Titus 3:4-7 - Grounding Grace

Amen.

Sake your Bible and go to the book of Titus.

Titus chapter three.

Titus chapter three.

Before Paul ever wrote a single command to Titus about the church there on Crete, he wrote something about that place.

He quoted one of their poets who said about them, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.

And that's not an outside criticism of the culture of the Cretans.

It is written from the inside, from someone who was one of them, their own poet.

I wondered if the Greeks were still saying the same things about the Cretans today.

And so I went on to Google and I put in a search.

What is the reputation of Crete today?

And this is what it said.

Cretans are widely stereotyped within Greece as proud, fiercely independent, and passionately traditional.

Is that right, Konstantinos?

No, he's saying no.

They're viewed by some as the Texans of Greece.

I'm not sure exactly what they had in mind there, but they said they're known for their strong regional identity and warrior history.

Well, that sounds a lot better than always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.

Well, last week, after I was service was over and I was walking back, uh, Konstantinos caught me.

And Konstantinos is not from Crete.

He's from the northern mountainous regions of Greece.

And he said, he said, the Cretans are still like that.

In fact, I think they're even worse.

But what a di what what three phrases, right?

Can you imagine that being said about your society?

These three words of diagnosis.

You know, when you sit down and you think about these words and you spend some time with them, it really does get uncomfortable.

And not just uncomfortable about thinking about Crete, but uncomfortable about thinking about our society.

Always liars.

A culture that's organized around the management of the truth, a culture that is crafting a narrative and deploying it for the service of preferred outcomes rather than the truth.

You know, you've been reading the news this week, and it doesn't matter which outlet you've been getting your news from, some of that's in there.

Evil beasts, aggressive, self-willed, driven by appetite and dominance, a culture whose posture is combative, who rewards the sharpest edge, who applauds those who are willing to fight.

Lazy gluttons.

A culture in which appetite is primary and where self is the center.

An economy that's developed not in order to fulfill needs that people actually have, but in the manufacturing of things that they tell people they want and want and want some more.

No, he's doing something completely different here.

He's saying that the church needs to be a community of people whose visible public life is a credible demonstration of the gospel, that the gospel does what it says it does.

It changes people.

That they are to be a people whose reputation in the society is one of gentleness, graciousness, honesty, and service.

And when the church's proclamation and the church's life melds together in that kind of concert effort, amazing things happen.

You see, the world is seeing arguments, and the world is tired of arguments, and they have their own arguments.

But what the world has not seen enough of is a genuinely different kind of person.

The church is not to be a subculture in our society, nor are we supposed to be a counterculture in our society.

Rather, we are a people who are transformed from within, who present to this public a different kind of person altogether.

A person who is capable, against all cultural odds, to be always gracious.

Now, the cultural conditions that we're in have often been called a culture war.

And that says something, that phrase, that the stakes are real, that the conflicts are real.

And if we started to list all the things that are parts of that cultural warfare, we could easily find ourselves several areas in which all of us lay on one side of the war rather than the other.

It doesn't take long to do that.

But the temptation is this the temptation is to respond to that war as a combatant, to fight the culture on its own turns, and to fight the culture with its own weapons.

But Paul has something to say about that.

Listen to what he says in 2 Corinthians.

Though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh.

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but are mighty from God to the pulling down of strongholds.

You see, the church is in a kingdom battle for souls, and that is primary and most important.

If we were to shift the cultural temperature one or two degrees further closer to us and leave those people lost in their eternal damnation, well, we've lost the battle.

Because we're not to engage with the same things that they engage with.

We're not here with the same weapons, and we're not to measure our engagement with the same outcomes.

We don't operate with a logic of conflict.

We don't operate with the economics of outrage, and we don't applaud the most aggressive person in the room.

There is something different God wants us to be.

And let me give you a picture of that by talking about a man who is a professor at Oxford University, a believer.

His name is John Lennox.

And he's probably the most composed person in a room where everybody showed up to watch a fight.

And over the past two decades, he's walked into the debates with hostile conversations being thrown at him.

He's had debates with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer and Lawrence Krauss.

All of these men have written books that explain with their considerable confidence that anybody who believes in God has simply not thought carefully enough.

