Spirit of the Law (John 5:1-16)

We're gonna be in John chapter 5, starting in verse 1.

John 5 · chapter mention

And before we read these verses together, your Bible may not have a verse 4 in this chapter.

The CSB that I'm gonna be reading from does not have a verse 4 in it.

And we're gonna explain why that is that some Bibles have a verse 4 and some don't.

All of you should at least have an annotation in your Bible explaining this a little bit, but we're gonna talk about that a little more.

I just didn't want you to get confused as I'm reading.

If you do have a verse 4 and think that guy just completely missed that verse and didn't read it, so uh just as a heads up, um we won't be reading it now, but we will be talking about it a little bit later.

So, John chapter 5, we're gonna be reading verses 1 through 16.

John 5 · chapter mention

If you're able, would you please stand for the reading of God's word?

John chapter 5, starting in verse 1.

John 5 · chapter mention

After this, a Jewish festival took place, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

By the sheep gate in Jerusalem, there is a pool called Bethesda in Aramaic, which has five colonnades.

Within these lay a large number of the disabled, blind, lame, and paralyzed.

One man was there who had been disabled for thirty-eight years.

When Jesus saw him lying there and realized he was already, uh he had already been there a long time, he said to him, Do you want to get well?

Sir, the disabled man answered, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up.

But while I'm coming, someone goes down ahead of me.

Get up, Jesus told him, pick up your mat and walk.

Instantly the man got well, picked up his mat and started to walk.

Now that day was the Sabbath.

And so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, This is the Sabbath.

The law prohibits you from picking up your mat.

He replied, The man who made me well told me, Pick up your mat and walk.

Who is this man who told you, pick up your mat and walk?

They asked.

But the man who was healed did not know who it was because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

After this Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, See, you are well.

Do not sin any more, so that something worse doesn't happen to you.

The man went and reported to the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Therefore the Jews began persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.

Let's pray.

Lord, I thank you so much for your word.

Uh, the opportunity that we have to hold it in our hands and to look at these passages together.

Lord, I pray today that your heart would come through.

Your purpose would come through of why you chose to put this in the Holy Scriptures.

Lord, so I pray that you would help me, Lord, that you would fill me with the Holy Spirit to teach it and you would fill each listener with the Holy Spirit, Lord, to understand, to analyze it for themselves.

And Lord, we don't want to neglect what this weekend uh is celebrating, this memorial weekend.

Lord, we thank you for the country that we are blessed to live in.

Lord, we thank you for the freedoms that we have that we can meet in public like this.

The freedoms that we have that we can hold all these different Bibles in our hands and study your word so freely.

So, Lord, we thank you for all of the men and women that have paid the ultimate price for these freedoms that we get to enjoy and as we celebrate these things this weekend.

I pray that we would not forget the reason behind what this weekend is set aside for.

But Lord, as I pray that I just think of you, Jesus, that paid the ultimate price for our freedoms.

As we're even going to be talking about today, the freedoms that you have given us through your Son Jesus Christ, Lord, we thank you so much for those in that He paid the price for us, dying on the cross for our sins, so that we could be made whole again.

We thank you so much in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So we're gonna see a few different things going on here today, uh, and a big portion will have to do with the Sabbath.

And so that just means Saturday.

This was the day that the Jews had set, or that God had had the Jews set aside as a day for rest.

And so we're gonna look at what happens when we allow legalism to overshadow the spirit of God's law.

You know, we've talked about this before, but I want to kind of do a little refresher for us.

Upholding the letter of the law, whether we're talking about traffic laws or whether we're talking about God's law, is making sure that we cross every T and we dot every I really without considering the why behind the law.

Now, upholding the spirit of the law is understanding the why behind the law and then trying to uphold it in that way.

For example, say you're with a friend, there's a tragic accident that happens, and you have to rush them to the ER as soon as you possibly can.

You get them in the car and you take off to the hospital.

But you come up to a stop sign, and it's a four-way stop, and there isn't a car in sight.

As far as you can see in every direction.

Now the letter of the law says that you need to come up to a full stop at that stop sign.

And then thousand one, thousand two, thousand three, that's at least what they taught us when I was getting my license.

And then you go, you know, as you're watching your friend lose consciousness, you know, in the passenger seat next to you.

Now the spirit of the law is to make sure that there, when there is traffic, that there is order.

