Longing for Healing

Man, I I am thankful and excited that it is uh Advent season and uh thankful for the privilege of getting to lead us this morning uh as we celebrate the promised one, uh the one who uh alone can bring us the healing we long for from our brokenness.

And when I talk about healing, I'm not referring to the uh the turkey ball football game that some of you guys did the other day.

Um thankfully no broken bones.

I lived most of my childhood in South Georgia, and you don't have to feel sorry for me.

It was a wonderful childhood.

Um the first house we lived in was uh nestled in uh towering pine trees everywhere you could look and twisted scrub oaks, which was an adventurous boy's um paradise.

Uh and straight across from our house was another woodlaw.

There were woods all around us and fields, and I remember one year the landowner decided to clear-cut uh the property across from us.

And I remember walking around that deforested area after they had done that and climbing up on the stumps and jumping off and walking all over the place.

And but even as a uh probably 12-year-old or so, I could sense the barrenness of what had been a wooded wonderland, as it had been reduced to uh a clear cut with just piles of unusable logs and uh treetops that have been piled up and burnt.

There were no birds chirping, there weren't any squirrels climbing up trees.

That hundred acres had been reduced to nothing.

And until the very next spring, it looked like a desolate area.

But the next spring, parts of the soil and of the ground and of plants that had previously been shielded from the light of the sun because of the thick foliage above in the mature woods begin to sprout up, bringing the new hope of new life and new beginnings.

The context of our passage this morning in Isaiah chapter 11 is actually rather similar, because in a very real way, the prophet Isaiah stands on the edge of a clear cut.

Isaiah 11 · chapter mention

He stands on the edge of what had been for so many uh years and decades the prosperous ancient nation of Israel, as they had thrived under the reigns of David and Solomon, their kings.

But during the tumultuous rule of Solomon's son, uh the vision happened in the land, and two kingdoms formed, ten northern tribes and two southern tribes.

And because of the ten northern tribes were just particularly wicked, with particularly wicked kings that spread things like witchcraft and sacrificing babies to pagan gods and bribing judges and things like that, God raised up some enemies to afflict his people to bring them to repentance, namely the nations of Assyria and Babylon.

The army of Assyria would invade and plunder and take captive Samaria, the capital city of the northern kingdom, and they would uh around the year about 720 BC afflict the people of God in the northern kingdom.

And this happened to be right in the middle of the prophetic ministry of Isaiah.

In rather telling language, Isaiah chapter 10, which is the previous chapter to our text, in verse 15, it calls Assyria God's axe.

Isaiah 10 · chapter mention

Talk about word imagery of God wielding an entire nation, the nation of Assyria and all their armies like an axe to chop down the forest of his rebellious people.

And again in Isaiah chapter 6 and verse 13, God told the prophet that he would do this until the cities laid in waste without inhabitant in the land as a desolate waste.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

And the tree, get this, the tree that had been the kingly lineage of David would be cut down, made into a stump, and then burned with fire.

So think about it, cut down, made into a stump, and burned with fire.

Such would be the lineage of the promised one.

Such would be the lineage of the one who had been promised to come through Abraham and Judah and David.

This was the bleak and broken scene into which comes the life and hope-giving message of Isaiah in our text of Isaiah chapter 11, verses 1 through 10.

Isaiah 11:1–10

And before we dig into the text, maybe you're sitting there this morning and you can personally identify with the seemingly hopeless situation.

Maybe when you look at your life or your relationships, or your broken dreams, or when you turn on the news and look at our divided nation or war-torn world.

So this is a message for us all this morning.

Let's look in Isaiah chapter 11, verse 1.

Isaiah 11:1

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

So here the prophet is a continues with this theme of this lineage of David being cut down and burnt, and now out of this stump of Jesse will come one that bears fruit.

Jesse was the father of arguably Israel's greatest king, King David, as in David and Goliath, King David.

But the lineage of Jesse would under Babylon, whenever Jerusalem was laid siege, some years in the future, it would be reduced to a stump.

