Just Us: Do Justice | Part 1

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Today we're kicking off a series called Just Us.

Go ahead and say that out loud.

This is a series that I've wanted to do for well over a year.

And the reason I haven't done it is yet until now was I really wanted to wait until there wasn't some pressing reactionary thing to give this series when we're talking about justice, because I don't want it to be a reaction to something.

This is about who we are as followers of Jesus.

This is our calling and our ethos and who we're to be.

I remember the series titles came from I was listening to Dr.

Ephraim Smith.

He was preaching and he quoted somebody, and I don't know who he quoted, and I couldn't find it, so I'm going to just give him the credit for it.

And he had this line.

He said, When Christ returns, Jesus returns, there will be ultimate justice.

When he comes, he's going to right every wrong.

There will be no more evil on this planet.

He will restore.

There will be no pain and suffering, no more weeping.

Until then, it's just us.

Until then, it's just us.

Until then, we the church are called to be his hands and his feet to bring life and hope and restoration to a hurting and broken world.

You know, in the new year we make new plans, don't we?

Set new goals, have new dreams.

I just wonder, this new year's 2022, have you considered this?

In all those goal setting plans and dream casting, and I love the new year, by the way.

Have you asked this question?

What does God desire for you in 2022?

I know your dreams, I know your goals, your plans, but have you wrestled what does God really desire for you from you in 2022?

And as a church, we must ask this question well, what does God desire for us as a church?

Better yet.

Maybe you've not thought of this before.

What does he actually require of us as a church?

The scripture speaks clearly of what he desires and what he requires.

And no more, I think, clear statement can be found about what God has for you and what God has for us.

Is in 2022 can be found in Micah chapter 6, verse 8.

Micah 6:8

In fact, if you have your Bibles, would you go ahead and open up to Micah chapter 6, verse 8?

Micah 6:8

Micah, it's in the Old Testament.

He's a prophet, he's a minor prophet.

They're called minor, not because they're insignificant, it's just they had shorter letters, that's all.

He's a minor prophet.

He's prophesying, this is written somewhere between the time of 750 BC and 700 BC.

He's a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah as well, among some others.

Now, at the time, um Israel used to be a unified kingdom, and it eventually split a lot of different reasons for that, but into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom.

The northern kingdom was called Israel, the southern kingdom was called Judah, and Micah was a prophet with Isaiah to the southern kingdom in Judah.

In 722 BC, the northern kingdom was attacked by Assyria, the superpower, taken over, decimated, and they were brought into captivity.

Micah watched all of this, and he is a calling the people of God in Judah back to himself.

In fact, he lays out the book much like a lawyer does.

He begins to outline his case against the people of Judah.

And see, the problem was with the Israelites, with God's people, is they gave lip service to God.

They would go to the temple and they would perform the sacrifice.

They would go to the temple and give what they had to give, but they did not give life service to God.

In fact, they lived for themselves.

They lived very self-centered, selfish, greedy lives.

And Micah's calling this out saying, your religion is worthless because look at how your life and how you're exploiting people for your own gain.

And here in Micah chapter 6, verse 8, we get the most clear statement of what God desires for you and me.

Micah 6:8

And he says, He has shown you, O man or O mortal, or all of humanity, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you?

But to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

I think it's interesting, right?

He says there, he's shown you, he's revealed it.

It's to make known.

Like it's not hidden.

Some of us are like, okay, God's will, God's desire, I have to kind of seek it out, I have to figure it out.

And he's like, no, no, no.

I've shown you, I've revealed it to you.

It's kind of like the parents.

I've been here many, many times, where you're telling your kids something, and you tell them over and over, and then you go, I told you that, and they're like, I don't remember it.

That's kind of how this is being played out here.

He's shown you, he's revealed it, he's told you what is good of moral excellence.

By the way, God gets to define what is good, not us.

And what does God require of us?

See, as we begin this conversation, we talk about it.

I first have to begin with what I'm calling a convicting truth.

And this is just a convicting truth that I think we need to just wrestle with right from the beginning, and it's simply this God's will for your life is clear.

We tend to complicate it so we don't have to obey it.

God's will for your life is clear.

He's shown you what is good.

In our we'll try that again.

In our sophistication, we tend to complicate it.

Sorry, this guy just fell off.

You know, it's an interesting thing, isn't it?

God's will.

We wrestle with it.

And we go, Ryan, God's will can't be that clear.

See, ninety-nine percent of God's will for your life is actually revealed in his word to you.

1% of it's not.

That 1%, like who should I date?

Who should I marry?

That 1%, should I take this job?

That 1%, um, you know, should we move here?

Those are the unknowns, and we focus all of our energy, all of our time, all of our effort on that 1%, and he's going, no, no, I've shown you and I've revealed it to you.

My will is clear for your life.

And by the way, if you obey and do the 99%, that 1% will become clear, and he'll show you that too.

