Habakkuk Part 3 (feat. Dr. Mike Plunket)

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we're looking at.

Uh, the second chapter of Habakkuk.

Today we're actually gonna read a, uh, sort of lengthy passage, but it's important that we look at this and we hear this answer that God gives to his, his prophet Habakkuk.

Habakkuk has twice prayed and asked for answers and he has even provoked God in terms of what he feels like is both the silence of God and the inactivity of God to bring a solution to his complaint.

And so here's Habakkuk chapter two, beginning at verse five.

Moreover, wine is a trader, an arrogant man who is never at rest.

His greed is as wide as she'll like death.

He has never enough.

He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own all peoples.

Woe to the Cal DNS shall not.

All these take up their taunt against SIM with scoffing.

And riddles for him and say, woe to him who heaps up what is not his own for how long and loads himself with pledges will not.

Your debtors suddenly arise and those awake who will make you tremble, then you will be spoiled for them because you have plundered many nations.

All the remnant of the peoples shall plunder you for the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in them.

Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house to set his nest on high, to be safe from the reach of harm.

You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples you have forfeited your life.

For the stone will cry out from the wall and the beam from the woodwork.

Respond.

Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity.

Behold, it is not from the Lord of hosts that people labor merely for fire and nations weary themselves for nothing for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Woe to him who makes his neighbors drink.

You pour out your wrath and make them drunk in order to gaze at their nakedness.

You will have your fill of shame instead of glory.

Drink yourself and show your uncircumcision cup and the Lord's right hand will come around to you and utter shame will come upon your glory.

The violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you and as also weld the destruction of the beast that terrified for the blood of man and violence to the earth, to cities and all who dwell in them.

What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it?

A metal image, a teacher of lies for its maker trust in his own creation when he makes speechless idols, woe to him who says to a wooden thing awake to a silent stone arise.

Can this teach you?

Behold is overlaid with gold and silver and there no breath at all in it, but the Lord is in his Holy temple.

Let all the earth keep silence before him.

Now this is a prophetic book and a true prophet of God.

A true prophet of God never puts his own personal spin on the words that he gives.

The words given to the prophet of the Lord are a burden not only for the people of God, but a burden that God has for his creation, for the earth, and it's a burden that God shares because of his trust in the heart of the profit that he's giving.

This expression to a prophetic burden can be defined as a verbalized expression or as verbalized expressions of the very heart of God.

They are directed to a spirit equipped person who will then deliver those words to the appropriate person or group at just the right time and the prophetic words of God always achieved their appropriate result.

They never fall to the ground.

They never have an empty purpose.

The Hebrew word for profit of the, of the work that Habakkuk is doing here, the Hebrew word, is that the message of God bubbles up inside and and begins to flow out of the prophet.

He's not cooking it up.

He's not creating it.

It's not a part of his line of thinking or reasoning.

It's a spontaneous thought or a spontaneous message that is brought into the heart, into the mind of the prophet of God.

And when you look at old Testament prophetic messages, which comprise a good deal of the old Testament, there's always two sides to it.

There's a positive side where there's this word of blessing where there's a word of promise, but there's also always the negative side where there's a word of, of cursing or a word of correction.

And the old English, they used to call it the wheel and the wo of the, when, um, when we talk about the wheel or the wall or the prophet, the word wheel means it means wealth.

It's the word we get from wealth.

It's the word blessing.

And the woe is that something that is rather traumatic or something actually very dramatic that might come upon the people of God.

So what bubbles up here in the, in the spiritual life of a Baca, this word, this expression of God's prophetic word is primarily a woe.

And matter of fact, numerous times, five times, God speaks a wo he speaks of, of the negative of the curse.

And only twice and you really have to look forward before you see any blessing in this prophetic message.

Now I want you to remember we're talking about the purpose of the book and the purpose of this book is for God's people to not only be able to endure suffering through evil times, but for God's people to actually do more than just survive, but to learn how to be ready for anything and how to overcome anything that comes our way.

Basically, the book of Habakkuk says to you that if you'll listen, if you'll pay careful attention and you'll respond according to what is being taught here, you can, you can overcome anything.

You can be ready for anything.