To make sure that people aren't getting T-bone and getting in accidents in this intersection.

The spirit of the law is safety, it's preventing accidents.

If you have someone in bad shape that needs the ER and quick, and there's nobody in sight at that four-away stop, you know, just kind of slowing down, looking in all directions, and then rolling through that stop sign really is upholding the spirit of the law, which is preventing accidents, which is safety.

So can you see the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law?

So keep that in mind as we're talking about the Sabbath specifically this morning.

Now, a few other things before we jump into verse one, just as a heads up, today may feel as if we're going down a few rabbit trails, because we're gonna go down a few rabbit trails today.

And it might feel like three or four little mini sermons instead of one uh big piece together.

But when you go through scripture like we do here at our church, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, that just tends to happen from time to time, and that's totally okay.

And this text this morning may actually give us more questions than answers, and that's also okay.

You know, we're gonna have to say a couple times this morning, I don't know, or we really don't know.

But all the things that we have uh to say, I don't know about here this morning, it's okay because it's not the point of why John is writing this passage in his book.

You know, if the Holy Spirit wanted us to know all the things that we have curiosities about, he would have told us in the text all of those things.

I have a lot of curiosities about a lot of things in this passage that aren't answered, so I'm gonna try specifically to not go down those rabbit holes here this morning.

So let's jump into verse one.

It says, After this, a Jewish festival took place, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

So John tells us this because this is one of the three major feasts in which the Jewish males were to come to Jerusalem.

And if possible, the families would join them as well.

You know, we could spend 20 minutes trying to figure out which feast this is and if this was Passover in an attempt to figure out how long Jesus' ministry really was.

If he, you know, was celebrating four different Passovers during his ministry.

But there's no way of knowing that for sure.

And I think John's purpose, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, obviously, is to tell us just why they went to Jerusalem, not specifically what the feast was, otherwise he would have told us what feast that was.

But what he does tell us is this one of those mandatory, those three big mandatory feasts, which basically lets us know there's a lot of people around.

There's some big crowds that are visiting Jerusalem in this time.

And again, John did not write his gospel as we've been talking about as we've jumped into this.

He didn't write it with a focus on timelines.

He wasn't real concerned with the order of events.

You know, he tells us in John chapter 20 the purpose of why he wrote this book.

John 20 · chapter mention

And he says, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

That's the purpose of why he's writing this.

So in chapter 5 here, John's giving us the information we need to know to prove that Jesus is the Messiah that makes us whole, so that we may have life in his name.

Now look at verse 2 with me.

By the sheep gate in Jerusalem, there's a pool called Bethesda in Aramaic, which has five colonades.

So this is just north of the temple in Jerusalem.

You can actually go and visit this place.

It's been excavated and it's one of those popular tourist sites.

So it's actually still there and just north of where the Temple Mount is.

Look at verse 3 with me.

Within these lay a large number of the disabled, blind, lame, and paralyzed.

Now, we're going to take our first rabbit trail here.

Ready?

Because if you're holding a King James version of the Bible or a new King James version of the Bible, you'll have an end of verse 3 and a verse 4 in your translation that we don't have in the CSB.

Now, if you're holding a New American Standard Bible, you'll have that text but in brackets around those verses.

And if you're holding almost any other version of the Bible, you're not going to have these verses there, but it should be noted.

There should be a footnote, there should be brackets, you know, something like that.

And here's why.

The King James Version, the KJV, was released in 1611.

And for the New Testament, their main source text was a Greek manuscript called the Textus Receptus.

But since the release of the King James Version, other manuscripts have been found that are thought to predate the Textus Receptus.

And those manuscripts don't have the end of verse 3 or verse 4.

Some of the most trusted manuscripts have it, and some of the most trusted manuscripts do not have it.

So the question becomes: which manuscripts are ripe?

And how does something like this happen?

Well, remember, this is way before the printing press.

You know, when scribes were manually sitting there transcribing all of these things, copying text for text.

And it's thought that most likely, here's the first scenario, you know, a scribe in about the hundreds AD, the 100s AD, so not that long after John wrote this, came to verse 3 and thought, you know, the reader isn't going to know the history behind this.

They're not going to understand actually what's going on.

And then maybe put a note in the margin, or maybe something like what we would call parentheses within the text to add some explanation to what's going on here.

