Gooding, David: 2 - Restoration of Relationship

Zechariah chapter one, um we take up the story of verse eighteen. And I lifted up mine eyes and saw, and behold, four horns. And I said unto the angel that talked with me, what be these? And he answered me, these are the horns which have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem. The Lord showed me four smiths. Then said I, what come these to do? And he spoke, saying, these are the horns which scattered Judah, so that no man did lift up his head. But these are come to free them, to cast down the horns of the nations, which lifted up their horn against the land of Judah, to scatter it. And I lifted up mine eyes and saw, and behold, a man with a measuring line in his hand. Then said I, whither goest thou? And he said unto me, to measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof and what is the length thereof. And behold, the angel that talked with me went forth, and another angel went out to meet him. And he said unto him, Run, speak to this young man, saying, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls, by reason of the multitude of men and cattle therein. For I, saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and I will be the glory in the midst of her. Ho, ho, flee from the land of the north, saith the Lord, for I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heaven, saith the Lord. Ho, Zion, escape, thou that dwellest with the daughter of Babylon. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, after glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled you, for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye. For behold, I will shake mine hand over them, and they shall be a spoil to those that serve them, and you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me. Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for now I come, and I will dwell in the midst of thee, saith the Lord. Many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people, and I will dwell in the midst of them. Thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts has sent me unto thee. The Lord shall inherit Judah as his portion in the Holy Land, and shall yet choose Jerusalem. Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he is waked up out of his holy habitation. Yesterday we began to listen together to the words of the Lord through his servant, the prophet Zechariah. And immediately we drew the very obvious but delightful lesson that God is a God who loves to restore his people, gives himself to this gracious task with unwearying patience. Simultaneously, however, we learned that the work of restoring Jerusalem city and its temple in ancient times was not the matter of a moment, but a long drawn out and often weary and sometimes painful procedure. Surely God was behind the return of Ezra and Nehemiah and that faithful remnant that came out of Babylon back to the Promised Land. But though God was with them, and then the miracle of his grace was present with them, there was no magic. It wasn't so that as they came to Jerusalem and saw its desolations, Ezra got out some magic wand and waved it, and lo and behold, without any labor, there began to spring out of the ground a new built temple and a delightful Jerusalem, the golden, all in a split second of time. No, it didn't happen like that. We who know the realities of life could scarce believe a Bible if it said that that was what happened. There is miracle with God, there is no magic. The work of restoring Jerusalem, eh, its city and its temple from the ruins that Israel's sin had brought upon them. Was a work to which God called his people in perseverance. They were to work with him, and he with them, patiently and persistently through the difficulties of repairing the damage. That, of course, is a thing that will not surprise us who live in this day and age. God forgives the sins of a repentant sinner. He doesn't always immediately remove the consequences of his sin. You give yourself to drinking methylated spirits every morning before breakfast throughout your unregenerate days, and get involved in drunken brawls and lose one of your legs in consequence. When you return in repentance to the Lord, he will forgive your sin. And fill your heart with his joy. He won't necessarily restore the leg you've lost for worse. He'll do it one day at the resurrection. He may well leave you, he normally does, the rest of your life short of one leg to hobble your way through the rest of life. And learn the patience of living with the past and its consequences. And of course, when we observe the life of believers, believers that since their conversion have gone on with the Lord consistently, without grievous lapses, yet it's the work of their sanctification no lightning procedure, but a long drawn out path of progress. As Paul reminds us in his classic words, not that I have already attained, but I follow after, pursuing the mark and pressing forward to the goal. Peter tells us likewise, that if we would qualify not merely for entrance into the eternal kingdom, but for an abundant entrance into that kingdom, then does it call for patient continuance and perseverance with the Lord, as we add all diligence, seeking to add in the power of our faith moral goodness and knowledge and self-control and endurance and brotherly love and love. If that is so with the normal procedure of our sanctification, how much more if perchance God's people have fallen into some spiritual disaster or waywardness? Yes, surely, when they come back to the Lord