. I just want to go in and do my job and let someone else worry about that stuff. Because I, I don't, I don't have a need to be undermined, have my authority undermined, because everyone will, the, the sinful people will do it.
And it's something that burns. But look how Moses responds. He cried unto the Lord, saying, Heal her now, O God, I beseech thee. He begs God for the healing. One of the things that we see about Moses, unless it was really egregious. Moses continually intercedes for the people of Israel. In the affair of, um, Dathan and Abiram and those guys, he...
that couldn't be let stand. Because they not only were speaking against Moses, they were speaking against Aaron, and we'll get to that. They were speaking against the way the law was set up about the worship of God, and they were attempting to push into the priesthood. And so that had to be really dealt with, and that had to be dealt with in a very... and, and Moses doesn't intercede on their behalf, he calls down judgment on them. They're attempting to overthrow God's plan of worship. And so we understand, says there's a sin that's not unto death, but there is a sin unto death, and, and in the book of First John it says, I don't say that you should intercede for those who have committed the sin unto death.
I don't know what that sin unto death is, but in the case of Dathan and Abiram and those other guys, that seems to have been the sin unto death. They were attempting to overthrow God's order, and they were attempting to do it by force. They were going to force their way in and supplant the priesthood. That's a serious, serious thing. We'll get to that. We're not there. This seems to have been a family jealousy. Miriam was jealous. Here's her baby brother, and he's getting all the glory. And we, I understand. I understand it.
I have cousins and sibli- a sister and it... And if they'd have just argued with Moses, it wouldn't have been a problem. And here's where the problem is, is when they take a family jealousy and they take it out into the church, and they start to undermine the authority of the oversight and start to mess with the unity of the body, there are consequences for that. So we need to be careful in our family relations to not let things get to that point. Some of my relatives here know that there was a problem.
There were two brothers in my family who were in oversight in the York meeting, and another brother who sinned grievously against them. And this brother that sinned grievously against them was older than them. And because they were in oversight... again, what do you do in that situation? Your big brother sins against you. You're elders, he's not. How do you make, how do you deal with it so it doesn't look like you're attempting to settle scores? I, that's that. I still don't know if there was a good solution to that. They're all in heaven now, so it's not a problem anymore. But, I personally saw an assembly split because of my family.
One, my, my, not my immediate family, older people in my family who couldn't deal with each other in a Christ-like way, and then couldn't, once the deed was done, couldn't sit down and talk about it and straighten it out. This is, and I, I know that I'm not the only one that has seen this happen, and this happens in Baptist churches and Presbyterian churches and assemblies, and I imagine that the Jehovah's Witnesses have the same problem. I, you know, I'm just saying this is a human issue. Anyone that's got relatives knows that there's friction. What's the solution?
Well, they came to the intercessor, and the intercessor interceded, and there were consequences, and there was judgment, but then there was a restoration. And you notice they didn't leave, and leave her there. They, the congregation, it makes a point to say that the congregation stayed with her in her judgment. The only solution to these family problems that I can see is to take it to the Lord. You can't force the sibling that you're fighting with or the cousin that you're fighting with to stop being sinful.
It's just not going to happen. And in their c- suffering the consequences and the judgment of God, you can't stop that. But Moses, a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ in this situation, intercedes. And we see Moses doing that continuously. One of the things that I see in this whole story, you know, when I got to chapter ten, I thought, oh boy, I don't really want to go further in Numbers.
Everything turns bad in Numbers. You know the thing that I have come to see in Numbers is the grace of mercy of God. Says of the Lord's mercies, we are not consumed. Every single one of us has done and thought and been so wicked and vile in our thought lives and some of the things that we've done that we ought to have been consumed. And if you don't think so, you're lying to yourself. I, when I was younger, I used to think I was a pretty good kid. And God just sort of dusted me off and nudged me over into salvation. Boy, was I wrong. As I got older and started to understand just the thoughts that I thought and the motivations and why I did what I did, I began to realize that I was a monster of iniquity.
And that, but for the grace of God, I could be doing anything that any of these criminals and horrible people are doing. And that's true about every one of us. I don't always get along with my sister. I don't always treat her right. Thankfully, it's never interfered with the meeting, but, um... and vice versa. I mean, brothers and sisters squabble with each other. If, you know... one of the things having siblings, it teaches you how to fight with people. It really does. It's one of the purposes God gives you is you learn how to have disagreements and how not to kill the person you're disagreeing with, and then how to actually learn to get along with a person after you've had a disagreement with them.
I think it's a great blessing that God has given us siblings. Cain failed miserably at that. But the truth of the matter is, if it happens and it starts to cause a problem in the assembly, or if it has caused a problem in the assembly, we need to turn to the Lord about it. We need to not go around and gossip about it. We need to not attempt to give them the consequences ourself. We need to not serve judgment on that person ourself. We just need to wait on the Lord, and we need to show grace and mercy in the way that Moses did. You see how gracious he was to his sister?
She was attempting to get him thrown out of his job, and she wanted to take it over. And if it was me and she got leprosy, I might have said, well, that serves you right. Ha. See? Try that again one time. I'm not as good a person as Moses. But what Moses did immediately, oh Lord, I beseech you. Kill her now. And then they stayed there with her and didn't move.