Jesse's lineage would become a dead end, or so it seemed.

But as this first verse says, an obscure, unassuming little stem would yet rise out of the lifeless stump of the Davidic lineage, bringing new hope of restoration.

And this shoot, this stem, if you haven't already guessed it, is Messiah.

The idea of Messiah being a shoot or a branch emerging out of dead or seemingly dead roots was something that isn't just limited to this passage, but in numerous places in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Zechariah, the Messiah is called a branch.

This wasn't just a branch out of a healthy tree.

This is a branch that grows out of a dead stump.

For example, I read in Jeremiah 23, verse 5, this prophecy as well.

Jeremiah 23:5

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

So this shoot, this branch is Messiah, the Christ who would bring about deliverance and healing for his chosen people.

And this is our main idea, this very first verse.

We might put it this way Into the desolation of our human brokenness, Jesus the Messiah would appear to heal his people.

Now, in verse 2, we read this section that describes the majesty and the character of this Jesus.

Verse 2 says, And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

In these four verses that we're going to look at that talk about his character, we're going to see a glimpse into who this Messiah is and what he's going to be like.

First, we see in this verse, the Messiah is going to be anointed with the Spirit of God.

And as you may remember, the very term Messiah and the term Christ, one Hebrew, one Greek, simply means the anointed one.

This is someone who's been anointed by God, chosen in a special way for a special role.

Here it says, the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon this shoot of Jesse.

You also notice that it says there's seven spirits.

And we shouldn't understand this to mean that there are seven spirits of God per se, but rather seven aspects of the person and the work of God's Spirit.

Notice that he says this, it's the Spirit of the Lord, number one, and of wisdom, and of understanding, and of counsel, might, knowledge, and fear the Lord.

Seven aspects of this fullness of the Spirit.

The number seven in the Bible, as you probably are familiar with, is a number that depicts fullness or completeness.

We see this in Genesis chapter one, where God creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh, and thereby initiates a seven-day week that is like a cycle of completeness before turning over and going to the next.

All through the Israeli history, we find the number seven popping up.

Every seventh year, God would require that all debtors, debts would be paid and be released.

Every 49, every 50th year, after seven cycles of seven, you would have Jews could could retake the land that they had sold or given away or lost because of debt.

In the book of Revelation, you read over and over about seven seals and seven lampstands and seven bowls and seven judgments and seven trumpets, etc., a number of completion or fullness.

So we should understand that this shoot from Jesse, this one that's going to come out of the dead bones of Jesse, would be filled completely with the Spirit and the fullness of God.

This reality that Christ would be anointed by the Spirit, it echoes something that we read later in Isaiah chapter 61, where Messiah himself in prophecy says, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.

Isaiah 61 · chapter mention

And this is something that Jesus, if you remember, spoke about himself.

So you have these prophecies about Messiah, and then 700 years later, Jesus comes, and when Jesus walks the earth, he claims all these prophecies for himself, and then he does miracles to prove it.

In his own hometown of Nazareth, he had already started his ministry some and he'd done some miracles, but then he comes back to his hometown, and they're like, we know this guy.

This is Joseph's son.

This is, we know we grew up with him, right?

Um, but he walks into the synagogue one day when the fullness of his ministry was going to be revealed, and he was gonna start telling people who he was.

And he opens up the scroll to Isaiah chapter 61, and he reads it, and it says, This the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.

Isaiah 61 · chapter mention

There's the messianic, the anointed one, right?

Because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, that is the year of jubilee, of release from bondage and of restoration, and the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn.

Isaiah chapter 61, verses 1 and 2.

Isaiah 61:1

And then he rolls up the scroll, and everyone's waiting for him to comment, tell us something about Messiah, and he looks at them and he says, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.

And so when we read about Messiah in Isaiah, we ought to be thinking about Jesus, because Isaiah is prophesying, hundreds of years before Jesus was born, about Jesus.