and know his gracious forgiveness, forgiveness and the sense of his presence again. The task of rebuilding can be long and painful. It was so in the life of David, king of Judah, who sinned, and from the evidence it appears that he attempted for a long while to cover up his sin, and God's hand lay heavy upon him in psychosomatic discipline. When he repented, God forgave him and hugged him close to his heart once more, and he needed, he needed the warmth of that affection, for before him lay difficult years, facing the consequences and the brokenness in his family of that sorry lapse from God. I was talking recently to a missionary, gone to a certain country to learn the language, going to a small assembly to help them while he learned the language. Scarcely had he arrived, he told me, when the whole assembly was almost blown to smithereens by the public scandalous behavior of one of its elders. Now he faces the long, difficult task of living down that, that terrible lap, of living down the path, of seeking out and gathering together believers whose faith has been stumbled, of rebuilding the testimony of the church. That kind of thing is not done in five minutes. We notice, therefore, with some interest in the very early verses of the prophet, God reminds his people, though they had returned from Babylon, of the sins of their fathers in past days. There is a sense, isn't there, in which we are called upon to forget those things which are behind. Unnecessary regret can be depressing and debilitating. Yet God does not always remove, I say, the past and causes us to remember it. I remember my good father in the days of my infancy, when I broke his commands and played ball of some kind near the drawing room window and cracked the whole thing from top to bottom. Well, I was duly forgiven, but my father in his wisdom left the old pane of glass with the crack right across it and left it for a long time. With what embarrassment to my infant mind when friends came round and said, oh, what a pity, you cracked your glass. How did that happen? Where did he leave it? Ah, but in his wisdom, it taught me a thing or two not to play ball so near again to the lounge window. If in five minutes the things that had been repaired, I should have been forgiven, yes, the danger would have been I should not have learned the seriousness of sin. And you will observe shortly as you have read the letters of Peter. And when he was forgiven and knew it and reveled in the joy of the forgiveness with which Christ had restored him. Yet ever and again there comes pe- peering through his writing the memory of the past. How would he ever forget it? He talks to us at one stage of that living stone, rejected indeed of men. And I think there must almost have fell upon the page as he wrote it a tear of remembrance. At the time when our Lord had begun to teach him that lesson, that the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem and be rejected, and people would have the impertinence to contradict the Lord. We never forget it, as he wrote now for his fellow believers that same lesson that he had learned so painfully. Yes, but it wasn't the sorrow of the world, that work of death, but godly sorrow that helped Peter, and through him has helped us. Or again, as we read Peter saying, since Christ has suffered, you arm yourselves to suffer. What memories that would have flooded through Peter's heart. Oh, if he'd never have done it. But it was undoable. Forgiven. Yet the memories would never perish this side of glory. As now these people stand in Zechariah's day in the ruins of the past. God calls on them to remember that past. Remember your fathers. Where are they now? Not to discourage his people. But at this moment, the path of restoration being so difficult, the danger was that they would give up. And less content. They were, you see, positionally correct. They had returned in the sense that they had returned geographically to the land. They were positionally correct. With the opposition growing so great and the difficulties so large, they had, for the time being, lapsed once more into complacency. A dangerous state for anyone to lapse into. Like a well-run business, the Christian life either goes forward or it tem- attends to go backward. What then is true restoration? It is not just being content with some kind of position is it. That we have gone back in our ecclesiastical life to the early principles of the New Testament, and positionally we hold those convictions. That is good. Oh, but hear the prophet crying in the name of the Lord, you've returned to the land, return to me, says the Lord. And I will return to you. A heart that is engaged with the living God in living experience. Hence, we are comforted surely, as we thought yesterday and now think briefly a moment today again. The gracious intercessions of the Son of God, and in those difficult days, set the initiative for the new surge of life and activity. But now, as his gracious intercessions begin to revive his people, they set their hand again to the work to rebuild Jerusalem and the s- and the temple. There comes first a vision in chapter one and verse eighteen following, a short vision, with the Lord's announcement of his putting an end for the time being of the opposition. There come four smiths to say and to cast down the horns of the nations which lifted up their horn against the land of Judah, to scatter it. Now the learned commentators and expositors assure us, some of them, that these four horns that did scatter Israel are prophecies of