Luke 22:7-23

Luke 22, 723.

Then came the day of unleavened bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed.

Jesus sent Peter and John saying, Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.

Where do you want us to prepare for it?

They asked.

He replied, As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you.

Follow him to the house that he enters, and say to the owner of the house, The teacher asked, Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?

He will show you a large room upstairs, all furnished.

Make preparations there.

They left and found things just as Jesus had told them.

So they prepared the Passover.

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined to the table, and he said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

For I will tell you I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.

After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, Take this and divide it among you.

For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

And he took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, This is my body given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way, after the supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

But the hand of him who was going to betray me is with mine on the table.

The Son of Man will go, as it has been decreed.

But woe to the man who betrays him.

They begin to question among themselves which of them it might be who would do this.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

We pray that you would speak to us by the Holy Spirit from this text.

Illuminate our understanding that we might apply these things.

And Lord, that you would find in us a willing spirit yielded and ready to obey, that we would have ears that hear, ears that respond in faith.

Thank you, God, for the care, uh, the good plans that you have for us.

And we ask, God, that you'd continue to reveal those things to us.

And we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

You may be seated.

Luke 22.

I'm I'm grateful for um Pastor Steve sharing last week on Judas' betrayal and kind of leading into this text.

Um, you know, if you look at a bicycle wheel, the center of the wheel is kind of where all the the um spokes lead into it, right?

And so when we look at scripture, this passage, the cross, what's what we're the material we're getting into is really the center of the story.

If you go back and you kind of plod your way through the Old Testament and you're learning what's going on in the Old Testament, you get into different stories, and those stories really are anticipating this very moment where Jesus is in the upper room, he is uh leading this Passover feast, giving it new meaning.

It's a beautiful, beautiful setting.

So let's go through this.

I just want to encourage you with this idea.

As we've gone through Luke, we've been talking about how God has a plan for our lives.

We've been saying that and hitting on that theme for over a year now.

I don't know what parts of your life have unfolded over the last year, but this we do know that when we are talking about at the end of 2017 that God has a plan, that his plan is being revealed here in the book of Luke, that Luke over and over again, as the author of this book, is reminding us God has a plan.

That's still the theme.

God is working in history in a patterned way.

God brings about beautiful resolutions even for people who experience deep suffering.

And Jesus calls his followers, us, he calls us to remember the plan regularly.

Remember, recall, return, renew, rejoice.

All of those rees.

So in this text, we have three major parts to it.

The first part is this whole section about preparing for the Passover meal.

Right?

Jesus tells his disciples, go and get the meal ready.

And you'll notice there that Jesus doesn't give the disciples an address of where this meal is going to be.

Why is that?

It's because we just saw right before this that Judas is planning the betrayal of Jesus.

So it would appear that Jesus does not want to get betrayed yet.

He's aware, right?

Jesus knows, even in our text, that there's this betrayal that's going to take place.

And yet he says, the place where we're going to have the Passover is where you, when you walk into the city, you see the guy carrying the jar of water, he's going to take you to the place.

Well, that's not going to work if you're trying to set up a plot to betray a guy, right?

So Jesus hadn't basically supernaturally gives guidance to his disciples to go to this house to prepare the Passover meal.

Then we see Jesus sitting with his disciples at the Passover meal, reclined.

So this is probably an Eastern meal that's not on a raised table like we do here eat in the West, or like we kind of have in the back of the room here.

That's not the arrangement.

It's more sitting on your side, propped up on a pillow with the table or the food kind of laid out before you.

And Jesus says that he um anticipates, he's been anticipating and longing for this moment.

He's been waiting to eat this meal.

And then the last part there in the text is Jesus giving new meaning to this traditional feast, to the Passover feast.

He says, This bread that we're breaking, that we're eating, is emblematic of my body broken for you.

This cup that we're taking, it is my blood poured out for you.

So what I want to do is I want to spend a little bit of time just covering the idea of Passover because you'll notice as a Bible student, as you're going through the text, the repeated word there is what?

Over and over again.

What's the repetition?

Passover, right?

We hear the word Passover over and over and over again.

If we're not Jewish, then we're not we're not celebrating an annual Seder feast.