And so, as we begin 2022, we're gonna spend the next three weeks talking about what does it look like to do justice?

What does it look like next week to love mercy?

And finally, what does it look like?

What does it look like to walk humbly with your God?

And so today, let's talk about do justice.

Go ahead and say that with me so I know you're with me.

Thank you, Mikhail, right there.

I love it, buddy.

Do justice.

How do we become a people that does justice?

How do we become a church that acts justly?

Now, there's actually, I believe, two major problems in the evangelical church when we're talking about justice.

Uh, the two problems is I'm calling them two uh different views.

And the first view is this, and many, many Christians in the evangelical church fall into this view that justice is not my calling.

Justice is not my thing.

You may either go, like, oh, I'm so glad that it's someone's thing, I'm so glad it's your thing, you know, justice is God's thing, hello, you know, leave room for the vengeance of God, hello.

But justice is not my thing, it's not my calling.

In fact, I've heard this refrain lately, not actually at our church, so I'm so grateful for, but around, is like, you know, what is all this talk about justice?

Let's just get back to Jesus and the gospel.

And that sounds nice.

But have you read the New Testament?

Have you read the Gospels?

And you can't get very far in the gospel before you see that Jesus is all about justice and restoring.

The gospel is actually good news, and good news for those who are poor and mistreated and oppressed.

First view.

Justice is not my calling.

Second view is of those that recognize the heir of the first, and so, in an attempt to embrace justice, have actually not done the full work.

And it's really secular justice is my calling.

Secular justice.

In fact, I was uh hanging out with a friend on Friday and he was asking me, we were talking about the sermon, and he was asking me, like, Ryan, what does secular justice mean?

Because we don't use that word uh very often.

Secular really is disconnected from God or disconnected from spirituality, disconnected from uh religion in some sense.

Secular justice is an approach to justice that introduces distortions into our practices.

First, there is first distortion is that there is no transcendent moral absolutes on which to base justice.

See, fundamentally, justice is simply this: an alignment to a standard of goodness.

That's what justice is.

It's aligning to a standard of goodness.

And if there are no moral absolutes upon which we are aligning to, that standard of goodness is changing.

And haven't we seen that in our culture?

Ten years ago, what was just and right is no longer just and right today.

And by the way, it will ever shift with the tide of culture and the populist opinion in the day.

And so justice is an ever-moving target.

Secondly, secular justice tends to be reductionistic, meaning that it's looking for a singular cause to explain all of the problems in our world, and it's far more complex than that.

It's often secular justice is justice to the neglect of mercy and humility.

You see, um, okay, I'm gonna offend you real quick.

I'll just give you a heads up about this.

Jesus doesn't fit into your political party.

Do you know what some of the distinctive marks of the early followers of Jesus were?

One let me give you four.

One of them was racial justice, racial equality, this unity.

This was incredibly transformational and unheard of.

That there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female.

This was unheard of.

Second, was this care and concern for the poor.

In a world all about status and power, there was no concern for the poor, only your own power.

Thirdly, was the sanctity of life.

You know, practice in the ancient day was a practice called exposure, in which if you had an unwanted child, maybe was born with a disability, maybe was of the wrong gender, much of the time, if you had a female child, would be exposed.

And what it meant is you would take this child and you would expose it to the elements.

You would leave the child you just birthed on the side, maybe in a trash heap, just to be exposed to the elements and died.

And what the early followers of Jesus did is they would go around and collect these children who were abandoned, who are unwanted, and raise them as their own to their own cost.

In the Roman world, it was a deeply sexualized culture, and even more so if you were an aristocrat, wealthy male Roman to have sex with anyone, anytime, anywhere, even though your spouse was supposed to be celibate.

That's a whole nother sermon on another day.

And the sexual ethic of the New Testament stood against all of that.

Here's what's interesting: you take some of those and they sound profoundly liberal, don't they?

And you take some of those and they sound profoundly conservative, don't they?

Why?

Because a follower of Jesus is not to allow their political party to be the defining reality of them, but Jesus' standard for how we are to go about life.

So let's talk about what is biblical justice.

What does it look like, and how do we go about living it out?

I want you when you think about biblical justice to have two words in mind, two framing words.

One, uh biblical justice as resistance, and biblical justice as restoration.

There is some things as followers of Jesus we are to resist and put away push away and rid ourselves of and restore, proactively engage in the process of.

Would you say that with me?

Meshpat.

Now you're a Hebrew scholar.

This word actually carries this idea of true religion.

Like your truest religious response is this.

It is the proper personal response to God that manifests itself in social concern, equity, and the well-being of all God's creation, especially the poor, the powerless, and the voiceless.

That in light of who God is, his greatness, his goodness, and his grace, my only response is then to respond in grace and justice for his creation, specifically those who are created in the Imago Day people that God loves, that are oppressed, that are poor, that are voiceless.