four great empires that in the coming day shall dominate Israel. This morning we leave the discussion of such things to them. We're interested to notice that where God comforts his people in the thought that God himself is in supreme control, even if the opposition. Yes, we saw yesterday that the sufferings of the nation had been so extreme that God was delighted for the opportunity to explain that not all those sufferings had come directly from the hand of the Lord. God had disciplined his people, but the enemy had gone beyond the divine intentions and taken advantage of it and tried to destroy Israel, whereas God was out to refine them. So often it is in our lives. Experiences that God designs for refining, Satan will try to exploit for our undoing. What a comfort it is. Though we cannot understand all the mysteries of providence and why God allows this, and why he allows his enemies so often to seem to triumph. Yet we calm our hearts, do we not, in the thought that here is no accident. God has not lost control. He remains even in supreme control, even of his enemies. When he says stop, they stop. Indeed, they have to get his permission to start. You remember what our blessed Lord said to his apostles in the upper room. Satan, said he, has desired to have you that he may sift you as wheat. Desired being old English for asked. Satan has asked to have you. On which it appears that Satan cannot just assault and attack the people of God at his whim and pleasure, but must ask permission of Almighty God. God normally maintains a hedge about his people. You remember the same thing is said in the book of Job as Satan comes accusing me into the presence of God, saying, does Job serve you for nothing? Why you put a hedge around him? You feather bedded the man. Take the hedge away, let me get at him, and you'll see he'll curse you to your face. God gave permission to Satan, without which permission Satan could have done nothing. It is a comfort, surely. It is similarly an encouragement as we stand before the living Lord addressing his churches, in the matters of the persecution that was to come upon them, then again in the matter of their pioneer evangelism. Satan says he is about to cast some of you into prison, and you shall have affliction ten days. Even before it happened, the time was already set. What a lovely thing it is to hear, even this morning in our hearts, the jangling of the key on the belt of our blessed Lord. I am he that holds the key of David. I shut and no one opens. I open and no one shuts. Behold, I have set before you an open door. Not ours to question the strategies of Almighty God, so that there are vast countries under Muslim sway that seem so little to have been penetrated. Wave after wave of missionary endeavor has fallen back, it would seem to us. We mustn't lose our hold on this glorious fact that ultimately our blessed Lord holds the key of David when he opens the door, none can shut. I like the imagery that now God uses to comfort his people. Think of them as they were marched off by their enemies out of Jerusalem and down the road to Babylon. Heads fallen, spirits broken. Now it's going to be different, says God. I'm going to put an end to that opposition so that you can lift up your head, march upright through life. Oh, my brother, my sister, I must not suppose that in any area of your life you have known recent defeats. But one heart knows another. Sometimes the memory of the past will cause us to go with our heads hanging down. Ah, but we have forgiveness through Christ. On our side and with us in the work of repair and restoration is Almighty God. In the face of all your enemies, you may lift up your head. For the victory is and shall at last be The hours. ours. Now there follows a lovely vision. I lifted up mine eyes and saw, says Zechariah, there was a lot going on. Ah. I lifted up mine eyes and saw, and behold a man with a measuring line in his hand, and I said, whither goest thou? And he said unto me, to measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof and what is the length thereof. Now this young man, whoever he was, like the woman in the Gospels who suffered from hemorrhage, has suffered many things at the hands of the expositors and the commentators. It happens sometimes to biblical characters, and they have said what a narrow-minded young man he must have been, going out to measure Jerusalem city, whereas had he only known the heart of God, God had far bigger things for him than just rebuilding Jerusalem City. Oh, and thus they would have denied him all the fun of measuring out the city. So you could see what God now says. I'm not going to have a city simply with literal walls. It will be inhabited as a city without walls for the multitude of the inhabitants and of the prosperity that I shall bring upon them. Also, as I already to write, the young man was merely carrying out in faith of God the promise that God had earlier given, yet shall a line be drawn upon Jerusalem. Surely God was doing, going to do more than rebuild it, but he was at least going to rebuild it. In my book, there's nothing wrong in the young man going out to measure it all up. It's fun anyway, isn't it? You take the young couple that have got their first house, their first apartment, and it's a bit of a wreck, to be sure, but it's their first one. They can't afford a new one, so they've got to have this little bit broken down, and the damp is coming here, and the floors are rotten there, but they go down many a night in their spare time, and they're measuring