The one speaking here is not Habakkuk, it's God's speaking to Habakkuk and what what God does here and why this is so important for us to spend some time studying this is because God is giving his interpretation of the causes of the evil times that the people of God are going through and he also exposes the source of the evil and the rottenness.

Particularly, he's talking about the rottenness of this Babylonian culture, which is now being inflicted upon the people of Judah.

And this rottenness is going to oppress them.

It's going to enslave them.

It will actually carry them away from their home and everything that makes them feel safe or secure.

And so as God speaks here, what we want to do is we want to, we want to look at at two things that he says that gives the people of God overcoming power in the midst of suffering, particularly in the midst of extended evil times.

So the first of these is that you cannot merely try to understand an evil season or a crisis season from your own discernment or your own education or background.

You have to begin to allow that the only one who knows what's going on, the only one who has understanding of what's happening is God himself.

And unless we can come to that place intellectually that we're saying, Lord, I don't know what's going on, but you do and I'm waiting on you.

But if we surrender in that way, and if we're humbling ourselves in that way, what we begin to see is that real discernment begins to come and, and real understanding begins to come.

And what God is doing is he's giving her back, uh, his understanding of the source of evil and even how that evil can be overruled in our lives.

So in this passage that I read to you, and it's, it was lengthy, but it had a lot of very negative descriptions of a culture that was rotten culture that was evil and wicked.

And it's God's own interpretation and it's God's own perspective about that culture.

Now, I don't think we have to go into all the details of everything he was pointing out.

I think that what will help us discern is how God basically characterizes the source of evil as two things.

And they're, they're abundantly clear in this passage.

And the first of the two things that makes Babylon, he says so rotten is in verse five and he says, an arrogant man never at rest, greed as wide as death and liked death.

He never has enough.

Even he, even in this passage it says, Babylon will never be satisfied.

He's recur referring to Babylon as he or as an arrogant man.

He says, Babylon will never be satisfied until he owns all the nations.

And then even when he owns all the nations, his emptiness will still not be satisfied, will not be filled.

So what God is saying and what we need to hear if we're going to, if we're really to be able to handle evil times well, is at the heart of evil is pride.

This arrogance, it's root cause is pride.

Now, one of the, one of the writers on this that helps me as a man by the name of Louis speeds, and in his book talking about this, he writes, he says, the root cause of arrogance is pride.

But between the two, between arrogance and pride stands vanity.

Basically when he's talking about vanities, he's echoing God's words to VACCA.

Vanity is basically emptiness.

He says, pride leaves us vain.

Now when we look at vein vein people, we think they're there, they think themselves superior, they're all focused on self.

But the Bible says, anyone who has vain is actually someone who is empty.

And that vanity or that emptiness pushes us towards arrogance.

So where we begin and where the rottenness begins, not just in a culture but also in individuals, but God himself is revealing that cultures can be rotten by pride as well.

He says, we begin with pride before God.

Pride leaves us with vanity inside ourselves, and that vanity then pushes us into arrogance toward other people.

So this sense of self, this need of fulfillment, this need for glory in a sense becomes an arrogance because we just feel empty and feeling empty.

We then have to direct our arrogance towards other people.

And then Smeed says pride in a religious sense is an arrogant refusal to let God be God.

It is to grab God's status for oneself.

Pride is basically wishing to be the creator, independent, reliant on one's own strength, unwilling to ask for grace, plead for mercy or give thanks to God.

See in a way in this passage and Smeeds is describing it so well, this emptiness, this vanity, this arrogance, the root is that our want to be my own creator.

I don't want to need anybody else.

I want to be able to be independent.

I want my own strength to be enough.

And then you see, particularly this arrogance expressed as someone is unwilling to ask forgiveness, unwilling to ask for grace, not realizing their need for mercy and never having gratitude, never giving thanks to God.

So Smeeds goes on, he says, thinking we can make it as little gods leaves us empty at the center.

You see, if any part of your life is empty, it means it's not only empty but it's unguarded.

And so it is open then for attack.

And what Smeeds says is if you are, if there is vantage vanity at the center of your identity, if you are empty at the center, you will not be empty long.

You will be attacked by demons of fear and anxiety.

That emptiness leads to a filling, but it's not a satisfying field filling.

It is a fear filled filling.

What happens from that, and this is what Habakkuk is saying is then we must use other people and their, their role in our lives is to buttress our shaky ego ego.

