Philippians Series Launch - 9/6/2026

Great to be with you this morning.

Once every other year, I relive the glory of my college days.

And all eight guys that lived in a house together when I was at college with me, we gather again in Vantage, Washington.

Do you know where Vantage, Washington is?

It's this little tiny town on I-90, right when you get to the Columbia River.

Beautiful place, very tiny place, kind of a gas station with a dream.

And it's where my roommate Jake lives with his wife and his family and extended family.

And he hosts us once every other year for a day of uh dumb athletic competitions and sharing stories and all kinds of stuff.

And it's a great time.

And this is last summer, and a few weeks before we went out there, uh something kind of crazy happened.

Uh we uh heard from Jake that a fire had started, you know, just some tiny spark somewhere, some some flame got going.

It was one of those hot eastern Washington windy days, and just in a matter of just minutes, it became a really big deal.

Uh, this was a couple photos from what took place.

And, you know, in a small town like this, you know, when when an emergency happens, when when a fire starts, like everybody's in on putting it out, on dealing with it.

You know, there is technically a fire station in Vantage, but there's no professional firefighters who live there or who work there.

Like, you know, the town had to jump in.

So everybody's grabbing a hose, grabbing a bucket, putting out this fire.

And this home that was on fire uh belonged to uh Jake's brother-in-law, Benjamin.

And um, you know, he is doing his part fighting these flames, and his house burned to the ground.

Uh, they they couldn't save it.

He lost everything that he owned.

Um, and yet uh what was said about him that day was he didn't take one second to stop.

He just immediately kept on going to try to save other people's homes and and protect the town.

And I just like hearing the story, obviously it was tragic.

It was hard.

Uh, you know, people going through so much.

They there was two structures that were lost, and thankfully they're able to put it out after that.

But it actually kind of made me long a little bit for the small town vibe.

Uh, I've never lived in a small town.

I've this is where I've grown up my whole life, but like that sense of being a community, of being in it for everyone, where you know, like no one is just kind of thinking of their own home and their own responsibility, whatever, but it's like we're we're all in this together.

We don't really have that on, you know, this side of the mountains in this kind of more urban area.

We don't have that community sense.

We're all a little bit more individualistic.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, be honest with yourself.

If you are driving home from church today and you drive by and there's like a house on fire, I mean, oh my goodness, can you imagine what you might do?

I bet what you wouldn't do is stop your car and go get a hose.

Uh my guess is you would call 911, which you should do, and you would say, somebody better come do something about this because there's a fire, crazy, and I'm glad I pay my taxes that there's firefighters.

Like, I'm not a firefighting guy.

Uh, send the firefighting people.

Um, like we just we're we're about kind of our own story and our own life, and we're not quite as connected as that small town vibe.

And it was on my mind because we're starting a new series uh this morning in the book of Philippians.

And for the next couple months, we're gonna be unpacking this letter that was written by the Apostle Paul to the church in Philippi.

Uh, and he's writing about what it's like to be the church, to be family in Jesus together.

And part of what he's gonna get at is this reality of kind of the individualism, the the way that we can get consumed with just our own stories and our own lives and not realize that we actually are a part of something much bigger.

That if we're followers of Jesus, if we're the church, then actually we're a part of a bigger story.

There is this story of redemption, of God working from the beginning to redeem all of creation to himself, of Jesus who came and who died for us, who rose again that we might have life that we don't deserve.

And in this reality presently, where God is still at work to redeem people to himself, and he has a part for us to play in it.

Like that bigger story is our story.

And when we allow just our own life to be its own thing and our own concerns and our own story, we can miss it.

We can miss what really it's all about.

Paul's gonna write to this church, and kind of the big idea that we're gonna work through this morning that sets up our whole series is this that everything changes when your story becomes a part of Jesus' story.

When you realize that your life, that every day that God's given you that's a gift, that your relationships, that your resources, that your time, that all of it is a part of this bigger story of God working to redeem the world.

When you see your life that way, it's gonna change everything about how you live, about what you do with this gift that God has given you of the breath in your lungs.

And we're gonna see four different ways that our lives have changed when we can see this bigger reality of the story of God.

The first is this that when when your story becomes a part of Jesus' story, your story gets smaller.