A second aspect of Christ's character is that in verses three and four, he will bring about perfect justice.

Remember, in the land of Israel, uh there was a lot of injustice.

There was there were bribes, the poor, the people who are who are either disenfranchised or who weren't represented well.

Um they were getting trampled underfoot by those who had more power.

And yet a Messiah was going to come to bring about perfect justice.

Notice what it says about Jesus in verse three.

And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord, and he shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth, and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

There's going to be a new sheriff in town, and he's going to clean house with the wicked and bring about longed after justice.

In other words, Christ will preside as judge over all the earth, and his justice will not be influenced, he is careful to say here, by popular opinion, by trending polls, by inflammatory remarks on social media.

Jesus doesn't jump on one bandwagon and then jump on another some other time thereafter.

It strikes me that Jesus' form of social justice is quite different than ours today, I think.

We tend to jump to rash conclusions and rash judgments on all sorts of things based on what we hear.

We hear one side of a story and we are just, we're all over it, right?

That's not how Jesus judges.

Jesus judges with an absolute knowledge of everything going on.

We tend to rush to judgment and even utter words against people that have a contrary vision of justice.

In our day, we may be familiar, uh, some believe that social justice and equality can only come about by absolute revolution, by deconstructing the very pillars of our society in the West, piece by piece, and maybe even reinterpreting history to uh cancel heroes from bygone eras for being out of touch with our own cultural sensitivities.

That's one extreme.

On the other hand, some of us that may be on the other side may be so sensitized to any talk about social reform that we want to immediately label someone a social Marxist if they raise questions about absurd incarceration rates and high school dropout rates and fatherlessness rates and poverty and alarming health trends among some minorities just because they raise questions.

But Jesus has the justice we need, and he is bringing it about through his kingdom.

We all long for healing wherever we stand on all these social issues.

We all long for restoration, we all long for human flourishing, and guess what?

That's exactly what Jesus is bringing about.

Our story goes like this.

Some of us look for true healing in the promises and policies of our civil government.

When we think here's a problem, our first thought is how can we vote in the right way?

How can we pass legislation?

How can we force people's hand?

How can we bring about justice through government?

But we must realize that, and this is a spoiler alert, so no systemic rearranging of the furniture of in among fallen societies and politics is going to bring about ultimate healing for which we long.

But rather, as believers, we should understand that in Jesus the Messiah, the only uh systemic wholeness we'll ever experience is going to be in the new creation.

And if we destroy one system, we're gonna replace it with another broken system.

This side of eternity.

So we confess with Abraham of old that we look forward to a city whose builder and maker is God.

Now, on the other hand, our stories that some of us look for true healing simply in hard work and self-help.

And in the process, we often, because we're self-made, right, we care little for those who are trapped in cycles of brokenness.

But when we look at Christ, we see he has a heart for the poor and the outcast of society.

If you look at Jesus, think about who he went to a lot of the time.

He went to those who were on the outside of society, he went to those who were not valued much by society.

He touched blind eyes, he touched lepers, he went to those who were ostracized for religious reasons and others.

And so we too must grow in our own love for those around us, even those who may get left behind in the free market foot races of the mighty.

And when we realize that everything we have and everything we have achieved has really come to us because of God's kindness and grace to us, it makes us all the more sensitive to those who haven't been as fortunate to us, who are trapped in cycles of dysfunction and sorrow upon sorrow.

And it's no stretch to say, and I'm thankful to say this, that we as Christians, we actually have the real answers to the human condition in the gospel.

Namely, the forgiveness of sins, namely, reconciliation with God, our Creator, a new birth that brings new hearts, that brings new behaviors and new attitudes that you just can't legislate successfully.

Progressive transformation into Christ's image through the Spirit.

And as we get serious about following God's word, we see bringing about in our homes healed marriages and healed parent-child relationships and healed relationships with those around us with whom we've been uh ostracized.

We experience formative church community in the household of faith, and we can invite others into it.

These are things that actually do move the ball forward in the scheme of things, and that's what Jesus is up to.