So every relationship becomes a relationship.

Where, what are you doing for me?

How are you fulfilling my, my need to fill this empty place?

And basically Smeed says, we asked, what can I get out of this relationship to support the need of my ego for power and for applause.

So Paul who loved Habakkuk and who often use the quote that the righteous shall live by faith.

I think he's talking about the same thing.

This rottenness is at the core of pride in Philippians chapter two verse three where he says, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, rather in humility value others above yourself.

You see, if you are filled with vanity, if you're filled with emptiness, you cannot consider someone else above yourself because that will mean you are nothing.

And so what pride does is it uses these two drives.

And actually what Paul is saying is pride is made up of these two elements.

And he says, because we are vain because we are glory empty, but we are also glory hungry.

We must somehow satisfy this drive, this longing, this hunger to take away our vanity, to take away our emptiness and to fill it with glory and glory can be defined in this way as beauty, eternal beauty, not just conditional beauty, but he Turnell beauty weightiness and other words, something that has substance that can sustain your life, that can sustain your identity, that can sustain everything you're going through and therefore it has to also be real.

So we are glory empty, but we are glory hungry.

Now you've noticed if you're listening to me, I have switched from talking about the Babylonians and the rottenness rottenness of that culture, which God was, was basically revealing the source of their evil.

And I've switched from talking about the Babylonians and now I'm talking about us.

I'm talking about all human beings.

We're not just talking about how one culture was prideful and arrogant and vain.

We're basically talking about how anyone who is trying to live this life and fill the empty space, how we do it, out of pride, out of arrogance so that we're not empty.

We are born glory empty and we are born with glory hunger and we must somehow satisfy this hunger for our glory.

Now I hope you're tracking with me in this because as we look at this together, I want to give you a little bit of a a story or illustration of this.

I grew up loving tennis.

I was committed to tennis and I got to play varsity in high school.

I played in college, played tournament tennis, but one of the people that I had so much respect for and admiration for was Chris Everett.

As many of you may not remember her or know her, but in the seventies and eighties she was quite a champion tennis player.

She had a lot of endurance and grit and consistency.

She was not as athletic, she wasn't as fast or strong as some of the other players, but she used what she had and she won Wimbledon.

She won the U S open.

She was quite a champion in 1980 in the 1980s about 1989 or so, she retired and she wrote this in a good housekeeping magazine.

I was depressed when I retired and I was afraid because so much of my life had been defined by my being a tennis champion.

I was completely lost.

Winning made me feel like I was somebody.

It made me feel pretty.

It was like being hooked on a drug.

I needed the wins, the applause in order to have an identity.

She was glory empty, but she was glory hungry and as long as she could play tennis and as long as she could, when she could at least for a time feel like she had an identity, she felt like her vanity was being fulfilled in not empty.

But as soon as she retired, she says, who am I?

What value do I have?

I no longer am pretty because I can't win anymore.

This glory empty always is accompanied with glory hunger.

So what we're really saying is the rottenness that God is describing and Babylon is the rottenness that he's describing in all of us.

And how you feel that glory hunger, if it's according to pride, if it's according to your arrogance, if it's according to your vanity, we'll never fill you in a way that can sustain you, will never give you an identity that is sustainable because you always are going to want to be beautiful.

You're always gonna want to be worthy and you're always going to want it to be real.

So what God goes after then is since there's this issue of pride at the source of the evil, he begins to say what it results in because we have this glory hunger.

What it results in is idolatry, and he explained to us that basically what, what an idle is is a God of our own making.

It's interesting, in verse 17 he starts to talk about how in our Adometry there's a cruelty to the earth.

There's even, he's calling it a kind of environmental sin of cruelty to the earth and cruelly cruelty to the animals that we will use anything in order to fill our need for fame and fill our need for more glory.

Verse 15, he uses kind of a, what I would say, an illustration or a euphemism that you get somebody drunk so that you can get them naked, which is Habakkuk's way here of saying that you're taking advantage of them sexually.

So there is a cruelty to the earth and there's a cruelty to the animals that comes out of our arrogance.

God says, but he also says there's a cruelty to one another of sexually oppressing and taking advantage.

Even here in the, in the old Testament, prophetic writings of Habakkuk.