We're not doing, uh we're not canceling life for a week and celebrating Passover.

It's not a part of our Gentile heritage.

So I want to go through, I want to explain what the Passover is, and then we're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about covenant because when Jesus takes the cup, he says, This is the blood of the new covenant which is shed for you.

And so we're gonna talk about the history of covenant throughout the Old Testament leading up to this new covenant.

Then we'll make some application for us, and we are taking communion this morning as well.

We'll be able to participate in this meal that Jesus inaugurates.

So let's talk a little bit about Passover.

Turn in your Bibles back over to Exodus.

Turn to Exodus chapter 12.

Exodus 12 · chapter mention

Exodus chapter 12.

Exodus 12 · chapter mention

Now, if you are new to Scripture, the stories of the Bible may be somewhat familiar through folklore or a cartoon.

Or as an adult, depending on your age, and you're like, oh yeah, I know that story about when like you know Moses let the people go, or the 10, sorry, the Ten Commandments.

But Exodus chapter 12 is the tenth plague.

Exodus 12 · chapter mention

So Israel itself is under, has been in slavery for 400 years.

You remember Abraham was given the promise of God that a nation would be created.

You have multiple generations that are born from the line of Abraham.

Um Jacob's sons, his oldest being Joseph, are brought down to Egypt.

They flourish, but then over the course of 400 years, they become slaves of Egypt.

And slaves don't get time off.

They're basically causing Egypt's economy to boom.

And so the slavery that we see in Egypt is very similar to the slavery in America that we've experienced.

It was an ethnic slavery.

Um, it was a cruel slavery.

Um, whereas when you go through the um scripture and you look at the idea of servants, it's totally different.

So you have slavery and you have servitude, um two concepts as you go through the Old and New Testament, very different cultural concepts.

But e Israel itself was enslaved to Egypt.

And it says in chapter 3 that they're crying out to God.

And we have the trophonic response of God, which is that I hear you, I see you, I'm aware of what's going on.

That's what God tells Moses.

I see you, I am aware of what's going on.

And God sends Moses back to Pharaoh, who runs Egypt, to say, you need to release my people.

And they go through this process of these plagues.

The plagues of Egypt are basically God pouring out judgment on Egypt, making it painful for Egypt to disobey God.

That's how God works with us, right?

He uh He will chasten us, He'll send many plagues into our life, sometimes issues of pain, hoping that we'll obey.

That's how we parent, right?

We'll say to a kid who's misbehaving, hey, you need to take a break, right?

Go sit in your room.

You don't get to be on your iPad, you don't get to watch TV, you just need to be separated from family life and fun until you're ready to change your heart.

And that's the goal with parents.

That's God's goal with us, oftentimes.

He doesn't, he's not mad at you.

He loves you.

He wants us to change, right?

He wanted, there was the opportunity for Pharaoh to be a part of God's work of releasing his people and sending them into the promised land.

But no, we have this man, Pharaoh, who continues to harden his heart.

And literally, there's plague after plague after plague that God brings about through Moses, and this in chapter 12 is the tenth plague.

And so we pick up in Exodus chapter 12, verse 1, the Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.

Exodus 12:1

Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each of his household, and if any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor.

Having taken it into account the number of people there are, you are to determine the amount of the lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat.

The animals you choose must be a year old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats, take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight.

Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and the tops of the door frame of the houses where they eat the lambs.

That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire along with bitter herbs, and bread made out of uh made without yeast.

Do not eat the meat raw or boil it in water, but roast it over the fire with the head, the legs, the internal organs.

Do not leave any of it until the morning.

It goes on.

So he what's what Moses is doing with the children of Israel.

Like imagine them in their little houses in Goshen of Egypt, and this is this little community, um, well, maybe not so little, about a maybe a million people, males, females, kids, and he's giving them, he's saying, Look, your calendar is gonna start.

You're gonna go take a lamb, and that lamb's gonna live with you in your house.

Your kids are gonna get to know it.

They're gonna name it, they're gonna play with it, right?

And then four days later, at twilight, you're gonna kill that lamb.

You're gonna roast it, don't boil it, you're gonna save the blood.