And John Lennox has come into the room with these guys.

He's come into auditoriums filled with people who've come to watch somebody lose.

And they think they know exactly who that's going to be.

And he's engaged these men and these audiences respectfully, rigorously, yes, but without anger and without the sharpness that says he's more concerned about winning the argument than engaging the person.

And the people who have watched him have noticed a difference.

And the reason why they've noticed it is because he acted in a way they never expected anybody to act.

And this is exactly what Paul is saying here in Titus chapter 3.

Titus 3 · chapter mention

He's not telling us to have fewer convictions, by no means.

He's not telling us to soften our theology.

What he's telling us is that our engagement in this culture is to be an engagement, the kind of engagement that this culture has no category for knowing.

That's what he's telling us.

And once you realize that and you start to look for how to have that posture, Paul is very clear in saying that the only way that you can engage culture in the way that he introduces here in this chapter is if you know exactly who you were before grace reached you.

It starts there.

And it's imperative because every person that we meet is an eternal soul.

Every person who's on the other side of whatever conflict is in public debate today, every person who is hostile to everything that we believe and cherish, every person whose moral choices are absolutely repugnant or bewildering to us.

Every person, even inside this congregation that is testing the limits of your patience, they're never dying souls.

Every single one of them.

And so that is the proposition of this passage.

And that is the proposition of this message this morning.

Because Paul is not giving Titus just a doctrinal summary to post up on the congregation's wall.

He's here to give us the content of a memory that we are to carry with us.

Because if we remember who we are before grace and we remember what grace is like when it reaches us, then we're capable of being the kind of people that God wants us to be in our society.

If you could distill all of this down to one phrase, the memory of all of that is not the background of our engagement in society.

The memory of all of that is the engine of our engagement in this society.

Last week we looked at verses one to three, and there we saw the content of what it meant to be or what we're to meant to show and demonstrate in our society, to submit to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to slander no one, to avoid fighting, to be kind, to always show gentleness to all people.

But we also introduced the memory, part one of the memory, the memory that we're to lay into our hearts deeply and keep in front of us as the engine of our engagement.

We ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, enslaved to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hating and hating one another.

That's part of the memory that we need to keep in place.

This morning we're going to look at verses four to seven, and we're going to see the positive side of the memory that's to be locked in as the engine of our engagement.

And what we see here is grace as an event.

Grace is something that's happened to us.

Grace is what we keep in front of us as we meet people.

Because the moment our memory of who we were and what God has intervened to do in our lives fades away, we become useless for the work of the kingdom in our public engagement.

This is vital that we keep this locked in.

So this morning I want us to see grace in three different aspects: grace that appeared, grace that is applied, and grace that anchors.

Let's look at verse four and we'll see the first part that grace appeared.

But when the kindness of God, our Savior, and his love for mankind appeared.

I want you to take note of those first two words.

But when?

Notice that grace here is appearing, and it's not doing so by invitation.

And it's not doing so by being in a place where the response is ready for its arrival.

He's not saying that grace has appeared when the darkness has finally prepared itself to be at a level in which it can receive grace.

Grace just shows up.

Grace arrives.

Think about the sunshine when it comes, the sunrise.

The darkness of the night is not gradually improving until it's worthy of the sun showing up.

It doesn't cooperate, it doesn't prepare itself for welcome.

The sun engages that darkness, and the darkness has nothing to contribute but to yield itself to the presence.

And this is what Paul is talking about here.

This is the kind of word he uses.

That grace doesn't just show up as human, the human condition gradually develops itself up until the place in which it could get a little extra boost from God's help.

No, the goodness and the loving kindness of God appeared in the middle of a dark world.

It appeared in the middle of an enslaved, hating, and hated darkness.

And in the middle of all that, it shows up.

What shows up?

Not his judgment, not his anger, not his wrath, not his what is it?

The goodness and loving kindness of God.

It's astounding.

Because in the face of verse three culture, I'm not sure goodness and loving kindness would be our first impulse.

And Paul reaches for a wonderful word here.

And if you want to know more about it, you can talk to Konstantinos.

His love for mankind appeared.

And that's a great word.

In fact, the Greeks had a particular use for it in ancient days, and they never, never used it for their gods.