But maybe you're listening to me this morning and you're thinking, you know, Tim, I've been a Christian for some time, and I still struggle with anxiety and fear, and or maybe my spouse and I just barely get along.

We're kind of sticking it out because of the kids.

Or maybe you say you have a bitterness in your heart towards uh someone who's hurt you, or towards your mother or your father because they weren't there for you in some way.

Or maybe you're crippled by insecurities that just seem to be only all taking place in your own head.

Or maybe you've made deep mistakes in the past that you're still plagued by, or you've been wronged deeply by someone in the past, and you feel shame about that.

The fact is we all carry scars from our fallness, and we all stand in need of the healing power of Messiah, who freely forgives and redeems, and as this text says, decides with equity for the meek of the earth, and who avenges his people from those who afflict them unjustly.

And so, if this is you this morning, if you feel like there's something there, maybe it's been there for years, maybe it's been there since you were eight years old, who knows?

I want to encourage you to take this brokenness to the Lord, to express to the Lord in even silent prayer now, what is bothering you, what is plaguing you, what is weighing you down, to verbalize it, and then to trust that he cares and that he is able and that he can deliver you from it.

Because the same Jesus who peeled who who healed blind eyes and touched lepers and befriended the marginalized, who wept with the grieving at funerals and raised the dead, he can heal you and he can heal me just as well today.

So we saw in these verses two through five a little bit of the righteousness and the compassion of Jesus.

But now let's look in verses six through ten at some of the fruit that revol that results from this righteous reign.

Remember, verse one said this this little shoot's gonna come out, it's gonna grow, and it's gonna bear fruit.

Well, here is some of the fruit the Messiah is gonna bring about in our fallen world, and ultimately in the world that is uh redeemed.

Verse six The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together, and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the whole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth is for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

In that day, the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples, of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

This is a remarkable passage that speaks of a future age in which the knowledge of God will be so ubiquitous, so pervasive, so universal in the world that even the relationships between predator and prey we reconcile.

Twice in the last week, I've had a couple of coyotes in my backyard, which is the first time in the last three years we've seen them, but they've moved in, apparently.

And the thought that a mangy pack of coyotes is going to surround my dog one day when I let him out to go do something and harm my dog or harm some child in the neighborhood, it makes me sense the urgency and the rightness and the wholesomeness and the healing of this promise.

That in the future fullness, that is the future fullness of Christ's present kingdom, the wolf will not eat the lamb, but will eat alongside the lamb.

Nor the leopard the goat, nor the lion the calf, or the bear the cow.

But they will graze together in harmony in the new creation as things were originally designed to be.

Because in this passage it says That with the effects of the fall one day completely vanquished, a human toddler will play over the serpent's den without being bitten.

The enmity gone.

So complete will be the curse-defeating work of Messiah that the curse and its effects will be no more.

And the beauty of all this is that Jesus didn't, from a lofty vantage point, wave a wand over the earth to bring and to repeal the curse of sin and death and cosmic chaos.

Rather, he entered into space and time, made of a woman, Romans chapter 8 says, as incarnate deity, as Emmanuel, God with us, and he suffered the flesh-splitting trauma of the fall, the crushing weight of the curse of death in his own body and the cross in our place, so that he would defeat death and reverse the effects of the curse in our world.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Because Christ, the seed of the woman, crushed the head of the serpent, Satan himself, and suffered a bite to his heel, leading to his own death, as was prophesied in Genesis 3, and then rose from the dead on the third day.

Those of us who trust in this victorious work are ensured a place in that new creation where we will need neither claw nor fang anymore.

And herein lies our gospel conviction.

Jesus Christ subjected himself to the curse of death to set all things right and establish a new creation in everlasting righteousness.

He subjected himself to that curse so that he could destroy it and recreate the world in everlasting righteousness.

We see in verse 9 that in this new creation, Isaiah tells us, the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

You know, in our current world, we read in Romans chapter 1, the knowledge of God is present, but it is suppressed.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

It is ignored, it is outright denied.