He goes on here, he says, You're gonna take um like major, what we would call the spice majorum.

You're gonna take that and you're going to dip it in the blood, you're gonna sprinkle the blood on the door frame, and anywhere that that that blood is found as the angel of death comes through Egypt, the um the angel of death will pass over that house.

Because again, these plagues are a form of discipline and judgment.

This angel of death is going to come.

That's the next chapter.

The angel of death is going to come in and kills the firstborn of every family that did not follow this instruction.

So this is inaugurated here for God's people, Israel, and then it carried on, it's re-reiterated as we get into the law.

We go further into Exodus, we get into Deuteronomy.

It's fascinating that this ritual is carried on for the next thousand or so years until you get to the time of Jesus.

Even for us to this day, Jews celebrate Passover.

So you have the lamb killed, blood covering, um, the leaven is cleaned out of the house.

So they would have um, just like we have this cracker that's um without leaven.

This is this is um uh unleavened bread.

It's called the feast of unleavened bread.

It's also called Passover.

But this was boring, right?

This kind of bread is boring.

It's yucky.

You'd eat this, so you'd eat this with herbs.

Um but that's all a part of this uh ritual.

You're supposed they were supposed to eat their eat the meal ready to go.

But here's what's interesting: even as Israel develops as a nation and they get the tabernacle, right?

You remember when they they are given the instructions about how to sew their this tent where worship takes place?

And then you get into how the priests are going to behave and all of those different aspects.

It's fascinating how this is a ceremony that takes place in the home.

Isn't that fascinating that you would do this ceremony in your home with your family?

If you've ever been a part of a Jewish satyr, one of the things that you know is that the meal is taking place around with a family, with your other family members.

So even to this day, this Passover meal has matured, and the fascinating thing is that the traditions that have continued, it's become even more symbolic and representative of what Jesus did.

So in our text, Jesus is is, and and Israel is traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast.

Now the the one thing that changed from Exodus into kind of the history of Israel is that the lamb was no longer just killed by your house.

You go kill the lamb at um the at the temple, right?

So Israel's coming up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast.

The money changers, remember that Jesus kind of kicked out of the temple, they played this role of making sure that you had like the right kind of lamb.

There was a money exchange.

So the economy is all built around this.

The the um the uh number of people in Jerusalem swelled.

Uh, there was a a bunch of people that were in the city.

And so Jesus is doing this annual feast with his disciples, right?

So it's really important as we understand this scene that we're looking at to realize the um cultural context that what's playing out here when Jesus has his disciples do Passover is like what we like how we do Christmas every year.

This is Passover from it, such a special thing that happens every year.

It's not anything, though, out of the new, out of the norm, right?

If you're Jewish like all the disciples were, they did it every year.

They'd been doing it for the last 30 years since they were kids.

And so Jesus takes the elements, though, and there was four times throughout the Seder feast where you would drink wine.

And there was a lot of drinking wine in this in this custom, right?

But there was the different cups that you would take throughout the meet the meal, and it was kind of like a toast.

There was different things that were said as you would drink throughout the meal.

And um there were uh there were different pieces of food.

So you'd have a lamb shank that would be there.

You'd have usually there's an egg that's there, a boiled egg.

There's horseradish sauce.

If you go through this, that you talk about bitter herbs.

Nowadays that's become like horseradish.

Um and that's representative of like the tears that we cried as we were in as we were um suffering in Egypt.

So there's this um all of the symbolism that's in this meal.

And Jesus is says in the text there, look at um verse 14 when the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined.

Sorry, we're back in in Luke 22, verse 14.

Luke 22:14

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table.

And he said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.

Do you see that?

The this feast finds fulfillment.

It finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.

After taking the cup, he gave thanks.

We'll get into that part in just a second.

So um all this to say, Jesus has been having the Passover feast for years.

He's been eating this meal for years, leading up to this point.

And here he is, he's saying, I've been waiting for this this time around.

This meal, it's gonna be fulfilled.

And then he goes and he gives this new meaning to the cup, right?

He holds the cup and he says, You've been taking this cup together, and you've done it in a particular way for years, but now it has new meaning for you.

It means the new covenant, right?