The concerns that you have, the things on your list, the stuff going on in your life, they they become a little bit less important when you have eyes to see this bigger story of Jesus that we're all a part of.

And we see that actually in just the first couple verses of this letter.

So I want to open it with you.

This is the beginning of Philippians chapter one.

Uh, this letter from the apostle Paul, it starts like this with the greeting Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is a very standard opening to a letter.

If you uh grabbed any old ancient letter from this day, you would see something a lot like this.

This is kind of a stock intro.

It has three parts.

Uh, when you when you started a letter in this time, you would say who you were, you would say who you're writing to, and then you would offer just a greeting.

And so we have all that here, right?

So who's writing this?

Paul and Timothy together.

Uh, Paul is the apostle Paul who wrote so many books in our New Testament.

Timothy is a younger man who's a ministry partner of Paul, and apparently they're together when this is being written.

And so they are writing to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi.

They're writing to this church in the city of Philippi.

Uh, and you know, in our world today, we sometimes think that the word saints means like super Christians, like the best of the best of the Christians.

That's not what it means.

Saints are just followers of Jesus.

So he's writing to the whole church, including the leadership.

And then you have the standard greeting: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So a super standard opening, with one exception, one key difference.

This is actually a different way of Paul introducing himself than he does in any of the other New Testament letters.

And it's all about this word right here: servants.

When Paul introduces who he and Timothy are, the thing that he says about them, like their identity, they are servants of Christ.

That was not the normal way that Paul introduced himself.

When you when you flip through your Bible and you see all these other letters, the most common thing Paul says at the beginning of a letter is, I, Paul, am an apostle of Jesus Christ.

That apostle is his title.

He's one of the senior leaders of the global church.

Jesus appeared to him personally, gave him a personal mission.

Like he's kind of a big deal, and he's not bragging, but he just introduces himself, I am the apostle Paul.

That's the norm.

A couple of times he says that he's an apostle and a servant.

This is the only letter where he just says, Who am I?

I'm just a servant of Jesus Christ.

That word servant, it doesn't jump off the page at us quite the way that it would have in this time, because the word behind that in Greek, this letter was originally written in Greek, and the word is doolos.

And uh it means servant, but it also can be translated slave.

It was just the word for a common house slave.

And so this is like the lowest rung in society.

And that is how Paul is introducing himself.

And think about what he's doing there.

I mean, think about what Paul could have said.

He could have listed his accomplishments, could have used his title of apostle.

Here's something that's true.

Uh, Paul is the founding pastor of this church.

In Acts 16, there was no church in Philippi, nobody who followed Jesus.

Paul started the church.

So when he's writing a letter to them, he could say that.

He could say, Hey, I'm Paul, uh, founding pastor of the church in Philippi.

Uh, no big deal, but none of you would know Jesus without me.

And um, and that's who I am.

And you know, here we go.

But he doesn't do any of that, he doesn't do anything that lifts himself up.

He comes with this humble posture.

I was just saying, I am a servant of Christ Jesus.

And this is what Paul is showing us it is this attitude that his life is about something bigger than just him.

His life is a part of the story of Jesus.

And so he's not gonna bring you his titles and his accomplishments and all that.

He's just gonna say, Whatever Jesus is doing, that's what I'm about.

Where Jesus tells me to go, that's where I'm gonna go.

What Jesus wants to do with my life, that's what my life is gonna be.

I am just a servant, a slave, even, of Jesus Christ.

And there's a reason why he's coming with that humble attitude, particularly in this letter.

He's writing to the church in Philippi, and he knows that in this church community there's been some problems, and these problems have arisen as people have let their own personal stories get bigger than the story of Jesus.

And he's gonna address those things through this letter.

But I want to show you a little bit about Philippi because it was actually an important place.

There were important people there with big things going on.

Uh, Philippi is this uh city in Macedonia.

This is a map of the Roman Empire around this time.

And so you got Rome over here on the left, and uh, and then you've got Philippi in Macedonia, and it was kind of this gateway between the west and the east of the empire.

That's what made it such an important place.

The key trade road from Rome to the east part of the empire, it came through here.

