The Ache: Part 6 - The Ache For Suffering

Welcome to the River City Church podcast and a message by our

lead pastor, Jason Powers. Our prayer is that this message

would inspire and encourage you, build your faith and point you

to the life changing love of Jesus.

May you enjoy the goodness of God as you follow Him today.

Hi everybody. I want to begin with our

confession. Our confession each week just

brings us back to good news. It gives us the grace that we

need to not be anything other than what we are.

We come to the cross not because we're good, but because he's

good. And so our confession is we're

badly broken. Yes, you are grace and peace to

you. I'm excited.

Today we begin our summer series and we're going to look at the

life of King David and the hope is that through the life of King

David, we're going to see the God that he loved and the God

that loved him. Now just kind of to set some

expectations for this series. It's not going to be a

chronological look, right? We're going to we're going to

look at vignettes, right? We're going to look at scenes

from the life of David. They won't necessarily come in

order. In fact, they may come wildly

out of order and that's OK because the focus, our desire is

to see the father through that. Another aspect of our teaching

team, if you're here you've come relatively recently is during

our summer series. Our teaching team presents that

we have been gifted at River City to have an abundance of of

talented teachers. And so I want you to know that

each of the the well, couple things, the reason we do that is

there's a couple reasons. Number one, it's an opportunity

for me to get away. Teaching is a lot, right?

The content creation every week to come with something every

week. It just it I'm tired, right?

It makes my brain is kind of like like ooze and like mush and

it kind of wants to drip out of my ears, right?

It gives me an opportunity to rest, gives me an opportunity to

pray. God, what's going on?

What are you doing around River City?

What's coming next for us? The other part of it is

important for you see, my job as a pastor is to make sure that

you know, and that we know that God speaks even when I don't,

right? That God's voice doesn't just

come through my lips. And I know that.

We all know that. I know that, you know that.

But I also know that in the churches that I grew up in, when

there was a guest speaker, that was a free Sunday.

And I want to encourage you that that's not the case.

The speakers that you're going to hear have been vetted.

We've talked to them, we've prepared together.

I know the things that they're going to be talking about.

I know enough to know that these speakers, the way that they

handle the Scripture is powerful and it's good.

I know that the way that they communicate the Scripture is

good and it's important, and I want you to listen.

They're going to have different perspectives.

They're going to have to take the different takes.

They're going to see things in the Scripture that I don't.

And you need to hear that as well because our eyes are on

Jesus, Jesus. Jesus is the one that saves us.

Jesus is the one that has truth for us.

And so I am excited for us to hear what they have.

And so my hope and my prayer for you is that you'll show up each

week, first of all, because it's incredibly vulnerable for these

speakers that are going to be coming.

They've been preparing for a long time.

They've worked hard on these. And when you come and show up

and look back at them to receive, it's, it's encouraging

for them. So my hope is that you'll show

up, and my hope is that you'll show up expectant.

I hope that you won't see this as the B team, but this is the

team that the Lord has put together.

And I would put our our, our teaching team up against a lot

of other pastors and teachers that I've sat under in my life.

They're good, they're gifted, and they're talented and I see

them as a great resource for River City.

So I'm excited about what is what is to come.

And so I hope you'll show up too.

And we're going to be talking about David and we're going to

start today in Second Samuel, chapter 12.

2 Samuel 12 · chapter mention

So if your Bible or your phone or your iPad or wherever you get

the Scriptures, you'll turn there.

And I want to acknowledge something from the outset before

we jump into this. I want to just kind of set a

little bit of a tone. Today's story, the account that

we find in the life of David, is emotionally tender, and it may

call up some things in you that may be difficult, some things

that maybe are are hard to process.

And especially the theological weight of what we're going to

talk about today may be disorienting for some of you,

especially if you grew up in a tradition.

And maybe it wasn't intentional, maybe it was subconscious, maybe

it was unintentional and well meaning.

But if you grew up in a theological tradition that liked

to kind of wrap every story up in a nice neat theological bow,

today may be difficult for you. If your exposure to stories in

the Scripture was that they all in kind of in like this kind of

like a moralistic Sunday school way that now we see this and

Jesus did this, so everything's going to be OK today may be

difficult. We're going to begin the story

with may be an uncomfortable declaration of God's

sovereignty. And so we want to declare from

the outset is God is sovereign, he reigns and he rules over

creation. From that sovereignty we journey

into a very real experience, a very real human experience of

grief and pain and lost. And it's not easy.