And then as it kept getting copied by hand by other scribes later on, you know, the parentheses became forgotten, or something like that.

And then it looked like it was part of the text, and by the time the King James Version was getting translated from Greek to English, it just looked like, oh, this is this is part of what's in the text.

The other thing that could have happened, kind of in the other direction, is a scribe was copying the text and he missed the end of verse 3 and verse 4 altogether, and then copies were made from that manuscript, and those verses were just forgotten.

You know, and things like this have happened in a few places in the Bible, and it doesn't make the King James Version better than the CSB, and it doesn't make the CSB better than the New King James Version.

You know, everyone was doing their best with what they had at the time when we were doing these translations.

The great thing is, whenever we see a translation issue like this, all reputable modern translations will note the discrepancy.

So you can see both sides.

And there aren't many.

Where there aren't many places where we find this.

And more importantly, wherever we do see something like this happen, those verses never once contradict anything else in Scripture.

Thank God.

It never leads us to question our doctrine or our theology.

It's usually just something minor like this that actually might add a little bit of detail that wasn't there before.

And this is why, in our statement of faith that you can look at on online on our website if you'd like to, we specifically say we believe that the scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the Word of God, fully inspired, without error, in its original writing.

That's why we phrase it that way, because there are these few little things that we come across and it's like, well, which is this fully inspired?

Is it not?

Is this added or is not?

But it's little tiny things that never contradict the whole counsel of God's word.

Okay, so we're gonna exit that rabbit trail on the right, okay?

And we're gonna go into what the New King James Version puts in at the end of verse 3 and verse 4, and we'll have that up on the screen for you.

So verse 3 starts off in the New King James Version.

So in these, speaking of the colonels, lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed.

Now, this is the part where it starts at the end of verse 3.

It says, waiting for the moving of the water.

For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water.

Then whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well of whatever disease he had.

So the end of verse 3 and all of verse 4 really only confirms what this man that Jesus is healing is saying in verse 7.

Look down at verse 7, a couple verses.

When he says, Sir, the disabled man answered, I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred.

But while I'm coming, someone goes down ahead of him.

So there's nothing contradictory in these verses.

It's only confirming and adding some detail to what's being said in verse 7.

And whether this was true or something people just believed to be true, the stirring of the water and the angels, you know, doing all of this.

Regardless of that, this guy believed in it.

And I tend to think that if it was superstition, you wouldn't have this huge multitude of people waiting for the water to stir to jump into the water.

And I tend to think, um, well, we'll scratch that for now.

But uh it says also at a certain time the angel did this.

You know, so maybe it was a specific time, maybe it was during this feast that God allowed this to happen.

This one miracle every feast, stirring of the water, angel, we don't know for sure.

Again, it's a question we would love to have answered, but again, it's not the point of why John is writing this in the first place.

Look at verse 5 with me.

One man was there who had been disabled for 38 years.

When Jesus saw him lying there and realized he had already been there a long time, he said to him, Do you want to get well?

Your translation may say, Do you want to be made whole?

Now this is considered to be Jesus' third sign in the Gospel of John.

You know, we've talked multiple times already that signs differ from miracles.

And John points out signs in his gospel a lot.

He says the word sign eight times, he says the word signs, plural, eleven times, because signs preach a sermon.

Signs point to something deeper.

Miracles are miracles.

They're both amazing, wonderful things that God does.

But when Jesus does a sign, he's pointing to something deeper, just like we're using earlier.

Stop signs.

That means something.

That means you have to stop.

It points to something.

So signs preach a sermon.

Now, as we picture this scene in our minds, we have to ask, what could this sign be pointing to?

Well, we see this large group of people that are all in need of healing, who have lost hope in the current condition that they're in, and are grasping for something, or grasping for anything to remove them from their current condition.

You know, I think this is a picture of the world in need of spiritual healing, in need of a savior.

And Jesus approaches this one individual and asks a question Do you want to get well?

Do you want to be made whole?

And I think that Jesus has been asking that same question to humanity ever since.

Do you want to be healed from the sin that is destroying your life?

Do you want to be healed from what's been spiritually crippling you for your whole life?

You know, all we had, or maybe all we have, a decision to make.

Do we want Jesus to make us whole?

Now look at what he says here in verse 7.

Sir, the disabled man answered, I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up.

But while I'm coming, someone goes down ahead of me.

So, question for you.