It's the new covenant, it symbolizes my blood, which is shed for you.

He takes the bread that would have been the offikomen, he takes the bread, he holds it up, and he says, This is my body broken for you, and gives new meaning to this beautiful tradition.

So there's so much more that we could look at when it comes to the Passover, and and I would encourage you, just the more you study it, the more you'll see just the rich symbolism that's contained within it.

If you get a chance to do a Seder, maybe in the future as a church, we'll do it we'll do a Seder together because it's just so beautiful knowing Jesus, because we are experienced the fulfillment of this tradition that's gone on for years and years.

But let's talk a little bit about covenant, because you'll see that there in verse 20, Jesus takes the cup.

It says, In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

This is so huge.

Such a big deal.

Such a big deal.

The fact that Jesus here is not just taking the cup and honoring the old tradition, but he's saying, we're going to enter into a new covenant.

Covenant is one of the most important themes throughout Scripture.

We have covenant all the way back to the very beginning.

In fact, I want to walk us through some of them.

A covenant is a kind of relationship between persons.

There's mutual obligations that characterize that relationship.

Thus, a covenant relationship is not merely a mutual acquaintance, but a commitment to responsibility and action.

A key word in Scripture to describe the commitment is faithfulness, acted out in the context of abiding friendship.

There are five key covenants that I want to give you.

Okay?

Five key covenants that I want to walk you through.

And hopefully, if you got a chance, I shared on Slack and in the email I sent out this week a video that goes through these covenants.

It's super important to understand these covenants.

And if you watch that five-minute video, it's going to walk you through their overall significance.

I love that video.

But the first is the Noahic covenant.

This is the covenant that God made with Noah in Genesis 16.8.

This was a covenant where God promised, I'm not going to destroy the earth again.

I'm not going to judge the earth again like I did before.

So Genesis 16.8, and then also Genesis, that should be Genesis 6.8.

I'm sorry, not 16.

Genesis 6.8, and then Genesis 9, 8 through 16 is post-flood, a reiteration of that covenant.

In the context of a tremendous loss of life, this emphasis on the value of life generally and the human life especially is of considerable significance.

Rather than suggesting that life is cheap, the deluge, the flood, signifies precisely the opposite.

The seriousness of the problem that had precipitated the flood.

In any case, this emphasis on the preservation of life reflects the primary rationale for the establishment of the covenant, the preservation without further divine interruption of life on earth.

When we look at these covenants, many of them have an accompanying sign.

Do you know what the sign of the Noahic covenant is?

What is it?

The rainbow, right?

Yeah.

So God makes this covenant that's not dependent on humanity.

It's a one-sided covenant.

God says, I promise to you that I will not destroy the earth, humanity, in the same way again.

Then we go to Genesis 12 and we have the Abrahamic covenant.

This is a twofold covenant, nationhood and international blessing, right?

Nationhood and international blessing.

So God tells Abraham, I'm going to make out of you a nation, and of your nation will become this blessing will come upon the earth, right?

It'll be an international blessing.

What's the sign of the Abrahamic covenant?

Circumcision, right?

So God tells Abraham, You're going to circumcise your boys as a sign that this covenant, that you are my people, you are my nation that I have made with you.

Then we go from Genesis 12, the sign is spoken of in Genesis 17.

We go to Exodus in the Mosaic covenant.

This is the law.

Exodus 24, 3 through 8 talks about this covenant of the law that I'm making with you.

Do you know what the sign of the Mosaic covenant is?

What's the sign?

In Exodus 31, 13, the Sabbath, it says, is the sign of the covenant.

It is a symbol.

The Sabbath day, or the seventh day, Saturdays, not working on Saturdays, worshiping God on Saturdays.

That was a sign to God's people of this Mosaic covenant.

That's the third one.

The fourth is the priestly covenant that's spoken of in Exodus 28 and 29.

It really runs parallel to the Mosaic covenant, but it's God's promise that there will be a priesthood, a mediator between God and man.

And you can look at that further.

So some people don't include the priestly covenant in there, but it seems to be a distinct promise to the nation of Israel that God will always allow a priesthood to exist.

Exodus 28 and 29.