But what I want to say from the outset, here's what I want to

give you. The end of the story points us

to something that is true. And because it is true, because

it's not circumstantially easy, but because it is true, it's

filled with hope. It's not an easy hope.

It's not hope with a nice neat bow on it.

But if you're grieving, it's hope that's not rooted in just a

circumstance that everything's going to be nice and mean and

it's going to be OK. And especially also if you're

here today and you're like, I'm not grieving at all.

I'm happy. This was the best week of my

life. I'm so happy for you like that.

Seriously, that makes me it gives me joy.

And where you at? But I also want to acknowledge

the reality that life has both celebration and sorrow.

It has joy and it has pain. And God is present in both, and

He is not only present in both. He is sovereign over both and He

is faithful in both. OK, so we begin on the road to

trust as we come to Second Samuel chapter 12.

2 Samuel 12 · chapter mention

The chapter begins with the prophet Nathan going to King

David and telling him a parable about a guy who had sheep.

And it's kind of weird. The context is David has just

committed what may be the defining sin of his life with

Bathsheba, but it didn't stop with Bathsheba.

He not only committed violence and adultery with Bathsheba, but

he followed that up by hunting down her husband and making sure

that he was killed so that he could get his way.

And the prophet Nathan confronts him with that.

So that's the backdrop. David has committed a sin.

His life has been marked by this.

It's part now of his story. And so when we come to second

2 Samuel 12 · chapter mention

Samuel chapter 12, starting in verse 15, we read this.

The Lord struck the baby that Uriah's wife had born to David

and he became deathly. I'll oof.

So as we sit with the weight of this, as we sit with kind of the

theological weight, I want to hold up two things.

The first kind of aspect of this theological weight is this story

is wrapped and surrounded by sin.

David's sin had consequence. As much as we don't like the

idea of this baby, of this child being born sickly and ill and

deathly ill, we recognize that the story of this child's life

is wrapped in sin. David's sin was the catalyzing

factor of this. And so the reality that we have

to contend with and this theological weight is sin has an

impact. And it's not always only on the

one who sins. The weight of sin leaks.

If you've ever told a lie, you know, and you've ever been

discovered and found out, you know how the weight of that lie

gets out. It gets all over other people

and it causes pain and it causes harm.

Sin matters it there's no such thing as a private sin.

And I don't say that to judge you.

I say that so that I, because I hope that this gives you the

reality to just know. We know this instinctively in

our bones. That's why we hide it.

That's why we try to keep it to ourselves.

That's why it comes with pain and that's why it comes with

shame. And so I want to say like we

begin every week with this idea that we say it out loud.

We are badly broken, and we're not just talking about the

brokenness that come. Sometimes we're broken by the

way of other people's sin, but sometimes, often and often in a

way that's that correlates, the brokenness is our own.

And what I want to say is if you're here under the weight of

sin, whether it's yours or someone else, this is the place

to be. And this is the message that we

need to hear. The second theological weight,

and this was maybe heavier, this is maybe more difficult to

wrestle with and to understand is that God is sovereign even

over suffering, even over the suffering of what we would

consider the innocent God. It's listen, I want you to know,

I want to explain this away. I want to find a way to make it

not say what it just says right there.

I want to to justify this. I want and here's what I'm

trying to do right. I'm trying to make God look like

the good guy. I'm trying to make sure that you

don't pick up an offence against God.

I'm trying to make sure that you don't say God.

How could you? But on the other hand, I'm also

trying to do that for myself. I'm also trying to look at the

things that have happened in my life that I don't understand,

that don't seem to make sense, that were handed me and I go,

Lord, I didn't ask for that. That's not what I wanted.

That's not where I came came from.

But what I've got to point out and what I've got to hold up is

there's no explanation given. It's just stated as a fact.

This baby's affliction, God saw it.

God could have reigned over it. God could have taken it away and

he chose not to. And So what I have to resist,

and I want to encourage you to resist, is don't try to offer an

explanation where none is given. See, when we start to do that,

we move from kind of being submitted to the scriptures,

submitted to God's plan, to being pretty presumptuous about

our ability to to be over that. We ask the question why and why

is is a fair question, but the question of why is often so

heavy that we want to answer. And let me just let me just say

I had to do a funeral for a friend that I loved this week.