Did this guy answer Jesus' question?

He let Jesus know that he wanted to be healed, but he did it through an excuse.

Jesus asked if he wanted to be healed, and he answered with why he hasn't been healed yet.

Because of the conditions and the people that are around him.

And maybe, you know, he answered according to where he had placed his faith.

He was placing his faith in an angel and in the stirring of the water.

So he answers really according to his limitations first, instead of just answering the question that Jesus was asking him.

You know, and I don't think we can really look down on this guy because I think we do the same thing in modern day.

He asks us a question and we answer with an excuse.

Or we answer with whatever the limitations are in our current circumstance.

You know, we answer with, you know, I'd like to be made whole, but I just really don't have time right now.

I'd like to be made whole, but you know, I had a bad experience when I was younger, and I don't want to give up my bitterness toward whatever that was.

I'd like to be made whole, but I don't want to give up my sin.

I'd like to be made whole, but I don't want to have to make any life changes, Jesus.

I'd like to be made whole, but Jesus, look at my current circumstances.

Have you ever had that?

I know I have.

You know, either for ourselves or maybe when we're telling somebody about Jesus, you know, and they're just like, well, that's nice for you, but and then you can fill in the excuse for yourself, whatever that might be.

But praise God that Jesus can look past our excuses and he can address the real need, like he does in verse 8 here.

Look at that.

Get up, Jesus told him, pick up your mat and walk.

You know, I want to know what must be going through this guy's mind in this moment.

You know, in the first millisecond, it's probably, ah, yeah, right.

Followed by, I have a sensation in my legs that I haven't had in 38 years.

And I'm just guessing here, but these no doubt withered legs must have just plumped right up.

Muscle definition was given right away and formed immediately.

Because look at verse 9.

Instantly the man got well, picked up his mat and started to walk.

You know, whatever this guy experienced in that moment.

He had the confidence to actually get up and try what Jesus is telling him to do.

And not only walk, but test his balance and pick something up and carry it.

Jesus healed this guy completely and then he gave him something more.

He gave him muscle definition and the ability to balance.

Well enough to pick up this mat and walk.

Jesus gave him probably at least a year's worth of physical therapy as well.

Instantly.

You know, my son Caleb had a broken arm.

He was in a hard cast for about five weeks.

And when they took that off, you could visibly see the muscle atrophy.

Like his left arm was much smaller than his right arm.

That was in five weeks.

Think about the atrophy that takes place over 38 years.

And when this happens, the ligaments and the tendons tighten because they're not being used.

And the muscles shrivel up.

But look at here.

Instantly the man got well.

You know, when we get to heaven, I want to see an instant replay of this.

If we still care about that stuff once we get there, but I would love to just kind of see this whole scene and how it played out.

But immediately, this man was made whole.

Again, this sign, this picture of what Jesus is doing here is a picture of what Jesus wants to do for us spiritually.

When we give our life to Jesus, he says, Rise with me.

And he makes us spiritually whole instantly.

Look at the rest of verse 9 with me.

Now that day was the Sabbath, and so the Jews, this was referring to Jewish leaders, so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, This is the Sabbath.

The law prohibits you from picking up your mat.

Man, talk about missing the blessing, right, of this miracle, of a man that was lame for 38 years now being healed.

And they just miss all of that because of their law.

You know, in Matthew 23, 24, when Jesus was pronouncing woes upon these religious leaders, like these guys, he said, You strain out a gnat, but you gulp down a camel.

You know, a gnat and a camel were both unclean, something that the Jews were not supposed to be eating according to the law that was given to them by God through Moses.

And Jesus says, You will go through so much effort to strain a gnat out of your drink so you don't accidentally consume it.

But in other areas of your life, you'll eat a whole camel and somehow justify it.

They would focus on the detail and they would miss the purpose behind it.

They would focus on the letter of the law and absolutely miss the spirit of the law.

So let me ask you this.

You know, the greatest commandment Jesus tells us is to love God and to love others.

Really, I think that is the spirit behind the whole of God's law that he gave Israel.

But is what Jesus did for this man the result of loving God and loving others?

I sure think so.

You know, in another instance of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, the man with the withered hand that we see in Matthew 12, Jesus says, Who among you, if he had a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn't take hold of it and lift it out?

A person is worth far more than a sheep.

So it is lawful to do what is good on the Sabbath.

