Psalm 44

Well, good morning.

Welcome to City Church, of course, as it is, and welcome to our first uh summer psalm series sermon.

That's a mouthful to say.

But uh we're we're we're excited to get started here and just look into the Psalms a little bit as we do through the whole summer here.

Um the book of Psalms is kind of like an anthology of songs, maybe a box set, we would have called it in my day.

I don't know what it is like now, a uh, you know, a Spotify playlist.

I don't know.

But uh it's it's the songs of of God's people.

It points to all the different experiences sort of um of life there.

And because there's 150 psalms to look at here, we can imagine that there's just a lot of diversity in the set list.

You know, I always I always, as a musician, try to think about, you know, are the are the psalms of praise these kind of soaring rock anthems, you know, are the psalms that are prayers, are they kind of like you know, acoustic ballads?

Uh I think that music allows us to uh express things that maybe we couldn't or wouldn't if we were just using words.

It touches a different part of our soul.

And so even though we don't have the the sheet music to sing along with this with this psalm this morning, um, I think that as it was being written uh and and as all the psalms have been written, I think it just it touches on things uniquely uh in scripture.

So we'll dig into some some stuff here with with regard to life experiences, but first let's let's go to our Lord and pray.

Lord, we thank you for this for this Father's Day, uh, that we get to come together and get into your word.

This psalm that starts off with with what was taught by fathers, by earthly fathers.

Lord, I thank you that uh many of us have good relationships with our with our earthly fathers.

I myself know that uh my father was not is not perfect uh by any stretch, but I know that I've been loved and I've been pointed to you by him, and I'm thankful for that.

Lord, maybe we don't all have that same experience uh as uh as we relate to our fathers, but thank you that in this psalm we can see uh that we have a heavenly father who cares for and provides for us.

I pray that as we as we look into this psalm, Lord, that you would help us to see uh just all that there is to see in it, and that you would use it to stir up our affections for the Lord Jesus, and that we would be driven more deeply into fellowship and communion with him, that our relationship with him would just be um renewed and refreshed on this Father's Day Sunday morning.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, as you heard from this psalm, this is not a soaring rock anthem, this is not a gentle and peaceful um you know acoustic ballad.

This is a psalm of lament.

I I imagine that it is loud and messy musically, that it's dissonant and screeching and just very raw.

If the psalms, as we've said, capture all of the experiences of human life, perhaps it's no surprise that the the largest group of psalms are Psalms of Lament.

It makes us wonder, though, why does the Bible focus on this?

And why should we, here in 2020, on a Sunday morning, dig into a subject that's perhaps a bit grim?

Well, I think there's two main reasons.

Number one, Psalms of Lament, they give us a template, they give us a way to express ourselves when we are going through hard times, when we are suffering.

And it's such a grace, and it points to the wondrous, diverse, uh, multicolored grace of God, that there's not just one Psalm of Lament, not just kind of a one size fits all, and this is how you approach suffering.

No, we have a diversity of psalms.

We have a diversity of psalms that that speaks to a diversity of people who go through a diversity of suffering.

And I think that is such a such a wonderful thing for us to remember that uh that God gives us this grace.

The second function of Psalms, all Psalms, I think, but Psalms of Lament particularly, is that they point to Jesus.

You know, Jesus is the truly innocent sufferer, and he suffers not for his own sins, but for ours.

And as we as we look into the Psalms from this perspective, as we see lament from the from the viewpoint of Jesus, it shows us, yes, the the depths to which our world and our lives are ruined by sin, and it's sad and it's tragic and it's difficult.

But we also get a sense of how far God reached to redeem us as people.

And so we're we're gonna take a look at both of these purposes here this morning.

How does Psalm 44 give us a template for suffering?

Well, there's three main lessons that I that I see in this psalm.

Let's let's look at them each in turn.

But the first one is very simple it's review what's true.

If we look at the first eight verses in this psalm, we can see the psalmist really looking to what he knows to be true of God.

Uh he says, these are things that have been taught to him since his youth.

He sees God has acted again and again on behalf of his people.

Verse 2 says, You with your own hand drove out the nations.

This is looking back to when God's people were uh in Exodus.