No covenant or no sign necessarily established connected to that.

Then, fifth, we have the Davidic covenant.

This is God's promise to David that he will always have somebody of his line sitting on the throne.

It'll be an everlasting kingdom that will extend from David onward, that his royal lineage will continue.

That's in 2 Samuel chapter 7, where that covenant is given.

2 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

So God is revealing himself through these covenants.

Some of them, like the law, is contingent upon the obedience of the people in the covenant.

Some of them are not contingent on obedience, like the Noahic covenant.

So then we get into Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 31, and the text we're looking at here refers to a new covenant.

That God's going to make a new covenant.

Look over in Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 31.

Jeremiah is in the midst of talking to people who are being judged by God and being sent out of the land.

Are you okay, Kenneth?

Help a brother out there.

Jeremiah 31.

You good?

Jeremiah 31, 31 says this the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.

It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord.

So notice he says, This covenant is not going to be like the Mosaic covenant, because it was broken.

Then verse 33, this is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord.

I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God, and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor to say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, declares the Lord.

This new covenant is going to be a covenant of forgiveness and a covenant of personal relationship with God.

Right?

It is God saying, I'm going to do this, right?

It's not really contingent.

It's God saying, This is my offer.

It's not contingent upon obedience, it's contingent upon faith.

And God's saying, I'm just going to forgive your sins.

And you're no longer going to need a pre, you're no longer going to have to go to an earthly priest or your neighbor to ask him, what is God saying?

You'll each know me individually.

So this is promised in Jeremiah 31 in this context where Israel's being judged.

They've failed God.

They're being sent off to Babylon under the Assyrian and the Babylonian attack.

And yet God is saying to these people that are being disciplined, I will make for you a new covenant.

Not like the old one.

I'm going to make for you a new covenant.

It was a fact.

So here we come.

We come into our text, right?

So here's Jesus, Passover, sitting with the cup, with the bread, and he looks at his disciples, and he holds up the cup.

With this whole history, thousands of years of history, and he says, New covenant.

We're going to make a new covenant between God and man.

And it's a new covenant that's in my blood.

Right?

If you go back and you look at the covenant that's made with Abraham, there were these animals.

God says, Go and take these animals, literally cut them in half, lay them out, you know, so that their kind of half is here and half is here.

Here's the cow, half the cow here and half the cow is there, half the bird here, half the bird there, half the goat here, half the goat there.

And then watch.

And God literally would walk.

He walked down the middle in the blood, running blood, to make this covenant with Abraham.

It's this amazing picture that takes place.

And here's Jesus saying, This covenant is going to be a covenant in my blood with you.

The Lord's Supper.

So there's a new covenant.

What's the sign?

We talked about how some of these covenants have a sign.

What's the sign of the new covenant?

It's the bread in the cup, right?

Just like Jewish boys are circumcised, and it's a picture of God's promise to Abraham.

When we take this cup, that's the sign of God's promise to us as a people.

It's this, the table, the Lord's table, or what we call communion and baptism, are the two institutions that God has given to the church, the two sacraments that have been given to the church.

So when Don is baptized this evening, he's doing the other, like we're doing two in one day.

Isn't that fun?

So when Don is baptized later on, that's obedience to the other sacrament that God has given to us as the church.

If you're from a Catholic background, you know that there's seven sacraments.

Those seven sacraments really aren't found in Scripture.

They're concepts, but we do have these things that are inaugurated for us.

And we do them remembering God.

Okay, so taking all that information in, because that's a lot of teaching, how do we apply this stuff to our life?

How does this hit us in our moment right now?

The tradition of the Passover and the covenants leads us to Jesus and his cross.

Jesus was the Passover lamb that was slain for us so that we would not be judged.

His blood was our covering from judgment.

Jesus' body was the unleavened bread.

Unleavened.

What's leavened?

It's it's this picture of sin, right?

Jesus' body is that sinless, sinless body that could be broken for us.

He delivers us from our slavery and bondage, right?

The whole meal originally celebrated freedom from bondage, and that's what God has done for us.

In our culture, postmodernism contains the idea that meaning is difficult to determine or is arbitrary.

Our culture has settled for incongruent, incongruent pieces.