it up. Uh, and the man is thinking of what he could do here for the floorboards, and the dear woman is is thinking what the curtains would look nice, and what bit of furniture, if they could afford it one day, would go there. And all the fun of it, not only the fun of the completed thing, but the fun of measuring it up and imagining it, what it's going to be, and working at it, and seeing at last the thing come into place. Oh, my brother, we're not in glory yet. You don't need me to tell you that. A great deal of fun, isn't there, in measuring up what God is yet going to do for us. Oh, my brother, get out your instate, if you will, right now. Let your imagination under God's Holy Spirit enrich your faith. What you're going to be like one of these days. Now I think not our ancient Jerusalem city, and how it was restored as the dwelling place of God. Nor do I think of the Jerusalem city above, which is the mother of us all, that was never in ruins, thank God, and never shall be. I'm thinking of my little life and yours. God Almighty has graciously undertaken to use as a temple of his presence. I know you'll tell me that as by his grace, he grants you to be strengthened in your inner heart by his spirit, and Christ takes up his res- residence ever increasingly in your personality. I know you'll tell me it goes and will go beyond all that we could ask or think, and that it would defy your powers to measure what is the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of this great mystery. For all that, there's no harm in imagining some of it, is it? Oh, my brother. You know, if you should see an angel this moment, like John the Apostle was given to see an angel, suddenly appearing you on the, uh, sitting by your, on the, on the seat nearby, well, your first reaction would be to grovel in the dust at the sight of that deacon and that brother, that sis- that sister that's sitting next to you this moment. Oh, if you could see them. If you could see them as they shall be when the Lord has come and God's work in their heart is finished and they are totally conformed to the image of his son. Princes and princesses in the royal family of God. Oh, if you could see the glory that they shall be. Yes, you'd do more than grovel at their feet. The trouble so often is that we don't have the imagination to see our brothers and sisters as what they shall be. We allow ourselves too much to look at the limitations of what they are now, and eat out our souls with criticism, instead of feeding our hope with God's glorious promises. Ah. Well, I know you'll say to me, but come down from your dizzy heights of imagination, young man, and I'm glad you mistook me. Uh, uh, come down from those dizzy heights of imagination and theory- theorizing and come to the stern realities of life. Oh, I need your rebuke. Psychologically, I'm an escapist, you know. Don't rob me of all my hope, will. We are saved in and by hope. It's the hope in my heart of what I shall be, by God's grace I shall be, that keeps me going now. Else have I long since given up. I love that passage, if you will allow me to diverge and get lost. I love that passage that is the coming together of chapter fourteen and chapter fifteen in Numbers, don't you? Israel had tramped across the wilderness, come at last to the promised land, and then decided they didn't want to go in. You remember the funny story. Arguably, if somebody got on the verge of heaven and then decided that heaven wasn't good enough and they didn't want to go in. Anyway, then God said he must discipline them and they must wait for forty years before the nation would go in. And in their arrogance, they went up without the presence of God to storm the promised land, and of course the kings came out and chased them away. As Numbers fourteen comes to its end, it paints that gloomy picture. Here is Israel with their backs turned to the Promised Land, running as hard as their little legs will take them away from it. Chapter fifteen opens calmly with the words of the Lord, Moses. Speak unto the children of Israel and say, when you be come into the land, uh, and reap its harvest, all the magnanimous and grace of God. The long years of discipline intervened for the nation. When Moses smoke- spoke that command to them, when you be come into the land and reap its harvest, then you shall do this, that, and the other. It went home to the heart of many an Israelite, and as he went to sleep that night, he said, well, the nation will one day get in after all, won't it? And he began to dream of cornfields and barley ripening in the sun, and thought of the days when they would gather the harvest. When he woke up the next day, he was in the wilderness, of course he was. Ah, but the vision he had seen of the purposes of God made the next few miles of the desert a bit more easy to tramp. So it is with us. Measure it, it'll go beyond your measurement. The length and the beds and the heights and the depths of God's eternal plan for you. And the vision of what you shall be will be your hope, your saving hope in long days of difficult restoration. And then God adds a delightful promise in verses five and six. We refer to literal Jerusalem, and the Lord saying, it is in fact, uh, beyond your measurement what I'm going to do. For I, saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and I will be the glory in the midst of her. Actually, literal Jerusalem was built again with literal walls, with God's approval. And yet, as Israel had occasion to learn throughout history, literal walls, however