You know, they were they were being released from slavery in Egypt and they were coming into the land that God had promised them generations ago.

And it's it's saying that not just good things have happened, but that God himself has been responsible for these things.

Verse 3: not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their arm save them, but your right hand and your arm.

We see the same idea echoed in verse six when he's gone from remembering to praying.

He says, Not by not in my bow do I trust, nor can my sword save me.

It's like he's saying, Lord, you have done big things, and now we're asking you to do big things again.

Things that we can't do for ourselves, things that are too big for us.

You've done them in the past, and we're asking.

We're we're coming before you in dependence.

So this is this is a recalling to mind that God was and God is able to act for his people.

In verse four, there's an ask.

In verse seven, there's a sense that God can.

And in verse eight, there's a response.

He says, In God, we have boasted who God is and what he's done.

I love that this psalm, this messy, discordant psalm with all of the strong words and sorrow, begins here.

How often do we face difficulties in life without stopping to consider how big our God is?

Think about the Garden of Eden, think about Adam and Eve.

They started to focus more on their problem, the fact that they had one tree that they couldn't eat from.

They focused more on that than they did on the God who had created them, who had loved them, who had provided for them.

Sometimes I think we become so focused on our suffering that it even starts to distort our view of God.

We get a bad picture of God because of it.

Now, I don't want to give you the wrong idea.

If we remember who God is and we we have the right view of Him, it's not some kind of a magic wand to just, you know, make our suffering end.

Likewise, on the other side of the coin there, if we are suffering, it's not a sign to us that we're somehow not trusting God or not having a right picture of who He is.

But when we approach suffering in the context of faith, it lets us hold on to what's true.

A real good question to ask ourselves is this Am I letting my experience distort my view of God or am I letting God speak into my experience?

So once again, this first lesson is review what's true.

How can how can we do this?

As people, as modern Christians, how can we do this?

Maybe a better way to look at it is what are ways that get in the way of doing this?

Well, here's a few examples.

You know, if I'm not in the word, if I'm not reading the Bible, if I'm not letting the truths of scripture wash over me on a regular basis, if I'm not in community with other brothers and sisters in Christ, people who will encourage me as I encourage them and will all encourage one another towards this God who loves and cares for us, this God who's in control.

If I'm not in prayer, you know, the Bible teaches that we're to pray even without ceasing.

If I'm not in prayer, if I'm not acknowledging this dependence that I have on God, if I'm not taking those moments, if I'm not doing these things and living out my faith in these ways, it's gonna be really difficult for me to keep my perspective straight, especially in times of great suffering.

Now, I'm not talking about just some kind of legalistic, mechanistic, you know, I'm gonna tick the boxes, yes, I have read my Bible and yes, I have prayed today.

I'm talking about engaging in our faith, living out what we actually believe as followers of Jesus.

But isn't it funny?

And by funny I mean tragic, that we as Christians that know this, that believe this, that hold to these truths, quite often see these practices as the first to go out the window when we start to face suffering.

You know, I find myself sometimes exhausted or stressed or overwhelmed.

And it's really quick to let some of these things just go by the wayside, disengage from prayer, disengage from community, disengage from from being in the word.

How different would my own struggles look?

If when I was when I was exhausted, I thought, gosh, this really needs to drive me to prayer.

If I was stressed and I said, I need to be letting other people know about my stress that they can pray for me and they can encourage me.

And you know, if I said, Yeah, I'm I'm overwhelmed with all that I have to do, goodness, I better make sure that I make time to be in the word.

I think this would be a much better way to approach suffering in our lives.

Um, but sort of well-intentioned but sinful people like us, we tend to try to just barrel through in our own strength and it brings us to ruin.

It messes up our thinking, and it's not a good thing.

So, this lesson here, this first one, uh, it's one that we need to learn and we need to just keep learning.

Review what's true.

The next lesson for us is from the latter part of the song.

We need to examine ourselves before God.

You see this in verses 17 to 21 says, you know, we have not forgotten you, we've not been false to your covenant, our heart is not turned back.

You know, verse 21 says, you know, God knows the secrets of the heart.

So we are examining ourselves.

And why is this important?