They never talked about their gods as having a love for humans.

A person who actually cares for the people that he has charge over, that shows up among the people that he's managing, who feels and moves into the needs that they have in order to find the answer for them.

That's the word that he's using here.

And he takes that word, and for the first time in Greek culture, they hear it put on God.

His love for mankind appeared.

That means when God showed up in this verse three lifestyle that everybody was living in, in that always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons culture, that he wasn't just tolerating them as he was executing his plan.

He was moved by what's happening to the human race.

That he looks down.

Just as the scriptures say that God takes no delight in the death of the wicked.

As Jesus cried to rebellious Jerusalem, oh Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I would have gathered you, but you would not.

Hold on to that.

That's the love of God speaking in the face of rebellion.

And hold on to it because this is not just what opens up our personal testimonies.

This is the posture of our engagement with our culture.

This is the posture of how what determines how we interact with people every day.

That means the person who is combative and difficult, is a person that God came into the world with his love for mankind for.

That the person whose moral choices are bewildering is in that same category.

A person into whose life and culture God, because of his goodness and his loving-kindness and his love for mankind appeared.

A person who's openly hostile to the faith, hostile to our church, hostile to us personally, same condition.

The person who's been genuinely difficult to live with, who's wounded you without a word of trying to repair the relationship, the person who is committed to test you every day, same condition.

And that's us too.

Because we're saved.

We're saved because the love of God appeared.

That's it.

And this appearance that Paul's talking about in his day, when he's talking about this first century Cretan culture in which he showed up with loving, kindness, and goodness and a disposition of love and compassion toward people, it's the same God who's interacting with our generation and our culture.

No, his goodness and his loving kindness has moved to people who are still in this condition.

And remembering that is what keeps our posture engaged in the way God wants it to be.

It's not sentiment that changes how we interact, and it's not a motivational framework that operates in how we interact.

It's the remembrance of the grace of God.

Now, you might be in this room today wondering if the gospel has any word for you whatsoever.

And perhaps you've come into this morning, into the service this morning, and you've been asking yourself some serious questions.

And you've been looking upon this congregation with more skepticism than hope, watching whether the gospel is real.

And I want to say something to you.

The God who has appeared to save has appeared not to ask you to brush yourself up or to clean yourself up.

He is coming into the middle of who you are right now.

He has come just as he's come to each of us who could look at verse 3 and say, That is.

Me if I want to be honest about myself before a holy God.

And the word, but when is just as relevant to your life as it was to these people that day and to us today.

Let's move to point two.

Not only the grace that appeared, but the grace that applied.

And take a look at verse five.

Such beautiful words.

He saved us.

He saved us.

Not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his mercy, his own mercy, through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Spirit.

And if verse 4 tells us what the character of God is like, verse 5 tells us what that character did.

It saved us.

God's goodness, God's loving kindness, God's love for mankind, his grace saves us.

And it tells us what happened and what it didn't need in order for us to be saved people.

And he starts off with that negation.

He says, not because of works done by us in righteousness.

Just think about that for a second.

Paul is clearing the air in an instant with just a few words and saying, look, this is not about whether or not your works are sufficient or insufficient.

This is not about whether you've contributed or not contributed some meaningful portion to your development toward salvation.

What he's saying here is that the ground of salvation is located completely outside of who you are.

There is no level, no proportion, no degree, total exclusion of any contribution that you make to that salvation.

Not by works done by us in righteousness.

You are not saved by being a good person.

You're not saved by saying, I'll be a better person.

You're not saved by some religious activity or form.

You are not saved by anything that you could do in any way, shape, or form.

This is what saves you, according to his own mercy.

And that is a level ground all of us can be on.

His own mercy.

And it's interesting he chose that word mercy here.

He doesn't choose the word grace, he uses the word mercy.

Now, grace is responding to a judicial need, giving us something we don't deserve.

Giving us a person something to a person who has no standing, no right to be in the room.

But mercy responds to something different.

Mercy responds to misery.

Mercy responds to the wretchedness of a person who is suffering, who is stuck, and who doesn't have the ability to get themselves out of the ditch.

That's mercy.

And that's what we need.

In fact, we need them both.

They're not meant to be held in opposites of one another.