And the question why always hangs over those those things,

right? But here's the thing about the

question why even if I knew in a cosmic sense why something

happened, even if I knew in a cosmic sense why my friend died,

I would still want my friend back.

Why would still the answer to why is often unsatisfying and

that's OK. And the bigger problem is when

we start to answer questions why God does something that God

doesn't answer, we get into start, we start getting into

heresy and and the reason that things are so often difficult is

because someone well meaning, well-intentioned and a desire to

deliver us from discomfort. Somebody started to say things

about God that God never said about himself.

And so then we begin to build a theology that's not built on the

character of God. And So what I want to say is, as

difficult as it may be to contend with a God who sits over

pain, the way this story resolves gives us hope.

And it's not necessarily the hope that we think we want in

this moment. It's not the the the relief that

we think that we need in this moment.

What I want to say is it's better when we sit with the pain

and when we sit with the grief and when we sit in the tension

and the discomfort and we don't unnecessarily or unnaturally or

in an untimely way when we don't resolve it.

What we get to is the real hope that the Father offers in this

story. We don't see why God does what

He does. And so we're not going to try to

talk about that. What we do see is David's

response when God does something that we don't understand.

And So what we're going to do is focus on that.

Remember over the last couple weeks we've talked about when we

find in Scripture, when we see Jesus or the Father, things in

US want to tend to identify with that and say, don't do that.

I like, I'm not, I'm not Jesus and you're not Jesus.

But we can, by identifying with the people in the story, by the

people in the Scriptures, we can see God more clearly.

And we can't find, you know, an example that we can follow.

So we look at David that way. We move now to verse 16.

The Lord struck the baby in verse 16.

David pleaded with God for the boy.

He fasted, he went home, and he spent the night lying on the

ground. The elders of his house stood

behind him for him to get up. They tried to pick him up off

the ground, but he was unwilling and he would not eat anything

with this. This is spiritual desperation.

We read about fasting and it's like, Oh yeah, we did Lent a

couple a little while back. This is like Lent.

This is not a spiritual discipline.

This isn't like David going, oh, maybe I can manipulate God's

hand. This is utter emptiness.

This is laying on the floor. Have you ever laid in bed and

you just can't get out from under the covers?

Have you ever been too desperate to eat?

You're fasting and it's not like in a nice, neat, spiritually

open way, like, oh, look, look at how spiritual I am.

It is absolute emptiness. David on the ground, weeping,

begging, God, take this away from me, thought this can't be

real. So much so.

And the people around him are uncomfortable.

Like David, this is too much. You got to get up.

You can't do it. And he won't be comforted.

He won't be consoled. Can you identify with that?

Have you ever been so broken you're just not sure that you're

ever going to be able to breathe again?

You're not sure you're ever going to be able to get out of

the house. But David's wailing isn't

without hope. David is pleading to God.

He believes that the God that he serves is able to move in this

situation. He believes that the God that he

loves is able to intervene. He's laying there.

He doesn't probably have words for it.

It's grown. Romans talks about the Holy

Spirit interceding on our behalf with groans that words can't

express. He didn't feel like he was being

theologically neat, right? Remember when we talked about

Jacob several weeks ago, wrestling in the night with God,

Jacob didn't feel like having he was having a, a neat spiritual

experience. He felt like his life was about

to come to an end. But that's the place where he

met God. That's the place where he, I, he

realized who he was, who his identity was, who God was in

him. And so one of the things that's

difficult but important, and I think often it it it was too

often absent in my theological upbringing, is a theology of

suffering, a well developed, well defined ability to

articulate when our lives are broken, where is God?

And what does it look like to say that God is sovereign over

our pain and over our suffering? And the reason that we have to

contend with this is so that when the suffering comes, when

the pain hurts, when that thing that threatens to crush us comes

so that we're not crushed, so that the inevitable pain in this

life doesn't destroy us, so that we don't get disoriented, so

that we have a stage and A and a foundation to stand on because

it's coming. And the good news again is that

God is in it, that he hasn't abandoned us into that.

And So what we see in the beginning, in the midst of this

story, is that David clings to the hope of God's nearest

nearness, aching for grace in the darkness.

This is what it is. He, he aches, he hungers, he

desires God. Where are you?