There's another psalm, Psalm 32, uh, where we get the idea that the psalmist, the person who was writing that psalm, was suffering greatly simply because he had sin in his life that he was not repenting of, he was not turning from, and he was not confessing to God.

And the imagery from that psalm was stuff like, I'm wasting away.

My strength is dried up, God's hand is heavy on me.

Now, I want to make sure that we're not misunderstanding what this is.

These are these are not the acts of a vengeful, angry God, you know, to inflict punishment and retribution on people.

This is sort of the loving, you know, discipline of a father who cares for and wants good for his children.

In the book of Hebrews, in the New Testament, it says that just in human terms, a father who loves his children will discipline them.

And so, how much more does our heavenly father, who loves us, uh, will he discipline us?

And it's not to not to inflict guilt or shame upon us, it's to help us to know we need to turn, we need to repent.

That's all repentance means.

It's a turning away from, turning away from sin and to God.

In this way, the the lesson that we see here, the second one, is really just an extension of the first one.

Because the first one was let's review what's true.

Okay.

The first one is let's review what's true.

And then this one is examine my life before God.

So I'm just taking what is true, and now I'm putting that lens before my own life, my own actions.

And the question here is not, do I feel good about myself?

Do I feel right about how I'm acting and thinking and my behavior and my attitudes?

The question is, how does it line up with scripture?

So the psalmist doesn't say, in all of this, oh Lord, we feel completely right and justified.

No, he's he goes to very specific things from God's word.

Verse 17, honoring God's commitment.

Verse 18, um, having a heart that's devoted to God, verse 20, not worshiping idols.

So all of these things are very specific uh line items from scripture.

And he's not even looking at it and saying, okay, I'm ticking this box and I'm ticking this box, and all is good.

But he's saying, even beyond that, God knows the secrets of the heart.

So the standards that he is applying as he is examining his own life are not just subjective, looking at it from his own perspective.

These are our standards that he sees from God himself.

So we can come before the Lord, we can examine our thinking, our actions, our words, our attitudes.

We can do all this as we pray and invite him to show us where we're where we're missing it, where we need to change, where we need to repent, where we need to come back to him in faith.

And this is a restoring of the fellowship.

It's not it's not affecting the fundamental relationship.

As believers, we believe we are secure in Christ.

But this is taking that union and also bringing communion into it.

Uh, this is fellowship, this is relating together.

So we can do all of these things, and God may reveal areas where we need to where we need to change it up, where we need to come back to Him and let Him work in us.

But sometimes, and this Psalm is an example of that, we may search our hearts and let God look into us and not find that there's any particular sin that we're being convicted of here, that our suffering is quite independent from that.

What then?

How can we reconcile trials and tribulations when we can't see a purpose?

How can we affirm the goodness of God when even his own people face trial and tribulation?

Scripture talks a lot about suffering, and we might say that there's good news and bad news.

If you want to call it this, bad news is that suffering is universal.

We will all face it.

Um, some of this is a result of living in a broken world.

You know, some of this is we suffer at the hands of other people who make bad choices, who sin, who are wicked.

Some of it is just we are frail creatures and life is hard.

So there is a lot of suffering and it is a universal experience.

So if you want to call that the bad news, okay, that's the bad news.

Well, what's the good news of scripture as it speaks into suffering?

If we look just in the book of 1 Peter, just one book in the Bible talks a lot about suffering.

My favorite book, not because I'm I'm into suffering, but because it just gives us such a hope and such a context to deal with and live out suffering.

If we just look in that one book, it says suffering is temporary, suffering purifies our faith, suffering glorifies Jesus, suffering follows his example, suffering fulfills God's purposes for us.

Suffering for righteousness results in our being blessed.

And in chapter four, it says suffering should not come as a surprise to us, it's just part of life.

We could we could easily do an entire session just talking about faith and suffering.

And wait, Mark actually did that on Tuesday.

So if you want to dig deeper into this idea of faith and suffering and you want to see more of what the Bible has to say about it, um, go on the Facebook page, the City Church Facebook page, and find the video from Tuesday night.

Uh, it's a whole session and highly recommended.

But coming back to our psalm here, there's something very particular about this suffering that gives us a little bit of insight.

The first words in verse 22, it says, Yet for your sake, yet for your sake we're being killed all the day long.