They, they were there with her in her stress and anguish, and I mean, I imagine leprosy doesn't feel good. I can't imagine it. It must be a horrible thing to have. And then, because God is gracious, back in the book of Leviticus, there was a way in which people who are healed from leprosy can be restored to fellowship. And it's a wonderful study to look at, because what it does is it shows us that, um, the whole, from the head, tip of the head to the s- bottom of the foot, you're completely restored.
And she was restored. There were consequences, as I believe. It's interesting, you know, God's, God's, uh, response, the Lord's response to Moses, if her father had but spit in her face, should she not be ashamed seven days? It was a way that a father would, uh, disinherit or shame a daughter. The commentaries, and I don't know where they get this, they say that this was, this was something that if a woman was caught in some sort of sexual sin, that the f- her father would spit in her face to repudiate her.
And it's interesting to see that God says, if it had only been that, she'd be unclean for seven days. As if that sort of sin was a much lesser thing than what she had actually done. And it's interesting to me, when we look at the New Testament and we look at how we're told the, the sin, sins that God seems to emphasize us avoiding in the assembly, it seems as if God feels that we understand that the sexual stuff is wrong, and we know not to do that, but that the ones that we need to in- not be involved with are the murmuring and disputing and evil communications and reviling and all of those things, the going around behind each other's back and and treating each other badly.
And you know, in a way, because we're in the family of God, we're all brothers and sisters. And it's important that if there's a brother or a sister who is doing better, and I say better in quotes, is a person, you know. So my best friend Keith is Keith Kaiser. He travels all over the world and preaches to all kinds of people. And I'm really happy for him. I like to sleep in my own bed every night. He likes to travel. The Lord knew that. The Lord gave him an incredible gift of ministry, and the Lord, in spite of a terrible handicap, is using him to reach people all over the world, and I am s- I am thrilled for that.
There are other people that I know that are not, and I've heard people talk against it. Who are we to judge another person's servant? Moses was not Miriam and Aaron's servant. He was God's servant. God had a specific thing for him to do. God has a specific thing for each one of you to do. And it's not my job to give you a performance review. And it's not your job to give me a performance review, unless, of course, I'm in open sin or something like that. And then there's provision for that in the scriptures. And each one of us has a role that we're supposed to play for God, a gift that we're supposed to do.
And we need to be doing it. And we need to not be looking around to see who else is doing one of the things. One of the things that I've noticed, and I'll close with this, is that, um, we have these Highland games that I- I'm involved with, and, um, we have sheepdog demonstrations. And if there's a sheep that won't go, what the sheepdog does is he runs up and he bites the sheep in the behind, and that gets the sheep moving. That would get you moving. Um, we have a shepherd, but there's no provision for sheepdogs in the scriptures. Each, each one of us are sheep.
Not a single one of us is a sheep dog. I am not responsible to make sure you are going in the right direction. That's the shepherd's job. Now, if I see that you're doing something that's going to lead you into sin or you're sinning, I, I have a responsibility as a brother in meekness and great fear, lest I also be tempted to come to you and attempt to restore you to the truth. And that's a very difficult thing. As a brother and sister in Christ, but it's not my job to look at you and decide whether or not you're serving the Lord the way the Lord wants you to do it.
And if I do, I run the risk of doing what Miriam did here. And I've seen people do that. I've seen people go around and cause problems and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Oh my goodness, it's a problem. And the Lord really doesn't like that. And he brings his hammer down when it happens. And so we need to learn to get along with each other. We need to not performance review each other. We need to stick as close to the word as possible, and we can avoid this. So hopefully I haven't offended everybody.
Just tried to stay with the scriptures, so. We thank you, Father, for this passage in your word. One of the things that we see in the scriptures is that pa- families just did not seem to get along very well with each other throughout the scriptures. So many difficulties and problems and people that didn't, they didn't live a life that was pleasing to the Lord and how they treated their family. Help us not to do that, Lord. Help us, as we have family members that are not just family members, but brothers and sisters in Christ. Pray that we would minister to them with the gifts that we have as a brother in the Lord, or a sister in the Lord, not just a physical brother and sister.
We pray that we would have a goal of building them up in their most holy faith and, and seeing them go on well for the Lord. That's hard to do. We, each one of us have a history with our families. We've been treated badly and treated them badly, um, and you, you know that, but we're in Christ, and so we're new creations, and we pray that we would act in a way that befits new creations and have new relationships with our family members. Pray that we would not be jealous of our brother or sisters getting to do something cool that we perhaps aren't, aren't getting to do.
Help us not to be envious. Help us to rejoice with those who rejoice and be glad when someone gets to serve you in a different way than we do. We pray that our pride and our selfishness would stay out of the, the assembly and stay out of our lives in general. We know that's a struggle. It's really hard. We pray that you would help us with that. Help us to be more like Jesus. Help us to prefer others more than ourselves. We know that that's a struggle because at heart we are, by, by our sin nature, very selfish. Make us more like your son in this way. Pray it in Christ's name. Amen.