They're bound together as one.

Grace and mercy.

And what we have here is a portrait of a people who are exactly that.

And this condition that verse 3 describes: enslaved people.

And they're miserable.

They're miserable.

They may not tell you they're miserable.

And the kind of car they drive around the neighborhood doesn't look like they're miserable.

And the size of their house might tell you something far different about whether they're miserable or not.

But I want to say something.

They're miserable.

I worked at the Towers of Chestnut Hill in the Boston area.

And at the time, those condominiums were going for, well, far more than my security guard imagination could reach.

And every day I worked there, I interacted with that community of people who lived in those twin towers.

And every day I walked away and said, These are the grumpiest people I've ever met in my life.

Especially when I had to have their car towed off of the front semicircle.

They didn't like that a bit.

But enslaved people are miserable people.

People led astray, can't find their way back, they're miserable.

People passing their days in malice and envy, hated and hating one another, they're in a group of guilty parties and they're miserable.

What's amazing about this is this is exactly the mercy of God moving toward that.

Wow.

We need to keep that in view as we think about people and as we engage people.

We need to think about them as more than just in a particular moral category.

We need to remember their plight.

That not only are they experiencing misery, their eternal destination is one that is most miserable.

That beneath whatever they're presenting is a person in turmoil because they are not right with God.

And we have to ask ourselves this question: is the way that I'm interacting with people, have I unwittingly, or perhaps even wittingly, brought into my way of thinking about others as I interact with them some system of merit?

Am I saying, have they earned the right for me to be kind to them?

Have they earned the right for me to show them mercy?

Have they done something that's allowed me to soften my posture toward them?

And we've re-engaged this idea of merit into how we operate with people.

And what Paul is saying here is we in our misery have been saved because we have been saved by that mercy-loving God who's moved toward us in our misery.

Amen.

And so let's see what this mercy does, because it's a beautiful passage.

When the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, he saved us, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy, through the washing of regeneration and the renewing by the Holy Spirit.

Now, Paul, when he describes the work of the Holy Spirit here, he uses the same word that's the root of the word of the very first word of the Bible.

This regenesis in the beginning, this recreation of us.

And he's telling us that our salvation is not about building a revised edition of who we are, some new and improved product for the world to enjoy.

We have not simply been redirected to better habits.

We've been recreated from the very root of who we are.

The God who said, Let there be light into the darkness of Genesis 1 has said, Let the light of the glorious gospel of Christ shine in your heart.

And he's made you new.

And Paul is pulling out of the Old Testament when he does this, not only in Genesis 1, but also out of the book of Ezekiel in chapter 36.

Because Ezekiel was writing to a people in exile.

Just think about that.

People who have been pulled out of Jerusalem, whose temple has been completely destroyed, and for 70 years they're going to be in a place of slavery because of their sin.

And there they are, back there in that land, foreign, strange land, broken, without a temple, without a land, without any visible reason to think that God has done nothing other than to just leave them forever where they're at.

And into that condition, God makes a promise that Ezekiel proclaims.

Listen to it, because it resonates with what's said here.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all of your uncleannesses, and from all of your idols I will cleanse you, and I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.

I don't know if you could do the arithmetic while I was reading that, but count the subjects there and the verbs.

I will, I will, I will, I will, I will, I will.

Divine commitment on God's part, and not a single verb that asked us to contribute.

The grammar has left no room for a co-author for our salvation.

Not a one.

And Paul here in Titus 3 is announcing that this promise of God's I wills is being worked through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit.

He's saying, This is the answer, the gospel.

The God of this passage of this ancient promise is a God who's alive today.

And this renewal has not finished.

Continuing to begin that work that he started with his own initiative and one he says he'll finish.

All of this matters.

All of this matters for how we engage every person we encounter.

This memory of who we were and what God has done in his mercy is the engine that drives our engagement.

And if we live our life as if we are asking others to merit our kindness and our mercy, if we're thinking, I'll return in kind what you I've gotten from you, we are in the place of having forgotten what God has done.

Because if we forget, consciously or unconsciously, we're going to give more of a pass to the person who's gained some merit with us rather than the one that has no merit to offer us.