The people of God are crying out to God because they are suffering for being the people of God.

Make no mistake, we live in a world that is fundamentally opposed to the rule of God.

And as they reject God's rule, we can expect that some of that rejection will also fall on God's people.

I mean, probably the most obvious choice for us in in today's world, we can think of the persecuted church, places in the world where, you know, just living as a Christian can cost you the loss of relationships, can cost you the loss of livelihood, the loss of freedom, even the loss of life.

And these are people who are just living to what God has called them to.

And so this is this is very much along the same lines of this of this psalm here.

We can even see it in the more tolerant West.

We're not going to be put to death for our faith.

But even here in Ireland, we find that as we live the Christian life, as we speak Christian truth, as we identify ourselves as followers of Jesus, we can find hostility and uh opposition from the people around us.

I think this is what the people uh in this psalm are faced with.

So I just got done saying we can suffer because of our sin.

We can suffer because we're doing it wrong and God wants to bring us back in.

Now I'm saying that we can also suffer if we're doing everything right.

This sounds like kind of a no-win situation, doesn't it?

Either way, we suffer.

How is that fair?

Well, the good news that I was just talking about from 1 Peter, and certainly those other parts of the Bible that contextualize suffering and share some very good truths about it, all of that is still true.

Our suffering is not meaningless, our suffering is not pointless.

Uh, we we can we can cling to that.

But there's two truths uh that I think we can really hold on to as we face suffering in difficult times.

First off, right here, right now, God is with his people.

The series we just finished in Revelation saw churches that were coming increasingly under pressure, and we saw very clearly that the Lord Jesus was right in their midst, that he was with them as they suffered.

Right?

We have God's very presence to comfort and encourage and assure us.

We're not abandoned.

I gotta say, the recent years, recent weeks, recent weeks in the Lynn household have been difficult.

There's been a lot of challenges going on and a lot of suffering in our own family and our own lives.

And I can testify firsthand to the fact that this comfort is a real thing.

We have experienced God's comfort as we have gone to him and poured out our hearts in prayer.

We have experienced God's comfort as we have searched the scriptures and found verses that speak to us right in our right in.

Our situation, and we have experienced God's comfort through his people reaching out with encouragement.

I just want to say thank you to people who have just given us encouragement and prayed for us and prayed with us.

Um, these encouragements, these truths are very, very real to us, and so there I just wanted to affirm that with you.

The second truth that we have is that we look ahead to a world where suffering is not the norm, where we're not going to be caught in the cycle of tribulation.

God's justice will reign, people will be preserved.

So we really have comfort both now and in the future as we look at all sorts of suffering.

Now for the third lesson.

We've reviewed what's true, we've examined ourselves before God, and now I think the third lesson is we pray without holding back.

Look at some of the things that the psalmist is saying in here.

He's telling God, you've rejected and disgraced us.

That's verse 9.

Verse 11 says, You've made us like sheep for the slaughter.

Verse 12 says, You have sold your people for a trifle.

Verse 13 says, You've made us the taunt of our neighbors.

Verse 14 says, You've made us a laughing stock.

We see he is questioning God, he is accusing God, he's pointing to external realities like having to turn back from foes.

He's pointing to internal realities like shame and disgrace.

All of this is very real, all of this is very raw.

And reading it, some of us might look at this and say, This is not how you come to God.

This is not how you approach the Almighty.

This is just wrong.

Imagine if, you know, Sarah prayed this morning.

Imagine if Sarah had prayed something like this: God, you have you've sold us for a trifle, you've made us the taunt of our neighbors.

How would we as a church respond to this?

Would we just have shock and horror?

And yet, these words are here inspired in God's word, the word that He has given us to live our lives with.

And I don't see any way to understand that, other than the fact that God wants us to come to Him first.

He doesn't want us to get our thinking and all of our doctrinal points sorted out and muster up everything within us and then come before him.

Imagine if you were in a horrible accident and you're broken, bleeding, and you got to go to AE.

But instead of going in the front door of AE and crying out for help, you're like, okay, let me get my let me wash my face here, let me uh put on a clean shirt, let me kind of wipe this up and clean this up.