God, Can I, can you find me in this?

What I want to say is that ache is part of the human experience.

The pain that we feel lost to varying degrees at varying

times. That's what it seems like.

That's what we feel. And when God gets involved, it

doesn't always look like we want it to and it doesn't always look

like we expect it to. Verse 18 on the 7th day.

So you got to imagine David laying on the ground for seven

days. On the 7th day, the baby died.

OK, so this is important, David praying for grace, for the grace

for salvation of an innocent life.

And God said no, God didn't do what he wanted to.

But David's servants were afraid to tell him the baby was dead.

They said, look, while the baby's alive, we spoke to him

and he wouldn't even listen to us.

So how can we tell him the baby is dead?

He may do something desperate now.

When David saw his servants were whispering to each other, he

guessed that the baby was dead. Have you ever been that you in a

room and your friends because they love you, they're just,

they know the news. They know what it is, and they

want to protect you from it. They want to save you from it.

And so they're kind of whispering and they're kind of

hovering around. But you know, when he saw that

his servants were whispering to each other, he guessed that the

baby was dead. So he asked his servants, is the

baby dead? He is dead, they replied.

Now look at David's response. David got up from the ground, he

washed, he anointed himself, and he changed his clothes.

So David pleads with God. He pleads for grace until God

says no. And I think the problem is, at

this point we feel like Grace has stopped.

We feel like when God says no to us that He said no to the grace

that we want. The problem is we have too

narrowly defined what grace means.

We have defined grace as an escape or a deliverance from

consequence. We have to find grace.

We have imagined grace in our head is getting rid of or out of

or circumventing the pain that we spend our whole lives trying

to avoid, trying to get away. If God would give us grace, then

we wouldn't hurt anymore. Then we wouldn't have pain.

But what we've seen over the last several weeks is often

times grace looks like a presence through suffering.

Jesus didn't abandoned Peter after his failure.

He met him on the beach and called him back.

He didn't. God didn't, or Jesus didn't get

Paul. Jesus's grace from the apostle

Paul was his grace is sufficient for the thorn.

The thorn remains and grace is sufficient.

And all David does is get up and change his clothes and wash his

hair and brush his teeth. There's no sign here that David

is denying the impact of what's happened.

David doesn't now begin skipping, going, OK, well,

everything's fine, I'm fine. You're fine.

Clearly God says no, that's OK. Let's go hop around like this.

David is still grieved. He is still struck.

He is still struck. But what he does is, are you

listening? He just gets up off the floor.

Sometimes simply getting up is all the faith that we can

muster, and that is enough. Sometimes the only strength that

you have is to move from the place of intercession to begin

processing loss. Honestly, faith begins by

getting up, but it doesn't stay there.

OK, we have faith. David believed that God could,

and now he believes that God didn't.

And the second part of this is where, again, it becomes grace

and it becomes faith. He got up, He changed his

clothes, he went to the Lord's house and worshipped.

And I want to stop right there. When we were, he went to the

Lord's house and worshipped what we kind of maybe imagine is he

went and sat in the Rose and and sang some songs.

And he may be saying, you know, our God is an awesome God.

Nope. David went to the temple.

He left his house. He went to the temple where the

presence of God was, and he submitted A sacrifice to the

priests for the forgiveness of his sin, for his faith.

It took him getting up and going to the place where he knew God

was in the Holy of Holies, and he offered a sacrifice.

It was costly for him. In that moment.

He worshipped, and then he went home and he requested something

to eat. So they served him food and he

ate. He hadn't forgotten his son.

He had simply began to process life different.

I don't imagine he asked about the sports scores.

I don't believe. I don't suspect he was all that

caught up or interested in the local gossip of the day.

But he knew that life was going on.

He knew that life was continuing.

And from that moment, he probably didn't eat another meal

where he didn't have that as part of him.

See, the grief and the pain that we suffer, it leaves us a scar.

Jacob limped for the rest of his life.

Peter, I don't imagine ever forgot.

When he abandoned the Lord by his fire.

We see it. We see traces of it in the

letters that he wrote. David was forever different, but

he was able to move forward. His servants asked him, why have

you done this? While the baby was alive, you

fasted and you wept. But when he died, you got up and

ate food. What's going on, David?

I don't. I don't understand.

Why are you not grieving anymore?