You had to take a little ship across this peninsula, and then it went up through here, across a mountain pass, through Philippi, and then down into Asia.

So, what that meant was that all the key trade of the entire Roman Empire moving from west to east ran through literally the city center of Philippi.

It was called the Via Ignatia, it ran right through the city.

And so you can imagine like this is an important place, it's a busy place, it's a place with money, with diversity.

Uh, people are buying and selling all the time.

And there was another reason why this was an important place, and it was because of something that uh one of the Caesars had declared about Philippi that set it apart from everywhere else around it.

Uh this Caesar had given land in Philippi to a bunch of military veterans of the Roman army, and he declared it this special place where it was when you're in Philippi, it was as if you're in the homeland of the Roman Empire, as if you're in Italy.

So here's what I mean by that.

Um, if you lived in this time, if you were in the Roman Empire, uh, not very many people got to become Roman citizens.

There were special privileges for being a Roman citizen.

The law treated you differently, you didn't have to pay as many taxes.

And to be a Roman citizen, you had to be born really in Italy.

You had to be born like in the homelands.

Okay.

But what the Caesar said was if you're in Philippi, it's as if you're in Italy.

We're gonna treat it like the soil of Rome itself.

So if you're born over here in Philippi, you are a citizen.

You don't have to pay those taxes.

Like you have this status above everyone else.

And so what that meant is this culture cared about status.

It was about, you know, being an important place where business was done, where money changed hands, where we're Roman citizens surrounded by a sea of the conquered around us.

Uh and this church here, apparently, some of that cultural ethos of wanting to achieve, of wanting to be seen as important, it has started to get in the way of the bigger story of Jesus.

Paul says people are letting their personal ambitions get in the way.

They're letting their personal disputes with one another get in the way, the desire for material comfort, the fear of losing what they have, all these things.

And in this letter, he's gonna be trying to get them, and the Holy Spirit is gonna use this to help to get us to see that that's not what the life of a follower of Jesus is all about.

It isn't about what we can attain, what we can achieve, how important we can be.

It's about finding our place in this bigger story of Jesus, in the story of redemption, of how God is working in the world through him.

And so he introduces himself to the Philippians, to the Philippians, and he says, I'm just a servant of Christ.

That's all.

Then he goes on.

Paul tells us that when our story becomes a part of Jesus' story, our story gets smaller.

He's gonna go on to say that also your joy will grow deeper.

This is what he says next.

I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you, always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

It says he is always praying with joy for all of you.

This this letter, uh, it's pretty short.

It's just four chapters long.

Paul is gonna mention joy 16 times.

It seems like he just can't get it out of his head how full of joy he is that he gets to be a part of this story of Jesus.

That's basically what he says here, right?

Why am I full of joy all the time when I think of you?

Well, because we we're partners in the gospel.

We together get to be a part of this amazing thing that God has done, that through Jesus everyone can receive salvation.

And when I think of that, I just can't keep the smile off of my face.

And when you realize where Paul is, it really shows us how incredible it is how that he's full of joy.

When Paul writes this letter, he is in prison, he's under arrest.

He is possibly on house arrest, but he is physically restrained, he's shackled to a Roman centurion and he's awaiting trial.

He he has been charged with essentially treason, with preaching that there's another king other than Caesar, King Jesus.

And he doesn't know when the trial is gonna happen, but he knows it's very possible that at any point someone could show up at his house and haul him off.

He could be tried and he could be executed at any moment.

That's where Paul is.

And as he is in that situation, with that hanging over his head, he is full of joy.

And I just think of what God might have to say to us in this series if we're willing to listen to the Spirit's voice through the Apostle Paul.

Because aren't all of us looking for joy?

I mean, when you when you think about your life and what you're pursuing right now and what you're excited about and what you're building towards and all of that, have you not found something that you think is gonna bring you joy?

We we often call it happiness, you know, but often that's that's what we're looking for out of our career.

We want something that's gonna be fulfilling, that's gonna make us happy and full of joy.

It's what we look for in a romantic partner.

That's why many of us have kids, that's why we live where we live, that's why we do all that stuff.

It's like we want a life full of joy.

And I just think that God might have something for us from this man, Paul, who has none of the things that we look for to become happy.