strong, were no ultimate protection for Israel against her enemies. So said our Lord centuries later, when he stood outside the city and wept over it, saying, Oh Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you, but you would not. Your city has left. The days will come when your enemies will cast up a mound against your walls and fortifications. Walls and fortifications of a city from which the glory of the Lord has departed. There will never be adequate protection against the ravage of the enemy. We may be allowed to translate the whole thing into our own experience. Not merely for us personally, but for the assemblies of which we are members. What ultimately is their protection? Or can it be, my brethren, my sisters, at the presence of the Lord? They were storming days, were they not, that Luke records in the beginnings of the church. They who study his book of the Acts may at first find themselves wondering why Luke chooses to devote three very large paragraphs in the opening section of his work to the mistakes and faults of the early church. Reminding his readers successively first of Judas and his dereliction of duty and portrayal of the Lord. Reminding all Ananias and Sapphira and their hypocrisy. Reminding of the, uh, reminding his reader of the selfishness of the Hebrew Christians who neglected the widows of the Hellenists in the daily administration. But even as Luke, in his honesty, records at length the grave faults of the early church in its very infant days, yet does he record marvelously. Think of that severe and summary judgment coming upon Ananias and Sapphira. Because... the living God was there. And it is written that all the rest dare no man join them. Or would to God we knew something of the reality, the solemnity, the wonder of a living God in our churches. They're not entertainment parlors, are they? The living God in all his glory that brings with it the ever-present possibility of his discipline of his people. I think sometimes we have lost our sense. Not you, but we at home in my country, of what an assembly really should be. The honor, the dignity, the awe of knowing the living God in our midst. Jerusalem needed the walls, and the walls were God. How inadequate. Only shall I be the wall of protection around them, says God. I will be the glory in the midst of her. What good having walls if you've got nothing inside much worth protecting anyway? The Lord should be the glory in the midst of her. God give us to know that in our day and generation. You will think of an old man, won't you? Gets a little bit crabby. It's just a factor of old age sometimes. One has met and does sometimes meet those who will tell you, well, now look, yeah, not too much of the word of God, you know. Those are people. Remember in my youth, when I used to be called to minister the Word of God at what were then called rallies, God bless them. The meeting would start at seven, and by ten to eight, we were still grinding through the preliminaries of witness boxes and, uh, adaptations of the local radio quiz shows and things. And then the chairman would get up and say, now, after the next half a dozen quarters, we've got Dog's body from, from nowhere, and he's come to talk to us. Now, we've given him ten minutes, and we, well, if it goes on too long, we should please fail, and, uh, yeah? Over your mouth, we now have the bit of pill that's necessary for your health, but it will soon be over, and we can get back to the really enjoyable stuff. I don't want a God like that. If that's the fact about Christianity and the God it represents, I, I, I kick the whole thing out of the window. I'm not going to a heaven where the day's fun is occasionally spoiled for ten minutes because you've got to gather around the throne and listen to God speak. All for those, by God's grace, can cause us to hear the very glory of God. The word, as the prophet has it, the word of his glory shall be heard. And so now there comes a call. I should say God was beginning to get excited, if it weren't a burden to say so. Ho, ho, he says, calling to the people, those stragglers may be that have remained in Babylon. Come back because of the glorious things he's about to do for Israel. He says, verse nine, I will shake my hand over them, and they, the Babylonians, shall be a spoil to those that serve them. And you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me. That is a wonderful thing about the wisdom of our God. That when his people truly repent and return, he not only delivers them, but uses their past mistake and folly, turns it to good, and makes capital out of it. So our Lord said to Peter, to quote him once again, you shall deny me twice. Peter, when you are turned back again? Strengthen your brethren, Peter. By the amazing grace of God. It doesn't justify our going astray. Doesn't reduce the solemnity of sin and failure. Now we who need all the courage we can get hold of. Glory in this, that to the repentant heart, God can take what was a defeat and a spoiling and use it to spoil the very enemy and make capital out of what was a disaster. Millions of God's people have been encouraged and helped in their pathway of sanctification by Peter's letters, by his warning that we should, uh, beware of the lion. Peter knew what he was talking about. He had temporarily succumbed. The restoring Lord uses the experience to make spoil of the enemy. As it was in ancient days, when Israel fell into apostasy with Moab and provoked the Moab to jealousy exceeding sore. God said to Moses, now Moses, the last thing I