But in the new creation, in the future fullness of the present reign of Christ, the knowledge of God will be embraced, it'll be enjoyed, it'll be upheld by all creatures with the same saturation as water covering the sea.

And then in verse 10 we read In that day, the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal or a sign for the peoples, of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

Now you may have noticed something.

How that our text began in verse 1 saying that this was the shoot of Jesse, but here in verse 10 it calls him the root of Jesse.

Why is this and does it even matter?

And I looked it up, and it's not the same Hebrew word.

It's not just one word translated two different ways, it's two different ideas.

Jesus himself seems to allude to this subtlety in Romans, in uh Matthew chapter 22, where he talks to the Pharisees, and they were asking him questions, trying to pin him down, trying to get him to blaspheme, uh, create blasphemy so that he could be uh killed.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

And he asks them a question that absolutely stumps him.

He says, Uh, if Messiah is David's son, then why does David call him Lord?

And then he quotes Psalm chapter 110, verse 1, The Lord Yahweh says unto my Lord, Adonai, sit at my right hand until I make all your enemies your footstool.

Psalms 110:1

This is the coronation of Messiah.

Yahweh telling Messiah, hey, you sit here, I'm going to subjugate all your enemies, and you'll be made king.

So Jesus quotes Psalm 110, 1 and says, Why, if Messiah is David's son or his descendant, why does David call him my Adonai, my Lord?

That is his superior.

And the reason is because Jesus was more than his descendant.

He was his predecessor.

And Jesus says this very thing in Revelation chapter 22 and verse 16 when he claims both titles for himself when he says, I, Jesus, am the root and the descendant of Jesse.

Revelation 22 · chapter mention

So when Isaiah uses these two words, it doesn't, it doesn't uh miss, John picks up on it.

Jesus obviously knew what was going on here.

And he says, I'm the root and the descendant of David, both the source and the descendant.

These root and shoot titles of Christ, they reinforce the fact that Jesus was no mere human born in the biological lineage of King David.

When we read Matthew chapter 1 and Luke chapter 1, we see these genealogies that go from Abraham through Judah through David all the way to Jesus.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention Luke 1 · chapter mention

It's true that he was of the lineage of David, but he's more than that.

We find Jesus in the Gospel of John chapter 8 poking holes in the weak theology of the Pharisees because they didn't have such a small view of who Messiah was going to be.

John 8 · chapter mention

They thought he was going to be some king like David, some mere human who's going to raise up some kingdom and deliver him from the Romans.

They had a very small view of what Messiah was going to do.

Messiah was going to redeem the cosmos, not just rescue the nation of Israel.

And in John chapter 8, he says of the Pharisees, Your father Abraham, who you put so much stock in, he rejoiced that he would see my day.

John 8 · chapter mention

He saw it and was glad.

And the Jews looked at him and said, You're not even 50 years old.

And have do you have you seen Abraham?

And Jesus says to them, Truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.

Which echoes the I am, that I am statement.

That is the God who never had a beginning, who will never have an end, who is always the eternal present.

Before Abraham was, I am.

And so this text too teaches that before David was, Christ is.

Christ is not simply a human anointed by God's Spirit who came into existence the first century A.D., he is the one of whom the prophet Micah stated when he said, O Bethlehem, city of David, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.

Jesus didn't come into existence when he was incarnated, but rather God Eternal was incarnate in human flesh.

This is a far cry from the Jesus of Hollywood, the Jesus of Harvard Religion Department.

You know, the Jesus who was a mere man who his followers exaggerated his stories to gain political power.

That's one theory.

Jesus, the misunderstood wisdom teacher that taught good morals but was somehow deified later on in the annals of history.

Or Jesus, the political martyr, who kind of angered the wrong people and got himself killed.

Or Jesus, the wild-eyed apocalyptic prophet, whom we shouldn't take very seriously.