Do you know what he's saying?

He's basically saying that every culture has within it it's idols and every culture has in it the seeds of this kind of evil or rottenness because we have this tendency because of our glory, empty souls to make good things into ultimate things.

Um, I have to admit to you that I truly enjoy Netflix.

I like binging.

It's fun.

I love the fact that I can watch a whole show through in a day.

I love that Lisa hates it, but I like it.

And so there's been this show that Lisa and I have been watching and I watched it primarily because the one who wrote it and directed it is an antagonistic atheist.

He ridicules Christians, a ridicules Christianity, and even in the show, he marks people who believe in life after death and he mocks people who believe in a transcendent God, a creator.

Now, he's a very funny man.

He's very witty, very smart, very creative man, but he does not get that in his show, which he himself wrote.

He has made something, a God in that show, something that he worships, something that he adores, something that he cannot live without.

He has this incredible love and the show for a dead wife, and that dead wife is his God.

You see, it doesn't, it doesn't matter if what you've made is a good thing or a bad thing.

It becomes an idol if it's an ultimate thing.

If something even that is good, has become your source of life, of joy, of energy, of strength, and that thing is not God himself, then it will ultimately let you down.

And here this show, which is a brilliant show in so many ways, is, is a day by day this guy not realizing that his God is dead, that the source of his life has died, that he made.

He made a person, a finite person into his infinite sense of worth his life and his joy.

And he has it no more.

You see, all of us have the seeds of this evil because we have to adore something.

We have to fill the glory empty place.

Now, one of the, one of the most brilliant things I've ever read about this is written by Alexandra salsa Neeson in his, uh, works from the Gulag and Enet he's talking about how when it be so simple, if it was just a political issue, if we could just blame the bad guys in government, if we could just blame the evil on some kind of social structure, here's what salsa needs and says, Oh, if only it were all so simple.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.

This is one of the most amazing quotes that I've ever read because he's looking at these guards who have persecuted him, who have tortured him, and instead of saying they're the evil, instead he says, the evil cuts through all of us, the evil custody, wouldn't it be?

He says, easy.

If you could just look and say, if we get rid of them, then the world will be great, but we are them.

It's a very powerful, very poignant quote and it goes back to kind of in many ways the world that we're living in today that for some reason it's even hard for people to talk about sin.

We want to talk about psychological causes.

We want to talk about background experiences.

Home life.

We want to justify or find reasons why people act the way that they do, but here is the honest truth of the word of God.

Our problem is sin and it's in our hearts as well as everyone else's.

What many of us don't realize.

If you go back to the days of the Babylonians, they were certain they were the good guys.

They were certain that any of one of them was not the evil, but that what they were doing was destroying the evil.

So as we look at this passage together and we, we see a world that's in crisis, then as a Christian, we have to begin to have more understanding, more discernment, and recognize that this darkness that's in the world is deeper, has a deeper root issue, both pride and a dollar tree.

And therefore the remedy or the solution will always be the grace of God.

And that remedy, that solution is only found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So the first thing I'd like you to get is that you cannot endure suffering.

If you don't have God's perspective on the world, you will not discern, you will not understand.

You will always be overwhelmed by symptoms and, and superficial temporary things because you're not looking at what's the real issue here.

The real issue is sin and the only remedy is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And the only way that the gospel comes into your life and into my life is by grace.

Not because we deserve it.

That evil cuts through your heart and mine all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And getting that understanding will help you not be so surprised when the world doesn't go the way you expect it to go.

And where life takes turns of unexpected evil even to go into evil kind of times.

Well, not only do we need an intellectual and an understanding perspective in order to discern, but really in this passage, and you have to look for it, but it's there.

He, God is saying that in the midst of distress, we must know where to turn for comfort.

Comfort is not a weakness.

Comfort is a need that was given to you before the fall.

It is not a sinful thing.

It's a human thing.

And so in both verses 14 and verse 20 we began to get these flashes of this comfort.

We began to get these flashes of how God gives us comfort in the most difficult times.

So the first thing I I like you to realize is that you need a real comfort in the midst of any darkness that you go through and God explains the source of our comfort.

The source of our comfort isn't knowing that this, this crisis is going to be over one day.

Our source of comfort isn't just saying, I'm not really affected by this when I really am.