And listen to David's response while the baby was alive.

I fasted and wept because I thought, who knows, Lord may be

gracious to me and let him live. But now that, listen to hope,

are you listening? Now that he is dead, why should

I fast? Can I bring him back?

Listen, I'll go to him, but he will never return to me.

David didn't have a theology of the Astor afterlife like Jesus

taught and like Paul extrapolated.

And he didn't have the Revelation.

And in Revelation chapter 21, he didn't see the throne of of

Revelation 21 · chapter mention

gold. But David had a sense that the

God whom he loved is a God of life.

He's a God who creates and sustains life.

So in a way that he probably didn't even understand, he

believed that God was going to restore this child to him.

And where he found that is in worship and got up and he went

and he offered a sacrifice that he probably didn't feel like.

There's probably no sense in David's life where he said, you

know what I want to do? I want to go be around a bunch

of people in the temple. I want to go stand before the

priest who now that you know, the prophet Nathan, he knows all

about my sin. Everybody knows Bathsheba,

everybody knows Uriah, everybody probably knows about it.

David probably wasn't looking real forward to go and be seen.

But what he did was he chose in the context of his grief to go

and worship. And that's what worship is.

It is a sacrifice in the shadow of grief to stand before a God

who is good, to be reverent, to be, to honor to God in the midst

of the good, to be reverent to the pain.

David doesn't minimize it. Go now, I'm all done hurting.

He just chooses to believe that God is present in the middle of

it. David didn't shut down.

David didn't stay on the floor for the rest of his life because

his loss was so great. And listen, I want to speak so

tenderly to some of you who may be in that place right now.

What David did not do was make an idol of his pain.

He did not. He chose, let me say that

differently, He chose not to make his wound the defining

trait of his life. He probably always walked with a

limp heart of Nathan's proclamation of judgement on

David's sin was that the sword would never leave his leave his

house. David was not a great father.

We see the marks of his sin and his pain and he walked in and he

walked under it. But you know, the very next

verse that we read, look very next verse when we come to verse

24 says this. After all of this, David

comforted his wife Bathsheba. He went to her and slept with

her, and she gave birth to a son and named him Solomon.

And the Lord loved him. And Solomon would go on to be

the next king of Israel. He would go on to be the wisest

man in history, to have a wealth and preside over a Kingdom that

people came from around the world to marvel AT and to wonder

at. David never forgot that child.

He never walked out from under that pain and that grief and

that wound. But he did live again, and he

did experience God's favor and his God see that What he found

out, what he knew is that his God is a giver.

Even when he seems like he's taking away, he's a giver, and

he's a giver in your life. And that's what grace is.

That's what a theology of grace tells us.

Grace isn't an escape from grief, but a close companion

through it. Grace is a God who sits by our

side as we weep. Grace is a God who sees and

knows the pain of his people. That's the crazy thing about

this story. This story reveals something

that's essential for us if we're going to walk through and know

what it means to walk with God through some.

See, if we ignore a theology of suffering, then our entire

theology comes down to who's the strongest, who's the best, who's

going to win, who's most likely to deliver me from pain and hurt

and wounds. And that's not the God that we

find. We find a God who says in this

life you'll have trouble is what Jesus said, but take heart

because I've overcome the trouble.

I'm with you through it. It doesn't mean the trouble

doesn't come. It means the trouble doesn't get

the last word. And faith is how we find God

when he doesn't rescue us. And grace is standing in that

place to worship him. And we need both.

We began our time this morning by taking communion together and

David's story. David's time on the floor leads

us to the communion elements. In David we find a father who

grieved over the loss of his son.

In communion, we find that David isn't the only father who knows

what it's like to lose a beloved child.

We see that our God knows that pain and that loss.

When you grieve loss, you grieve in the presence of a Father who

understands, who knows who has been there.

When we take the communion elements, when Jesus spoke of

his body broken, Jesus spoke of His body being broken for you.

Jesus knew that God's answer in the Garden of Gethsemane was

going to be no. Jesus knows what it is to have

His pleading for reprieve from pain and suffering rejected.

And Jesus knows what it is to sacrifice in worship, to give

his life for a pain they didn't want.

He didn't like that. He didn't understand.