He's single, he's separated from his friends, he doesn't have kids.

Uh, you know, he his career is on the rocks, you can say the least.

Like, he's not doing his missionary thing right now.

He's chained to a Roman soldier, his future is completely uncertain, like all of that, and yet he's just completely full of joy.

Like, what do we have to learn from this man, Paul, about how to live a fulfilling life that's actually full of joy?

I think he's gonna have quite a bit to say to us there.

Paul's telling us that when our story becomes a part of Jesus' story, our story gets smaller, our joy grows deeper, and our future becomes certain.

This uh is such an interesting thing.

I mean, so I just told you he's awaiting a capital trial.

Like he is potentially gonna lose his life because of the the message he's been preaching.

And yet he has this just like rock solid confidence in the future.

Look at what he says next.

He says, I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Says, indeed, it is right for me to think this way about all of you, because I have you in my heart, and you are all partners with me in grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.

Paul's saying, Look, I know something to be true.

I know that we're in this together, we're partners, okay?

We're partners in the gospel and in this work that God is doing.

And because I know your story, because I know that Jesus has saved you, that he's forgiven you, that he's working in your life like he's working in mine, then I know the future.

All right, let's go back to verse six.

He says, I am sure of this.

Here's what's gonna happen.

The one who started a good work in you is gonna finish it.

Jesus is going to be faithful to do everything that Jesus has promised to do.

I don't know what it's gonna look like.

I I don't know, you know, how many days left on earth I have.

I don't know whether your plans are gonna succeed.

I don't know if the your hopes and dreams are gonna come true.

I don't know that.

What I know is that you can count on Jesus being faithful to you.

If he's forgiven you and if he's adopted you into the family of God, he is going to redeem and sanctify you and give you a hope in a future.

I just wonder how much we need to hear that this morning.

Uh, what fears of the future do you have today as you sit here?

Uh there's reasons to be fearful of all kinds of stuff in the future.

I mean, there's stuff in the news.

Who knows, you know, what the stock market is gonna do this next year, how AI is gonna affect the economy, what's gonna happen to your retirement, what's gonna happen in the war in Iran.

I have no idea.

Uh what's gonna happen in your family in the next year or two years or three years, I don't know.

What's gonna happen with your kids?

Uh you don't know.

If someone tells you they know the future, be very skeptical.

Except for one thing.

If Jesus is alive today, if God loved us enough for him to go to the cross and die in our place and rising again to offer us life, like we know that he is who he says he is.

He's not gonna get stingy on us now.

He is gonna stay faithful to give us everything he's promised to give us.

Our future is secure in him.

And when your life becomes just the small story of yourself, when everything that you're thinking of and consumed with and anxious about and all that, when it's just what's gonna happen to me, right?

What am I gonna do this year, next year?

What am I gonna accomplish?

Am I get what I want?

Like when your story is that small, then fear of the future makes sense because you just never know where your life is gonna go.

You never know what's gonna work out.

What Paul says is when you when you take a step back, when you when you recognize that your story is just this small part of this broader story of a God who's redeeming all things, then you actually do know how the story ends.

You do know that God is victorious, that he's not gonna let any suffering go to waste, that he's one day gonna wipe away every tear, and he is going to redeem you and turn you into the fullness of the person that he created you to be in Jesus' name.

And that's actually where Paul goes next.

This is his last point about how life changes when our story becomes a part of Jesus' story.

He says, your story is gonna get smaller, your joy is gonna grow deeper, your future becomes certain, and lastly, you become whole.

You become who you were made to be.

Because here's the thing despite what our culture says, you were actually never made to be the hero of your own story.

We have this narrative in our culture that, like, kind of we chart our own destiny, we pursue our own dreams, we accomplish our goals and find our desires in life, and whatever we want to be, we can be.

But the reality is that's actually not how human beings were designed.

We were created by God in his image.

And from the beginning, we were always meant to be a part of his story of who he is and what he's doing in this world.

And so when you can see that, you actually can find the peace and fulfillment of being.

Who you were made to be from the beginning.

This is how Paul explains that.

It says, For God is my witness how deeply I miss all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.

And I pray this that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.

So the glory and praise of God.