We're going to find ourselves more patient with the person who's earned some of those markers than someone who's never even tried.

We're going to be more willing to extend grace whose verse three condition is just seen in more quiet ways rather than the more blatant ways.

Because we have to operate out of grace, not out of merit.

Because we've been given grace, not judged according to merit.

Let's take a look at the last point.

I'm going to skip over a few things just to bring us to this last point.

And I want us to just understand just how anchoring this grace is.

This grace that appeared, this grace that's applied to us, this grace that's now anchoring, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by grace we might become heirs to the hope of eternal life.

Think about that for a second.

What is this salvation?

What is this mercy?

What is all of this that he's given us?

It's poured out.

You know, not like uh, you know, three grams.

Well, let's make it four.

Poured out, poured out, effusive, not dispensed carefully, not measured with exactness, poured out richly, abundantly, nothing held back.

Through Jesus Christ our Savior.

Now that's an important phrase.

Think about what we've just heard here.

We've talked about the love of the Father, we've talked about the work of the Spirit, and now we're talking about the Son who is pouring out this salvation.

This is a triune salvation, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit and one rescue.

Now, let's stop here for just a moment and let me just leave aside for a second our main thesis of the engine that engages.

I want to talk to perhaps someone in this room who wakes up at 3 a.m.

and is filled with anxieties and doubts about whether or not God loves you, who sits very quietly wondering if you've done something or failed in somehow, or haven't quite measured up in such a way that you could live with grace covering everything.

I want you to hear what this text has to say.

Your rescue doesn't unravel based upon how consistent you are, or how good you've been, or what you've accomplished.

In order for salvation to fall apart, the Father would have to give up his promise.

And the Spirit would have to stop his renewing work.

All three of them, all at once.

The Trinity is not a committee that occasionally gets misaligned with one another.

They work in concert with each other, and it is one God and three persons who executes one rescue.

And he's made a determination that what he's begun, he is going to finish.

And so, yes, your 3 a.m.

doubt might be very, very real.

But it's not meant to be a load-bearing guilt or doubt, because the load-bearing your salvation is based upon God and his activity.

Now, let's look back in the text and see just how this grace anchors us, because he talks about two gifts that we receive.

He said that we receive through the pouring out of Jesus Christ abundantly on us by the Spirit, that we receive justification by his grace and heirs with the hope of eternal life.

I can't think of two better gifts to receive than those two.

Justification.

Think about that.

What is justification?

It's a legal term.

It's God examining the full case of who we are, the full case of what our life deserves.

And he's not looking at some highlight reel of our activities or some curated list of things that we wanted to present.

Everything inside and outside of us, every unflattering detail.

And what is his verdict about us?

Not just not guilty, declared righteous.

Declared righteous.

No, hey, we're gonna hold off until you improve a little bit.

No, we'll wait till the next quarter is finished and see how you do, and we'll give you probation until then.

No, declared righteous, justified by his grace.

The verdict is in, the gavel has fallen, and the case is closed, and he says, declared righteous.

What a gift.

There's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, Paul said.

None.

And the second, the inheritance of what?

The inheritance with the hope of eternal life.

Now there's a distinction that's worth making here.

Because there are two things that can look similar from a distance, but they are categorically different at the very core, and they are absolutely not to be mixed.

There is a wage that is earned, and there's an inheritance that is received.

And here what says that we are heirs, we are recipients of an inheritance.

A wage is earned.

You work, you produce, you perform, and you expect to get some remuneration based upon the effort that you've put in.

That's work.

It's a logical system and it's calibrated to push our performance.

But an inheritance, on the other hand, is something totally different.

It's received because of whose family we're in.

And the air doesn't earn a place at the table.

We're born in.

We are adopted in.

We are acted upon.

We are given what belongs to the head of the family who makes it generously available to us.

And what God has given us by adopting us as one of his own is he's given us an inheritance of the hope of eternal life.

What a wonder that is.

So our standing before God is one of inheritance, not debt.

We're not here to earn our way, we're here to receive all that he has for us.

So let's talk about that according to who we are today.

If we're in this room and we're thinking we need to perform, that we're doing the work, that we're trying to be faithful, we're trying to be consistent, we're trying to be present, and we carry this low-level anxiety of whether or not we've done enough.