The prophet Isaiah gives us a powerful definition of justice in Isaiah 1, 16 and 17.

You'll see the resistance and the restoration at play here.

He says, Wash and make yourself clean.

Take your evil deeds out of my sight.

Stop doing wrong.

Learn to do right.

If you're taking notes, circle all the verbs in there.

That's resistance.

There's a thing in us.

We have to resist.

Take your evil deeds out like the garbage and then restore.

Defend the oppressed.

Take up the cause of the fatherless.

Plead the case of the widow.

This is biblical justice.

James, the brother of Jesus, picks up on this idea of true religion, and speaking to the entire Hebrew scriptures of summing up what true religion or justice is, writes in James chapter 1 this.

James 1 · chapter mention

He says, Those who consider themselves religious, and if you're still taking notes, circle the word religious through this.

And yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongue, deceive themselves, and the religion is worthless.

Ooh.

That's a sermon all and of itself, right there, isn't it?

And by the way, follower of Jesus, this verse alone should cause us to pause before we post.

Right?

Think about it.

If you do not keep a tight rein on your tongue, James is saying, you're self-deceived.

Speaking my truth.

No, you're self-deceived.

And your religion is worthless.

But notice what he goes on to say.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless, true religion, it has this Hebrew understanding of Mishpat is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

We see resistance from the pollution of the world and restoration looking after orphans and widows.

We are rightly concerned about the effects of pollution in our world, aren't we?

And yet, we seem to be completely unconcerned of the effect of the world polluting our souls.

And yet there is this pool and this draw that is polluting us and pulling us in.

Resistance, restoration.

The Proverbs speak significantly to justice.

Summed up in Proverbs 29:7, the author says this the righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.

Proverbs 29:7

I don't know about you.

But when we talk about righteous and wicked, and I'm reading that in the Hebrew scriptures and the Old Testament in Proverbs, I don't necessarily put myself in the righteous category.

You know, I'm like, that's kind of like a big statement, right?

Righteous.

Now we all know this if you've been in, you know, church for a while, that our identity is received, not achieved.

Like we are righteous in Christ.

We have the imputed righteousness of Him.

But there's sometimes that hard feeling of like, yeah, I'm the righteous, if I'm the righteous.

But then at the same time, you know what?

We don't really put, or I'm sorry.

I don't necessarily say I'm in the wicked category either, right?

That's reserved for like really bad people.

I mean, like bad, bad, bad.

Notice what it said about the righteous and the wicked.

The righteous care about justice for the poor.

The wicked.

And it doesn't say this.

Exploit the poor.

Oppress the poor.

What does it say?

It just doesn't have a concern.

Ooh.

That's a different definition than I ever had.

Bruce Walkie, Old Testament scholar, he he actually sums up the entire teaching in the book of Proverbs about the righteous.

That word in Hebrew is the Sadiq.

He says, the righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community.

The wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.

And here's why this is so incredibly difficult in our day, in especially Western American culture.

Our culture is hyper individualistic, right?

Consumeristic and hedonistic.

That's America.

And so a hyper individualistic culture.

Says this, my rights over my responsibility.

And we're hearing everybody, this is my right to do this, but I'm not hearing my responsibility for the common man, my responsibility to the community, my responsibility to the other, to the least.

In a consumeristic culture, it's about my wants over your needs.

It's about me getting and not necessarily me giving.

In a hedonistic, pleasure-oriented, it is the highest good.

It's about my cravings over my calling.

See, this is the culture, these this is when he says in James is saying, and do not be polluted by the world.

These are the things that are like toxins to our soul that are keeping us from being the people God has designed us to be and created us to be.

And so, how do we be, you know, the how are we called to disadvantage ourselves?

Let me just give you four areas.

The first is in the area that's personal.

Personal.

You notice Isaiah, wash and make yourself clean.

James, keep a tight rein on your tongue, keep from being polluted.

First, first, disadvantage.

I need to root out evil in my life.

I need to root out evil in my life.

We're called to live lives of integrity.

Where you'd say, God, if there's anything in me that's not of you, would you show me and I'll do the necessary thing and the necessary work to get that out of my life?

I mean, Jesus would go to the extent, think about this, the way he would say it.

He'd say, if your eye causes you sin, gouge it out.

If your hand causes you sin, cut it off.

And we rightly go, that's hyperbole.

He's making a point.

But what's the point?

Because we dismiss it and say, well, we're not under that.

Yeah, the point is do whatever it takes to root out sin and evil in your life.

Personally, the other side of it, here's what's fascinating in the Hebrew law, it literally said, if you saw your enemy's donkey had wandered off, enemy's donkey, this is awesome.

This is in the Bible, by the way.

You are to return that donkey to your enemy.

Not go, that's awesome.

They deserve that.