I want you to be able to understand that there's a spiritual reality behind this world, that God's real, that He's living and active and at work.

I don't want you to be consumed by just the here and now and what's in front of you.

And as you grow into this, here's my ultimate my hope.

I want you to become pure and blameless in the day of Christ.

Jesus is going to come back one day.

And at that day, I want your life, I want you to have nothing to be ashamed of.

And I want you to be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.

You know, these these words here in this passage uh pure, blameless, righteous.

Um, I wonder how they sit with you.

You know, if you have a certain kind of experience with church, uh, maybe growing up or maybe even as an adult, uh, sometimes these words can kind of spark shame in us.

Because maybe these words were used kind of to tell you what you're supposed to be that you're not.

You know, you're supposed to be good, you're supposed to do the right thing, you're supposed to be pure, you're supposed to be blameless, you're supposed to be righteous.

And the undertone is kind of like, what's wrong with you?

Why aren't you those things?

And so we can be ashamed of who we are when we see the standard put here that's so much higher than any of us can live up to.

But that's not what Paul is doing here.

He's not trying to get you to feel ashamed of your life.

It's actually quite the opposite.

He's trying to give you an unshakable hope about what Jesus has promised to accomplish in your life, about what Jesus is going to turn you into.

This fruit of righteousness, it comes through Jesus Christ.

This is a picture of God redeeming your faults, redeeming your mistakes, redeeming your sins.

So it's as if they never happened.

That word uh pure here is a really interesting word in the Greek.

Uh or this is an English translation of the original Greek.

And that word pure, um, the Greek word behind it is a compound word.

Uh, it's eloquinase, and it's basically taking two Greek words and and smashing them together as one.

And the two words are the Greek word for the sun, uh, it's like the sun in the sky, and the Greek word for judgment.

And so literally what eloquinase means is sun-judged.

And that's Paul's desire for you, that you would be sun judged.

And we translate it pure.

And if you're like, how on earth do we translate sun judged as pure?

Well, it I'll tell you, it comes from the marketplace.

So the idea of sun judged is that uh until things are brought out into the light of day, you might not be totally sure of what they really are.

In this day, uh pottery was a big business.

Uh, people you know made clay pots, and and a lot of times there was you know decorative pottery that people would have in their homes, rich people would have in their homes.

And the highest end pottery, uh, it had the thinnest walls.

That was like the sign of a master craftsman.

Uh, but there's a problem when you're trying to make really thin walled pottery, which is that often when you fire it in the oven, it cracks.

Um, and so these merchants who were who were doing this, um, you know, they they're trying to make money.

They can't just throw away every pot that cracks.

And so what they would do is they'd fix it.

Uh, they would take wax and they would they would push the wax into these cracks, and then they'd smooth it over and they would paint over the whole thing so that it looked good, even though it actually had a big crack in it.

And you know, in this day and age, uh, you know, there's there's no artificial lighting in these shops.

And so you you're in a kind of this dingy dark place and you're shopping for a beautiful pot for your home, and in that dark shop, you could easily miss that there's a flaw, that's a problem that's been covered up.

And so, what wise people would do is they would, before they buy it, take that pot out of the shop, out into the street, into the bright noonday sun, and hold it up to the sun and inspect it.

And in the sun, you looked inside this pot.

If there was a crack that had been covered up with wax, it was clear as day.

The sun would shine right through it.

You would see exactly what it was.

You couldn't hide any flaw out in the sun.

And that's why to be pure is to be sun-judged, is to be something that can stand up to the scrutiny of the brightest light shining on it.

So you know what you're really getting.

And that's what Paul says his hope is for us that our lives would be pure, blameless, righteous, that we wouldn't have any shame, we wouldn't have anything to hide.

Now, here's the problem none of us have that life.

Right?

I mean, every single one of us has cracks that we've tried to fill and paint over and cover up, we have flaws that we uh don't want anybody else to see.

We have the things in our life that are capable of making us feel shame for not living up to even what we think of ourselves as supposed to be.

And this is why we have to grasp what Paul is really saying here.

When he says that he wants your life to be filled with righteousness, he's not saying that he wants you to live a life where you've never made any mistake and you've always done the right thing.