want you to do before you come home to glory, I want you to avenge Israel of the Midianites. And the armies went out, and they fought and defeated Midian. And here come the captains of the hosts with their spoil that they dedicate to God. How better if they had never fallen. And don't you despise those treasures too? When we return and repent, and out of the sad experience comes spiritual gain, a vindicating of ourselves, a holy avenging of ourselves against the enemy. Vindicating the honor and the glory of God. And finally, as God encourages his people, he says, it will not only, the restoration of Israel will not only lead to many conversions among the Gentiles. The gracious promise of God given to Jerusalem in that age was scarcely completely fulfilled, even at that time. Such as it awaits its final fulfillment. And God shall yet come, shall yet choose Jerusalem. Where the presence of the living God will demonstrate before all the nations that our Old Testament was no myth. It will demonstrate that Israel's fall and scattering among the nations is not to be explained as the Russians would like to explain it, because all their notions of God were mere superstitions now buried in the unscientific past. God's restoration of Jerusalem City, his presence coming back again, demonstrates to the nations at large that Israel's claim was true and has been true, that there is a God. He has intervened in history, and Israel are his people. The thing has not been missed. Israel's fall was because of their chastisement under God's hand. Their restoration will prove the truth of the whole story. We must not linger there this morning. Let us concentrate on these glorious words. The Lord shall inherit Judah as his portion, and shall get to Jerusalem. Get out your measuring tape once more. Measure, if you can, the grace of a God that would talk like that. Little Jerusalem, tiny little backstreet affair compared with the glorious cities of Babylon and Ur and all the rest of them, and Rome and Athens. It meant something to God. His portion. His inheritance. Jerusalem, dark and scarlet in her sins, now lying desolate under the discipline of God. Yet he persists in his choice and finds in Jerusalem, by his grace, something to satisfy his infinite heart. And oh, how can it be true? Yet it remains true that the God who has chosen you and me perseveres in his choice, even in the furnace of our affliction, where the old dross of our character is being burned out. Seeing us with, seeing us with the eyes of realism that are the eyes of God, and not pretending anything. He chooses you, my brother. Still he chooses. You mean something to him. Our mind goes to Ephesians chapter one that dwells on that lovely story, chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. What for? That we should be before him. What do you mean before him? In the ancient tabernacle, as you experts will know, as you enter the holy place on the left hand side and upon the right, there were two vessels. One was a table and one was a lampstand. Both of them were vessels of presentation. On the table there were put loaves, understandably so, for the loaves were for the enjoyment of God. They were to be put there before the Lord continually. At the end of the week, the priests came and had their portion therefrom. Their primary purpose was to be before the Lord continually. And the golden table held up those loaves for the pleasure of God before the Lord continually. And the lampstand on the other side was a vessel of presentation, that the lamps being put upon it, they should be upheld before the Lord continually. The ancient rabbis, when they pondered that, uh, those directions, found a difficult question. They said, you know, God is the author of all things. He gives us bread. Why does he ask us to come and put bread upon his table? They said, God is the author of light. Shouldn't he ask us to come and put oil lamps upon his golden standard so that they might shine before him when he is the author of life? God, they said, doesn't need food, does he? And they saw at the end of the week, of course, that the old glows were still there. God hadn't literally eaten them. God doesn't need anything, does he? Or does he? God need food? Oh yes, he does. Hear our blessed Lord. I stand at the door and knock, says he. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and I will dine with him. And he with me. How is it possible, my brother, that we with our murky past and faltering present should mean something to God and be before him, and he find satisfaction in us. Yet it is so, and shall be so, for in Christ we have been chosen that we should be before him now and eternally. If that's what restoration is, is restoration indeed. Shall we pray? Cause then, Lord, we beseech thee through our reading of thy words. Cause our hearts once more to get a grasp of thy glory and of thy magnificent grace. Hear our confessions this morning for our wanderings and our failings. Look in thy mercy upon our brokenness. Yet, O God, we praise thee from our hearts, that thy choice of us remains, and thou shalt yet fulfill all thy pleasure of goodness within thy people. Help us to measure it, to imagine it, that its hope may grow in our hearts and strengthen us for the days and the work that lies ahead, that we might fulfill thy pleasure and indeed be the riches of thy inheritance in the saints, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Yeah. Igen, jól érzi, hogy ő maga. Mert olyan, olyan tápláló ember. Olyan, hogy ő csak őt érzi, Yeah. mint mi.