No, Christ is the root and the shoot of the lineage of the great king, whose goings forth have been from all eternity.

Now, also of important notice, I think, is the fact that Isaiah does not refer to Messiah as the root of David, but as the root of Jesse.

This is really fascinating to me.

And this is when I was starting to think about this passage, this is one thing that really stood out to me.

Why does he talk about Jesse?

I mean, who even knows about Jesse, David's father?

David was the important one.

Why is he the root and the shoot of Jesse?

I believe the reason is because Isaiah is showing that Christ, in a very real sense, was the truest son of Jesse.

He was the king that was even in an infinite way the king after God's own heart, as was said of David.

He was that unlikely son of Jesse who ended up redeeming and saving his brothers.

Jesus Christ is, as some theologians like to put it, the true and better David.

So it goes back to Jesse.

We have a new David coming on the scenes who will fulfill all the promises God gave to David.

Jesus not only sits on David's throne, he is the inheritor of the throne, Jesus redefines the reign of David.

He elevates it, he fulfills the throne of David, He raises the bar David set.

He is the one to whom David pointed but never could be.

It raises the question well, why use David at all then?

Because David was the greatest king of Israel.

And just as David was the greatest king of Israel, so much more will Christ be the sovereign over all the earth.

He will be the great, ultimate David, the supreme, great Davidic King, the new David who conquers every Goliath the people of God will face.

He's the one who will rule with perfect equity and foresight.

He will be the one who identifies with his people in all their affliction and who has never lost a battle.

That is our Messiah King.

Now allow me to close our passage out with calling your attention once more to verse 10.

I want us to respond with the very hope this text calls us to.

Verse 10 says that Jesus Christ shall stand as a signal for the people.

It actually says peoples, which is nations.

And of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

This is a fascinating terminology for Christ.

He is a signal.

This means that Jesus himself is the sign, is the insignia, is the symbol, the banner, the flag in battle around which we we rally and towards which God is savingly drawing the nations.

As Christ is lifted up, the nations flow to the city of God.

And that's what happens in the gospel of Jesus in John chapter 3, speaking in Nicodemus.

John 3 · chapter mention

He said, The Son of Man is going to be lifted up on a pole.

And then in John chapter 12 later, it says that whenever he's lifted up, he will draw all people to himself.

John 12 · chapter mention

He is the signal, he's the sign, he's the banner to which we draw for salvation.

And so I want us to challenge, to be challenged this morning in our gospel vision, especially in this Advent season, to be fully engaged in our hearts as we think about Jesus.

That we would set our hope on the person and the work of Christ, our Savior.

And there's just three quick ways that I want to leave us with that this text would, I think, require of us.

Number one, that we personally hope in Christ for healing in our lives and world.

That we don't just give lip service to Jesus being the healer, Jesus being the king, the one who actually brings about justice in our lives and in our world, but that we personally, in a way that your spouse can't do for you, in a way that your parents can't do for you, in a way that your pastor can't do for you.

Personally set your hope in Christ for healing in your life, in your world.

Secondly, that we deeply and daily rejoice in this hope.

It's possible for us to have this hope and to give lip service to it, and for it to be somewhere there in our psyche bouncing around, but to not really be enjoying it, to not be drawing literally moment by moment joy and deep, not only satisfaction, but stability from this hope that is ever before us.

So I want to call us to deeply and daily rejoice in this hope.

And thirdly, that we share our joy in this hope.

We should hope in Christ, we should rejoice in that hope, and we should share our joy in this hope with others so that they too may know the salvation that is only in Christ.

And so now as we transition into responding liturgically to this message, I want us to consciously, as we sing, as we pray, as we confess, consciously set our hope with all our might through God's Spirit on our anointed and great and true Davidic King, who entered our broken world according to prophecy, who defeated the curse for us, who triumphed over death, and now is drawing to himself a people from among the nations.

May we as Sacred Mission Church be a part of Messiah's ongoing work in the world, and may we each find, even today, for ourselves the healing He alone provides.