I mean, that'd be great, right?

But uh it's off the table for me, certainly, and I think for you.

No, he's saying that that fruit of righteousness, it comes through Jesus Christ.

It comes as you recognize that you are a part of this bigger story, that God loved you enough that he pursued you in Jesus, that Jesus lived the only life that actually can stand up to the sun, that actually can withstand any scrutiny.

He lived a pure and blameless life.

And he went to the cross to carry your sin and your shame.

And as he rose again in exchange for your life, he's offering you his that is blameless, that is pure, that is full of righteousness.

And that becomes true of you the moment you put your faith in Jesus.

And it also becomes more true of you every day that you follow him, as your life reflects that reality of the work of the Spirit in you.

And this is Paul writing from prison, having given his life to the work of Jesus, full of joy, no regrets, saying, This is what I want for you too.

Would you see yourself?

Would you see your story as a part of the story of Jesus?

And would you receive this incredible life that can only come through him?

We're going to pack that more and more uh as we go through this series together.

But this morning, I would love for you just to ask the question like, what is this next step of faith for you?

This view of seeing your life as a part of the story of Jesus, the Bible calls that faith.

Uh that's what it looks like to live, not just looking at what's in front of you and what's, you know, just pressing right now, but realizing that there's a bigger story, that God is alive, that he's real, that he's at work in the world, that Jesus is who he says he is.

This is a life of faith.

And at Alder, we call that following Jesus together.

That's what we do here is we encourage one another, we equip one another, we pray for one another as we're living this life of faith together.

And uh just what's the next step of faith for you?

You know, maybe this morning you're here and you have never recognized the reality that Jesus came for you, that he actually has a purpose and a plan in your life today, that there's a part of God's plan that you have a role in.

And it starts by receiving in faith what only Jesus could accomplish for you, the forgiveness of your sins on the cross and a hope and a future promised to you.

And maybe that step of faith is just to receive that today, to say, Jesus, I want my story to be a part of your story.

Maybe you've been following Jesus for a long time, and yet it's been a while since you've asked the question, God, what do you want to do with my life?

Here I am.

You've put breath in my lungs, you've given me uh uh resources, you've given me passion, you've you've given me relationships, like you've given me this time and this place, you have me here.

What do you want to do with my life?

How do you want to use me as a part of your story?

Maybe that's the step of faith this morning is just asking that question with God and listening and really seeking to find where God's calling you to go.

Yeah, I'd love for you to find that reality here at Alderwood, uh, to find connection and community with people who are gonna walk alongside you to find a place where you can serve and give your life away for the good of the kingdom.

And today is a great day to do that.

This is our fall launch, and there's all kinds of new groups starting, new service opportunities, new places to get plugged in and to be a part of the community of faith.

And before you leave today, I hope you'll stop and just ask the question God, what what is next for me?

Um, we have some great things coming up in October as well.

If you're if you're new here, if you're trying to find your place, if you're curious about what it actually means to walk with Jesus, we have a class in October called Discovering Faith, which is all just about that.

What does it mean to live a life of faith?

What does it mean to believe in Jesus?

And we'd love to have you check that out.

We also have a class called Discover Alderwood.

And if you're just like, what is this church?

And what does it mean to be a part of the family of God here?

That's for you as well.

I don't know what it is, but God has a step for you to take.

He is writing a story of redemption, he has a place for that, for you in that story, and I can't wait for all of us to find it together.

Let's pray, Jesus.

Thank you for the way that you just relentlessly pursue us.

That despite our flaws and despite our cracks, despite the countless ways that we go our own way, that you don't give up.

And so I thank you that you're here pursuing us now, that you have a plan for us and you have a purpose for us.

And so I ask that you would help us to open our eyes to see that, that you would help us to lift up our head and not just live a small story of just us and what we want out of this life.

But that you would help us to see this bigger story, that you're at work, that you're redeeming a lost and broken world, that you have a hope and a future, and that you've got a mission for us.

And would you help us to step into that with boldness, with confidence, and with excitement, knowing that there is nothing more fulfilling than being who you created us to be, than doing the work that you've put in front of us, receiving life from you.

So we love you.

We give ourselves to you in Jesus' name.

Amen.