Let me tell you this: there's no way these gifts are going to be yours because they are not earned, they're granted.

The verdict is not about whether or not you have become righteous enough.

It's about whether or not God has declared you to be righteous.

And perhaps you're in this room and you've been filled this week with a lot of failure.

That you've gone through things this week that you would rather not anybody notice or examine.

Your standing with God is not performance contingent.

It's not based upon whether you had a good week this week.

What it is meant to do when we have those times is to drive us back to the mercy of verse five and to remember what we really are and who God really is and what he's really done for us.

And if you're in this room today and you said, you know, I have been operating with others in this sort of mechanism of merit, and I have been measuring my mercy based upon what I'm getting from them.

You're acting like a wage earner, and you're making others act like wage earners.

You're causing them to have to earn what you give them.

And this passage is all about God giving us something in complete contradiction to who we are, and not once asking us to do something in order to gain his mercy or his loving kindness or his goodness.

You see, if you operate in this mechanism of merit, you're going to hold it tight because you've only got so much you can give out.

And you're going to protect it.

But when you operate out Out of the abundant eternal well of God's love and mercy who's been showered upon you, you don't have to protect anything.

You know what God has done for you.

He has poured out all of that love and mercy and inheritance upon you.

And you you don't need to see if you've got the reserves to be merciful, because you've got eternal mercy that saved you.

And you can operate out of that.

And you can be always gracious.

Always gracious.

You can extend to others what's been poured out on you.

And this is what this passage has been about.

It's been about how we interact in a public way.

Because the public is not just waiting for the right argument, they're looking for a different person.

And God tells us that the gospel makes us different people.

And when we bring the good news and the transformation of that good news in our life together, and we bring them together in concert, what a difference that's going to make.

We're going to engage the kingdom battle in the way that God wants.

And the way to do that is to keep that memory fresh.

Not in the background, but as I've said, the engine of our engagement.

Let's pray together.

Father, I pray that you would watch over us.

Lord, that you would help us to remember the thing that you've asked us to keep alive.

And Father, we want to confess that we too often let go of that memory.

And we do so more often than we'd like to admit.

Lord, we live in the world in which verse 3 is loud and proud.

And the pressure to become a combatant in that culture is very, very real.

And the temptation to forget the condition of your loving kindness and what it appeared into, our condition, is a temptation we yield to more often than we should.

So remind us, Lord.

Remind us that what appeared into our darkness was not something in response to our readiness, but you who could not look at us and leave us where we were.

That your mercy reached us in a condition of being just like everyone else.

Lord, help us to remember that and to look at every soul and every person we encounter this week, whether they're difficult or hostile or just filled with the things that verse 3 talks about.

We ask, Lord, that the washing that regenerated us would keep renewing us, keep pouring out on us richly, and would produce in us what we need to be.

To be the kind of people that move through this broken world with open hands.

That we don't interact as combatants that are protecting us side, but as heirs that are extending a mercy that can't be spent down.

Father, I also want to pray for every person here who's not feeling very stable this morning.

And remind them that the title of salvation is held by you, not by them.

And that the gavel of declared righteousness fell on a verdict that you rendered.

And that the ground beneath them is not how they perform, but according to your mercy.

Father, I also want to pray for anyone in this room who does not yet know of this inheritance that can be theirs.

Father, we pray that you would show them by the awakening of their mind and their heart and their conscience of that gracious door that you opened, made to be visible, that the loving kindness and goodness of God has appeared into the lives of people just like they are right now.

And it's still moving and it's still drawing and it's still reaching need and their need.

And I pray, Father, they would open their heart to you.

And Father, I pray that as we go out today, as we step into our families, as we interact with celebrations, some of us amongst our family for the fathers, as we remember those fathers who are no longer here.

And Father, as we remember you as the good Father when we have no good memories of our own, we pray, Father, that all of our hearts to be filled with gratitude, that you're a God who is full of kindness, that you're a God who's full of goodness, that you're a God who is saved, you're a God who has given us, according to your mercy, a renewal of heart and a washing, and that you've poured all of this out abundantly on us so that we might be justified by your grace and be declared heirs with the hope of eternal life.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Let's stand in.