And then in Mark 2, 27, he says, The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

You see, Jesus understood, and he wanted everybody else to understand as well, the spirit of what God wanted regarding the Sabbath.

It was meant to be a blessing, yet they had turned it into a curse.

And if you really think about what's going on here with these Jewish leaders here in verse 10, what they're actually doing is they're asking, you know, could anyone other than, well, let me ask you a question.

Could anyone other than God heal this man like Jesus did?

No.

So in reality, these people are mad at God for doing good on the Sabbath.

Here they ignored the miracle and missed the purpose, but they want to focus on the gnat that just landed in their drink.

Look at verse 11 with me.

He replied, The man who made me well told me, pick up your mat and walk.

Who is this man who told you, pick up your mat and walk?

They asked.

You know, they wanted to know who they could get in trouble, really, is who they were looking for.

And they ignored the miraculous work that was being done.

Because they didn't deem that good work to be appropriate on this day.

You know, this, when I think about it, it was like the HOA board of Judaism, is what these guys were.

You know, they're walking around with their rulers to see if their grass was a quarter inch too tall or something like that.

But notice in verse 11 and 12 that to the healed man, Jesus is the one that made him well.

To the Jewish leaders, he was the one that told the man to pick up his mat and walk.

Isn't that interesting?

Two very different views of who Jesus is, depending on where their focus was.

Look at verse 13 with me.

But the man who was healed did not know who it was, because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

So Jesus is still not ready to perform these miracles in front of large crowds in Jerusalem and then deal with them trying to make him king only because they had seen miracles being done.

Jesus knew they didn't have a trust faith in him at this time.

They didn't have a faith in what he was saying, but only in what they were seeing through these miracles.

You know, this is the crowd that couldn't decide whether they wanted to crown him or kill him.

You know, there's times where it's like, crown him, and then next moment, kill him.

You know, Hosanna, crucify these people that are just going back and forth.

So he just slips away quietly because it wasn't his time yet.

Look at verse 14.

After this, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, See, you are well.

You are well here refers to a permanent wholeness.

This was not a temporary thing that Jesus did.

He had made this man whole physically.

But notice Jesus now wants to address the much more important issue with this man, making him whole spiritually.

So look at the second half of verse 14.

Do not sin anymore, so that something worse doesn't happen to you.

This verse can be misunderstood to mean that, you know, his original disability was a judgment for this man's sin.

And he may have gotten injured while sinning, you know, we don't know.

But we see in other places that Jesus debunks the theory that this guy was being judged for his sin or even for his parents' sin.

Because this is something that used to be thought in this day.

Basically, if you have an ailment of some sort like this guy, it's God's judgment on you.

And you know, we see that with Job and with his friends and things like that.

But we do pay the consequences of our sin while we're still on this earth.

And maybe this guy was injured as a consequence, not a judgment, but a consequence for his sin.

You know, maybe he broke the law, he was running from the authorities, he tripped and he broke his back, you know, or something like that, and then he ended up paralyzed.

But most likely, I think Jesus is just saying, sin no more.

Like, follow me.

Make sure that something worse, like eternity in hell, doesn't happen to you.

He's addressing the spiritual here.

Again, back to this being a sign that Jesus performed.

Follow me and sin no more is what Jesus tells us to do when we come to faith in him.

Because the worst thing that could ever happen to us is to reject Jesus and then go on sinning and enter into an eternity without him.

You know, this guy probably thought his life was rough before being paralyzed for 38 years, or being paralyzed for 38 years, but eternity in hell is the something worse that could happen to this guy.

Look at verse 15.

The man went and reported to the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Therefore the Jews began persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.

These guys can't see the force for the treaties right here.

In their attempt to keep every dot and tittle of their own interpretation of the law, they miss God.

The giver, the creator of the law in the first place.

And this is what legalism does to people.

These Jewish leaders missed their long-awaited Messiah that they were so looking forward to.

But when their Messiah didn't meet their expectations, they persecuted him instead.

This is why our expectations of God can be so dangerous.

Just as we're seeing with these religious authorities here.

They didn't allow Scripture to inform them about who God really is, what his heart is toward them, and what the spirit of God's law is, the spirit of God behind the law and why he gave it in the first place.

They allowed some rabbis' legalistic interpretation of the law to become the most important thing in their life, instead of God being the most important thing in their life.