But in those elements, in that story of a Father who knows and

of a Savior who enters in and walks through and those

elements, we receive grace. We see that the suffering of

loss leads to the redemption of resurrection in the elements and

in the life of Jesus. We see that pain is going to

come, but we see what it means to overcome the world.

We taste resurrection in the aftermath of ruin and pain and

sin and destruction, when we take those elements, when we

enter into the pain and when we wait there and we don't try to

escape it and run around it. What we declare is our

declaration is that death doesn't define us, that the pain

and the wilderness that we're in right now, that this wrestling

season that we're in right now, that this grief and the sorrow

and it doesn't undo us. But it doesn't get the last

word. Grace gets the last word, and

you may not be there yet. Maybe all you're doing is laying

on the floor weeping. If that's where you are, that's

OK. That's the place where you can

meet the Lord. But I want to hold out that

maybe, maybe it's not time for your grief to end, but maybe

it's time to begin getting up, not to have final closure and

never think again. But maybe it's time to begin

imagining what life may look like with a limp for you, what

grace may mean in the light of unimaginable loss.

Maybe it means cleaning up. And maybe it looks like

beginning to worship, to stand before God and declare that he

is good even when my experience hasn't been.

Maybe it means to declare a trust in his sovereignty,

because if he's sovereign, I'm not.

And that's good news because I'm really bad at controlling the

world. I'm really bad at making the

sunrise. My wholeness, my whatever

wholeness is in my soul. It begins with the declaration,

you know, It begins by declaring and stating I am powerless and

everything in my life is out of control when I try to be the

boss. And so I want you to know

wherever you sit today, the Lord is with you and he is for you

and he sees you and he knows your grief, not theoretically,

empathetically, He has suffered as we suffer so that he might be

a faithful high priest to take your pain and offer it to Father

and bring about a good redemption.

And so as believers in that God, as believers in that Savior, as

followers of that Jesus, we say by faith, your grace is

sufficient even for this, even in this moment.

Can we pray together? I know not everyone here today

is suffering, but I just want to take a second at the front to

acknowledge those of you who are.

And maybe it's not an A new wound that you're feeling.

Maybe it's an old one that never really got to heal.

And maybe it's one that you've covered over and you've resisted

the scatting process and it still feels like it's bleeding.

I just want to acknowledge you today.

Not with Sunday school answers, not with a nice neat theological

bow that tells you everything's going to be OK, but with the

suggestion of hope that God may be in it.

And if that's you today, maybe what you have is just a cry in

your heart and a declaration of dependence.

God, I haven't even let. I haven't even consider that you

might be in this, but today I do.

And maybe what you need to do is just confess that God is

sovereign over your grief. He could have done it

differently and He didn't. And open your heart to the idea

that there may be a grace that waits.

And now maybe you're in here and it's not.

You're not in the darkness. You're not in the pain.

And I just want to invite you to consider, where is God in your

joy? Have we acknowledged the season

of grace that we're in together when all the flowers are

blooming and the spring and fall rains have men of fruitful

harvest for our lives? Have we stopped and acknowledged

the reality that that is from our God and our Father?

The hope in our story, Jesus, is that you are sovereign over both

that when we weep, you weep with us, and when we celebrate, you

celebrate with us. And so Jesus, I pray that that

awareness, that that reality would prepare us to bring grace

and life and hope to those around us.

When we are celebrating and we see others grieving, I pray that

we would remember that you met us where we were, not because

you had to, but because you chose to.

And Jesus, when we grieve and we're on the floor, I pray that

our eyes would be on you and that you would call us to a new

life and a New Hope. We thank you that you haven't

abandoned us. You have met us.

And so Jesus, with all the love in our hearts and all the hope

that we can muster, we ask for grace in your name and for your

glory. Amen.

Thank you for joining us today. River City Church is all about

experiencing and expressing God's love in our lives and

community, and we hope that you've been able to experience

that today. As grateful as I am that you've

spent this time listening in this morning, this podcast is no

substitute for full participation in a local church.

I love it when River City people listen to other pastors, but it

is those who show up week after week faithfully giving their

support and time and resources that make all of this possible.

If we can help you get connected to a local church, pray for you,

or support you in any way, click the link in the description and

let us know. If you'd like to financially

support the ministry of River City, click the give link on our

website in the description. Don't forget to subscribe and

don't forget to share this with your friends.

Thanks so much for listening. May the Lord bless and keep you

in all grace and peace.