Let me, you know, come up with the right ways to explain that, yes, this looks bad, but you know, I'm I'm looking ahead to being healed, and I'll be back to normal before you know it, and we'll get through this, and and all of this stuff is is is present on my mind, and I see it perfectly well at all times.

No, you're not gonna do that.

You're gonna you're gonna burst in the door, you're gonna be screaming or crying, or whatever you need to do, you're gonna be messy, you're gonna be in whatever state you are, you're gonna go there because that's what you need to get help.

And I think God is saying the same thing here.

Come to me, right?

I think it is very normal, very natural for us to experience and feel pain when we're in pain.

God meets us right at the very point of our need.

This psalm doesn't show us an example of kind of sanitizing our thinking, of you know, cutting off our suffering, placing it under a microscope that we may learn and understand from it.

The human experience is not lived out under laboratory conditions.

Hashtag thanks for watching, Jimmy Morgan.

But we have this father who loves us and he calls us to himself.

We need to be pouring out.

The Bible has this idea of pouring out our hearts before God, you know, and that's that's a very different idea than okay, here's my heart, and and you know, I've got this this little bit here that I'm gonna I'm gonna share with you, God, and I've got, you know, this, not not that one, this one that'll no, this is I've got my heart and it is a mess and it is a wreck.

I'm just gonna take and dump the whole thing out before you, Lord, because this is the experience I'm going through.

This is how I'm feeling, and that's what we're meant to do.

You see this idea all through scripture, but I loved this.

I ran across this in Romans chapter five, the same idea in reverse.

It says, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us.

So we pour out our pain and our brokenness and our emptiness before God.

And what does he pour out?

He pours out his love through the Holy Spirit.

So, friends, may I encourage us to pour out your heart before God.

Tell him all that you're going through, let him see your experience.

Don't feel like you got to sanitize it, clean it up, and make it pretty.

That's our third lesson.

Pray and don't hold back.

Now, before we get on to where this psalm points us to Jesus, um, I want us to see something from the very last verse.

Take a look at verse 26, the last line there.

It says, Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.

We might miss this with all of that's come before, but I think the psalmist is taking us right back to where we started.

We have reviewed what's true, we've examined ourselves before God, we have prayed and not held back.

And now, here at the very end, we're back to reviewing what's true.

God's love is steadfast.

God's love is unchanging.

God's love is not affected by our circumstance, it is always there.

This idea of steadfast love is all over the Old Testament.

In fact, by my calculation, is about seven years from now in the summer psalm series, we'll hit Psalm 136.

Psalm 136 has this same Hebrew word for steadfast love in every single verse.

So, yeah, stay tuned for that.

But when we get back to what is true, we see that God's love is not undone by suffering.

Suffering just means that we're waiting to see how that steadfast love will play out.

Let me say that again.

Suffering just means that we're waiting to see how God's steadfast love will play out.

We wait in hope.

And that hope is a certainty because of God's unchanging character and his ongoing work in our lives.

So now we've seen some ways that this psalm speaks into how we suffer, but I want to show just briefly a few ways that points us to the Lord Jesus.

So, first and most obviously, this psalm points to suffering.

And it even points to suffering that is undeserved to sufferers who are innocent in the matter.

Now, I don't think the psalmist is trying to claim perfection.

I don't think the psalmist is trying to say that you know everybody that is included in the we of this psalm has never in their lives sinned.

That's not it.

They're just saying it's, you know, this is suffering that's not directly tied to something that we're doing wrong.

Jesus, on the other hand, is the truly innocent sufferer.

All these ideas of suffering for the sake of righteousness, suffering when you've not done anything wrong, these are all perfectly completed and fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

This is an important distinction for us to make because Jesus is our pattern, our example, right, the way that we're meant to live our lives.

So if if his greatest act in his earthly ministry was to submit to unjust suffering, we we have a sense of perhaps what our lives will hold.

But just like Jesus, we can suffer in hope, knowing that we can entrust ourselves to the God and Father who cares for and provides for us, just like Jesus did on the cross.

So we see this, see Jesus in here as the human sufferer.

We can also map him onto the place of God, the person that the psalmist is crying out to in this psalm.

Verse 23, it says, Awake, why are you sleeping, O Lord?