Life doesn't make sense, and there's a this idea that there is no grand plan.

We can't unify the pieces of our experience.

But we absolutely have to have meaning in order to survive.

So we live in a culture that struggles with the whole idea of meaning.

What does my life mean?

I sat a year and a half ago in a class.

It was like a continuing education course on marketing, and there were 12 other students in the classroom, and they each got a st a chance to share kind of where they're at in their career.

Almost everyone in the class, all millennials, men and women, basically saying, I don't like my career as it is.

I'm struggling with meaning in my life.

Right?

There's this search for meaning, there's this need for meaning in life.

If you don't have meaning in your life, then you despair.

So what do we do?

What does our culture do?

Absent of faith, what it does is it generates meaning.

It has to come up with what is meaning, what is meaningful about life.

Oftentimes it's this idea of living free, having absolute autonomy, able to seek pleasure or power.

One or the other, seeking pleasure or power.

But for us as believers, the Christian message says that meaning doesn't have to be created.

The meaning for your life and my life is something that is discovered as we come to know God.

The Bible invites us to let go of our blind groping in the dark, looking for purpose in life, and to instead discover our place in God's grand story.

The reason why I wanted to spend so much time considering Passover and Covenant is that what you and I see as we go back thousands of years is this idea that God has a story, He has a plan that is unfolding.

And therefore, life has meaning, right?

This meal has meaning.

It has significance.

And our culture is a culture that is, it's absolutely like it's it's moving from career to career faster than ever.

It's unwilling to make deep commitments to marriage and to careers and to family and to location because of this search for meaning.

But yet God, through his son Jesus Christ, comes on the scene and says, there is meaning.

It's not something you have to create, it's something that I want to reveal to you, to weave your life into it like a beautiful tapestry.

The whole of Scripture invites us to trust God deeply and change our lives so that it is oriented around obedience to Him and His good plan.

As we review God's covenants and traditions, like the Passover, it reminds us of the foundation that we stand on, that it is strong.

When we get up tomorrow morning and we read God's word, we are encountering a supernatural book of God's faithfulness in human history.

When we set aside time to pray and talk with God, who has been faithful for hundreds of generations before us, we will find that He wants to speak to us and reveal to us how we fit in to His plan.

He hears your cares and what you're saying.

And when we care for those who are suffering around us, we're participating in thousands of years of God showing mercy and compassion to those who are hurting.

You see, as we are at this crucial point in history of Jesus taking the cup, taking the bread, going to the cross, what we see is the plan of God being fulfilled.

You have this, as as Christians, those of us who have come to the Lord Jesus Christ for our salvation, we have inherited this beautiful standing.

This beautiful standing and this secure position in Christ.

So let's let's take uh the the body, the the um the bread, the cup together.

But before we do that, uh let's pray together.

And I want to pray too for um the Moore family.

Tracy lost her dad um two nights ago.

He was he had terminal cancer, he was on hospice, he passed away.

If you're on Slack and you have your term your uh notifications turned on, you saw that.

Um so we want to pray for them and other people that are just kind of struggling through life.

So let's lift them up and just pray that God would speak to us in our life.

Lord, we thank you so much for the work of Jesus on the cross and this sign that we're gonna participate in in a minute here, and we're just grateful for it.

We pray, Lord, that you would root us in this beautiful tapestry, this beautiful plan that you have.

And God, we want to lift up to you, Marvin and Tracy.

We pray for Tracy that you comfort her heart and the family's heart in just the loss of their dad.

Lord, we pray that you would just be in their midst as a family, draw them close.

Thank you for the salvation of their dad, that he's with you right now in paradise, that he's he's present, and that we will see him again.

Lord, comfort them, though we pray, and Lord, for those that are suffering and hurting this morning in the church, we just ask for your physical touch on those who are in pain.

Lord, for those who are going through difficult trials, that you'd encourage them and you'd rescue them, that you demonstrate your power in their life.

Lord, just be present in our midst.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I'm gonna ask you to come forward, come and take the elements.

So stand, come on up and get um the bread and the cup.

Take it back to your seat.

Take it back to your seat, and we will um take the elements together.

We'll take them together.