What makes hope, hope?

What makes hope a spiritual generator?

Is there something true always.

There's something certain always that you can rely on that you know will not change, no matter what the circumstances are.

And here God says, here's the basis of our whole hope.

The Lord is in his Holy temple.

Let all the earth keep silent before him.

Here's what he's saying.

Do you not know?

Those of you follow me.

Those of you who have put your trust in me, do you not know that I am the sovereign Lord, that this does not reflect that I've lost control or this does not reflect that my choices as God do not matter.

But there is an important part of this.

And sometimes even Christians miss this.

He's never saying that your choices don't matter.

As a matter of fact, he's always saying your choices do matter.

And he's saying that choices lead to consequences and these happen and they often cause damage, not just to us, but incredible damage to our family, to our friends and others.

But also I've yet to find anyone in this life who hasn't had other people cause incredible damage to me or to you.

You see, there's a freedom in our choices.

There's a responsibility in our choices.

I'm not sure any of us can completely understand this or can completely explain it, but I, I would do this in an infinite God.

In other words of God with no limits.

So God would no restrictions in an infinite God.

He can make it to where his choices matter and are free and at the same time make it to where your choices matter and are also freely chosen and make responsibilities and consequences.

But here's what this verse means and here's why the hope is so great.

He is saying here that no matter how wicked Babylon is, that no matter how wicked Judah has been, God is in his Holy temple.

In other words, he's saying, I will overrule this evil and I will cause even these evil things.

I will cause these bad things to work together for your good.

See you and I.

What happens is we don't really make the last choice.

The last choice belongs to God and God is overruling even the evil in our lives and he's turning it for good.

I know the plans the Lord says I have for you plans for your welfare.

He works all things together for good, for those who love him and are called according to his purposes.

Please don't miss that.

I'm saying your choices matter, but praise God.

Your choices are not ultimate.

You have a sovereign Lord who overrules even the choices of others and causes the evil in this world to be overruled and turns even the evil into good look, he can be trusted.

The longer I live, the greater his faithfulness, the greater the history of his faithfulness in my life.

Now you can make a decision.

You can make a choice.

You can say, well, I'm going to live for empty glory.

You know, you can live glory empty.

You can live for empty glory and you can live glory empty, but the Bible says this is vanity.

This is emptiness, and what will happen if you live glory empty and you live for empty glory is you will in your arrogance use other people in order to try to your glory.

They're only reason in your life will be what they do for you and what glory they bring for you.

Or you can go against pride.

You can go against idolatry and you can begin to live for the glory of God and be filled.

See if you live out of your pride in your arrogance, what, what God says here in a back, he says, you will have your fill of shame instead of glory.

Drink yourself and show your uncircumcision.

And when he says, show your uncircumcision, he's saying, show that you have no covenantal commit commitment or connection to God, that you're outside of intimacy and relationship with God.

Go ahead.

He says, drink it up.

But he says, the cup and the Lord's hand, the cup and the Lord's right hand will come around to you and utter shame will come upon you and upon your glory.

See what he's saying is you can live your life as your own God being your own God, but when time comes, that will be to your shame, not to your glory.

But really the beauty of this verse to me is that this is almost exactly like what Jesus was talking about.

Can this cup pass from me?

He said, and the gardener guests Semini.

Is there another way other than my drinking of this cup?

So here is Jesus seeing that we're attracted to empty glory and seeing that we are glory hungry and instead of rejecting us and forsaking us, he goes and he drinks the cup of our shame for us.

He drinks the cup of God's wrath.

He empty.

He who had all glory, emptied himself of his glory, took for himself, our emptiness, and then gives us his honor and his glory.

He was treated and he drank the cup that I should drink.

Now he is giving me his cup to drink and it's the cup of his honor and his glory as I was, as I was studying for this, I heard, uh, a missionary from last century talk about these revivals in Korea.

And he said that what he witnessed, what he witnessed is he Western has these, the people publicly in Korea, he saw them publicly repenting.

He saw them confessing their sin and confessing their shame.

Okay?

He was explaining that there's this, there's this honor culture in Korea.

There's this, the, the worst thing is to bring this honor to an admitting your shame is culturally very, um, unusual, but in the presence of God, in the presence of other people in these revivals, Korean people were publicly confessing their shame and their sin and ask, why are you doing this?