This reminds me of the story in the Gospels where Jesus and his disciples are going across the sea and they get caught up in this big storm, and the disciples are freaking out and they're panicking, as you would.

And Jesus is asleep in the stern of the of the boat, and they come and they wake him up and they say, You know, do you not care that we're perishing?

So, in the same way that the psalmist is speaking out of his distress, they were speaking out of their distress.

They were not sanitizing, they were going to Jesus, but they took their distress to the right place.

Jesus quickly rose up, quickly calmed the storm miraculously.

He was not unaware of their need, he was not unconcerned with their plight.

His example as Lord in that reinforces the idea that hard times are an act of waiting to see how our Lord's steadfast love will play out.

So Jesus is the truly sinless sufferer, Jesus is God Almighty.

And there's one other connection I want us to see here before we close out.

Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

It's in the New Testament.

The Apostle Paul is writing it, and he directly quotes verse 22.

Verse 22 says, Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long.

We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

Paul quotes this, but he quotes it in the middle of a big long section about our hope and our assurance in the Lord Jesus.

All by itself, it doesn't sound any more hopeful than where it does in this in this psalm.

But the context of the New Testament, Paul has the benefit, just like we do, of being able to look back to the cross of the Lord Jesus.

At the cross, Jesus gives an answer to the questions posed in Psalm 44.

God does hear, God does see.

God is not sleeping, and the brokenness of the world does not stand a chance against the love of God expressed in Christ.

If I may, and there's no one here to tell me I can't.

This is Romans chapter 8, and we're gonna start with verse 35.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Just listen to how this how this plays out.

It says, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword, as it is written, for your sake we are being killed all the day long.

We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

So you can see here, before I go on, you can see Paul is pointing to this, and he's not saying, Yeah, there's not really trouble.

No, he's saying, Yeah, there is trouble, there is peril, there is danger, there is all of this bad stuff in this world.

But he goes on and he says, No, in all of these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Such an encouragement there from the New Testament helps us to contextualize it.

Now, maybe, maybe you don't know this Jesus.

Maybe the idea of a worldview that takes so much time with suffering just sounds like a downer, not something you want to engage with.

Maybe you don't see how this psalm could possibly encourage us in difficult times.

To you, I would say we all suffer.

It is a universal part of the human experience.

The Bible says that this goes back to the problem of sin in our broken world.

But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus came to this broken world to rescue and redeem, that Jesus has defeated sin, and that Jesus came to usher in a new world and new life.

So there is hope there.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples, In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart.

I have overcome the world.

In Christ we have hope for this world and the one to come.

And to the church, those of us gathered here for the live stream, maybe some of you are in small groups and homes by now, for those around the world, for those uh in other places gathering on a Sunday morning, let's be encouraged together.

Let's point one another to God's steadfast love as we do life together.

A church where people engage in community for the purposes of the gospel.

This is where this kind of thing happens.

I know, lockdown, quarantine, it's been hard on all of us.

We have struggled to make it to Zoom calls and prayer meetings and community groups and live streams.

There's been a lot of difficulty in that.

We have lamented how it's different and how it's not comfortable and we don't like it.

We have suffered separately in our own homes, and you know, when we meet together virtually.

But may I encourage us all, even in this time of isolation, even in all of all that's going on, let us all commit to being in community with one another.

We're not called to this Christian life by ourselves.

We are a family, a family of broken people, absolutely, but a family united under the headship of the Lord Jesus, a family that should be encouraging and pointing the way back to him in the midst of all of our suffering.

May we spur one another on in hope.

Let's pray.

Our Lord God, we thank you that you've given us your word and that we have hope in our suffering.

Thank you that in Christ we are more than conquerors.

We are not simply uh wandering through this world and facing meaningless catastrophe and calamity.

Thank you that in Christ all things are brought together and redeemed and used for for your glory and for our growth.

Lord, may we commit to these three lessons that we see in this psalm.

May we uh review what is true in all the circumstances of our lives, may we examine ourselves before you and see where we need to learn, where we need to grow, where we need to change.

And may we pray to you without holding back.

Lord, in all of this, may we see that we have the victory in Christ both now and in the world to come.

That we wait and hope for your steadfast love.

Thank you, Lord.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.