You know, if you've been here at our church for any amount of time, you know that we place a very high value on you individually being in the scriptures on your own.

That's why we do the reading plans, that's why we have the dwell app, is to encourage you to be in scripture for yourself.

And we play we uh we place a very high value on that.

And this is why we teach through the Bible the way that we do.

So you understand the scriptures for yourself.

You know, this is actually, we have a list of values for our church that you can also find on the website.

But the number one value of our church, it says the Bible is the compass that directs everything we do.

But don't ever trust me or anyone else just because we're up here and you're sitting there.

You have to know scripture for yourself.

Because if I ever go down a road like one of these religious authorities or somebody else does, you need to be able to say, ah, that's not right.

That's not what Scripture says, and I'm not okay with this.

And you should be doing that with every pastor that you listen to, with every book that you read, with every podcast that might be on your playlist.

Because if you have scripture hidden in your heart and the Holy Spirit living inside of you as every Christian does, you don't need anyone to tell you what to do.

I really want you to hear that and understand it.

If you have scripture hidden in your heart, if you have the Holy Spirit inside of you, you don't need anyone, including me, to tell you what to do.

You see, our whole goal here at Abide as a Church is not to teach you what to think, but how to think biblically for yourself.

And the only way to do that is for you to know the Bible for yourself.

And the fancy word is that's called a biblical worldview.

Everything you come across being seen through the lens of Scripture.

You need to have your own Bible glasses, so to speak.

And you can't borrow mine.

Because we need to have them on all the time.

Scripture should affect everything that we look at.

You know, we've actually, another rabbit trail, we've actually been accused as a church of being anti-political.

You know, we're not anti-politics at all.

You better vote, you better be engaged, you better play a part in who gets elected and what laws get passed, but we're not going to tell you what you should be thinking about those things.

I'm not smarter than you are.

Because if you have God's word and the Holy Spirit inside of you, like I said, you don't need anyone to tell you what to do.

These religious leaders had been teaching legalism and had been adding to God's law and telling people what they should be thinking and what they should be doing and not doing on the Sabbath.

And completely missed the heart of God.

And we're, and we're making the people of Israel miss the heart of God as well.

And the people of Israel didn't even know it.

That's scary.

So I want to encourage you, know the word, abide in Christ, walk by the Spirit, and filter everything through the lens of Scripture, and you won't have to worry about that for yourself.

Even what you hear me saying, it all needs to be filtered through a biblical worldview that is your own.

If you do that, you will know the heart of God and the spirit behind what God has instructed each one of us to do in his word.

You know, if you're here today and Jesus has not made you whole spiritually, he wants to heal you instantly this morning and give you a new life in him.

Just accept his invitation of if you want to be made well, of if you want to be made whole.

You just simply have to say yes to that.

And he wants to heal you spiritually instantly for all of eternity.

Would you please pray with me?

Lord, I thank you so much for your word and all that you have for each one of us in it.

Lord, I pray that you would give us the desire and the discipline to be in your word, to read it for ourselves, to understand it for ourselves.

Lord, it is so important to understanding your heart and to understanding the spirit behind all of the instructions that you've left us in your word.

Lord, your word is a gift.

I pray that we wouldn't take it lightly.

Lord, show us how to study your word effectively, to where you're speaking to us directly and it's not filtered through the voice of somebody else.

Lord, would you give us a lens of Scripture for ourselves to have a biblical worldview?

Lord, everything we're looking at is through the lens of Scripture.

Would you show us how to do that well?

And Lord, if if things may seem murky, Lord, would you align us with the right people that we could talk to and talk through those things and figure out what your scripture is saying on every little detail of our life?

God, we love you so much and we thank you for the gifts that you've given each one of us, the gift of Scripture, the gift of your Son Jesus Christ.

Lord, if there's anybody here that has not accepted Jesus into their life, has not come into a trusting relationship, has not said yes to being made whole spiritually again, would you just, in the quietness of your own heart, just repeat after me.

Lord Jesus, I thank you for all that you've done for me.

I thank you that you desire me and want to make me whole again.

Lord Jesus, I admit that I am a sinner, that I have failed, and that sin has corrupted my life.

Lord, I pray that you would forgive me of those sins.

I recognize that's why you died on the cross for me, why you spilled your blood in my place, dying the death that I deserved.

Lord, would you please make me whole through and through in my life, I pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.