When this is against your culture and this is against your experience and background.

What they explained is we, we experienced Jesus drinking the cup of our shame.

We experienced Jesus taking on our shame fully and giving to us his righteousness.

And in that moment, this movement of people all experienced stepping out of any cultural bondage, no longer being afraid.

They experienced the comfort of Jesus taking their shame and they, they, they had a freedom now to, to unload, to confess, to put it all at the feet of the cross, at the foot of the cross.

Okay?

You see, when Jesus becomes real to us that he drank the cup of our shame, that he took the cup of God's wrath.

Then we find in ourselves a freedom to no longer hold on to or hide our shame in any way.

Been teaching through these, these last few weeks I've been teaching through a, um, Paul's letter to the Galatians and one of the questions that is very powerful in that letter.

It's God, God through the apostle Paul is asking the question.

Basically, how would you walk before me?

How would you live your life before me in utter transparency with no shame, with boldness to live near me and with transparency as you live before me and what Habakkuk shows and what Galatians shows is, there is no way to live before God without shame, without hiding, unless Jesus has drunk the cup of your shame.

Unless Jesus has taken your shame on himself, that he who knew no sin became sin for you.

Well, you have to realize is this cup of shame comes out of your pride and comes out of your idolatry that you have honored someone else or something else as your source.

You have even made good things, ultimate things, and Jesus says, even though you've had other lover gods, even though you have trusted in empty glory, I am willing to take the cup of your shame so that you can have the cup of my honor.

So that by faith you are accepted by my father.

But he also friends.

He absolutely knows about our pride and our arrogance about how we compete, how we oppress, how we do damage.

And he was willing not only to take your sin, but to become that sin.

He who is most glorious, was willing to become most reviled on the cross.

Jesus became absolute evil so that you could become absolute righteousness, not by works friends, cause you can't do it.

But by receiving it all starts with that simple phrase that I learned from Tim Keller long ago.

I am so evil that Christ had to die for me, but I am so loved that Christ chose to die for me.

Or another one to remember is he was treated as I deserve so that now I am treated as he is deserved, as he deserves.

And what happens with that?

It doesn't matter what your culture or your religious background is.

You no longer want to live in shame.

You no longer want to live in hiding because now the more free you are, the more comfort you experience.

Will you pray with me?

What a powerful, what a powerful truth, how easy it is for us to miss this Lord, because we can just start thinking about how you're criticizing the Babylonians, how you're dissecting the Babylonians and their rottenness and we can make it all about them.

We're the good guys, they're the bad guys.

But how convicting the words of Sosa nation when he says the line of evil cuts through every human art that end, this rebuke of the Babylonians and their pride, which resulted in arrogance, which, which was sandwiched between their emptiness, their vanity, their need to for glory, but their pursuit of empty glory.

And in doing so, they made good things in idol.

They make good things, ultimate things, and yes we can see it's true of the Babylonians, but your spirit is even more so saying it's true of every human.

This is the source of evil.

And what blows me away as I think through this is you knowing how rotten we are at the core drank the cup of our shame, what belongs to us because of our dollar tree.

What belongs to us because of our pride and arrogance did not hold you back one bit, but rather you said, I will empty myself of my glory so that I can drink the cup of your shame.

And now we who are empty of glory are receiving not our own glory, but the glory of the son of God.

The glory of the righteous.

Judge the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We who knew nothing but sin have been loved by the one who knew no sin and who became sin for us.

And as we received this gift of you being our substitute, your gift of taking our place, we become the righteousness of God in Christ.

Or as I'm speaking these words, it has to be spiritually discerned.

It has to go deeper than just intellectual understanding.

There has to come in a conviction and a confidence that you have made us acceptable.

Nothing more needs to be added.

And since we are accepted by God, now we can live boldly near you and walk with transparency before you.

No more shame, no more hiding.

The righteous shall live by faith.

And as I see these, these two wonderful blessing prophecies are prophetic words.

The Lord is in his Holy temple.

You will overrule even the stupid decisions of our lives.

What others mean for evil?

You mean for good?

And the day is coming when the glory of God shall fill the earth as the water fills the seats fill us now that we may be strong in this crisis to the glory of Jesus Christ.

Hey, Matt.