In fact, it goes even further than that.

If you see your enemy and your donkey and their donkey is loaded up to the point that it's collapsed, you don't go, shouldn't have put so much on it.

Your call by the law of God is to go and serve them and help them and restore the donkey.

Jesus would say it this way, right?

Love your enemies.

Love your enemies.

And pray for those who persecute you personally.

What does this look like?

Root out evil.

Love our enemies.

Secondly, social or communal.

A responsibility to the community.

You know, it's interesting.

Uh in Deuteronomy, it's actually Deuteronomy 24, 17 through 22, there's actually what's called gleaning laws.

It's when if you were a property owner, if you're a landowner, uh God commanded you.

It's like you have this property, and there's these laws about how you're to harvest.

And so what you were to do was as you are harvesting your crop, you're actually supposed to leave the fringes, the edges, the corners for the poor and the foreigner to come and uh harvest themselves.

And the picture is this that you're not to maximize your profit for yourself, but you're supposed to leave some over for those in need.

It's not, it wasn't this charity.

It was, hey, we have this and you can come harvest it yourself.

And it was this sense of how we are to communally take care of one another.

It wasn't that your property was to be taken from you and given, it was this voluntary act.

Why?

Because this is yours, but you recognize that all that you have is God's and you are simply loving his creation and his people.

It's interesting the whole early church took this on in Acts 2, 45.

It says, they sold property and possessions to give anyone who was in need.

This is our heritage.

This is what it means to be a just follower of Jesus.

Proximity to the poor changes our heart.

That's why our homeless outreach team and ministry and what they're doing is so incredible.

And if you've been a part of the food pantries that happen every Thursday, it begins to shape and change you, and you can't live the same way.

Personal, social, judicial.

Judicial means everyone must be treated equally and with dignity.

Why?

Because every single person is created in the image of God, meaning you have intrinsic, infinite value and worth.

You have never met an ordinary person in your life.

In fact, Leviticus 24 was laws for the foreigner.

You know, most countries, in fact, every nation, they had laws for their people, and they didn't treat other people the same.

And God set it up and said, laws for the foreigner, you must treat them exactly the same way.

You must have the same laws.

Any system of justice that favors the wealthy, the powerful, and disadvantages the poor is an abomination to God.

And systems of injustice perpetuate far more evil than any single person.

And we got to wrestle with that.

And we have to take a fresh look at that because there are systems of injustice and worldwide historically, not just America, but yes, America.

If you are wealthy, you get out of things.

Don't serve the same amount of time.

And if you aren't wealthy, you get longer sentences, poorer representation.

We gotta wrestle with this.

Let me see where I'm at.

Okay, I can do this.

Uh we gotta wrestle with this, even in understanding the systematic nature of our country and the brokenness to be able to grow.

And we don't understand how so much of it's rooted uh even in our language.

So I'll just give you this.

I wasn't able to do this on the first service.

Uh you know that word uh grandfathered in?

Yeah, you know where that comes from?

I didn't until like uh about a year or two ago.

I can't remember where I stumbled upon this, but I I said, I'm I'm gonna strike this from my language.

I didn't realize this was the origin of it.

I used to use it all.

I'm like, hey, we're grandfathered in here, that's awesome.

And it's this idea that you know there's a special treatment because of you've been here so long.

This came about in the Civil War area.

Uh the actual date was during uh the 1870, the 15th Amendment prohibiting racial discrimination, specifically of voting in the South, said, okay, we're not allowed to discriminate based on your race anymore, so how do we make sure we can discriminate?

Enacted two different things, a poll tax and a literary test.

Well, now all of a sudden, instead of discriminating on race, they're discriminating on education and affluence.

And in the South, there's a lot of illiterate, uh poor white people who used to be able to vote, and if this law went into effect, would no longer be able to vote.

And so they came up with the grandfather clause.

If your grandfather could vote, then even though you are poor, you can't pay the poll tax, illiterate, you still can vote.

I mean, there's things, friends, I just gotta tell you, there's things in our language, things in our water stuff that we just gotta do the work.

We gotta do the work that you you have no idea the origin of it and the history and how evil it is as a system of injustice.

And finally, financial speaks the Old Testament speaks to unfair wages, delayed wages, exorbitant interest.

James would pick up on the theme in James chapter 5 and talk about hoarding wealth.

James 5 · chapter mention

And we know about hoarding because we all live through the great toilet paper crisis of 2020.

And it's I gotta get mine, and it's the scarcity mentality, and I don't have any to give or to share.

Friends, if created it all, and if he gave his life for you, how will he not, along with him, graciously give you all things?

There should be no hoarding Christian.

That was a great place for an amen, more than snaps.

And yet we pull back.

Why?

Because we live in a hyper-individualistic, consumeristic, hedonistic culture, and we have just bought the lie.

All right, Ryan, thank you very much.

Happy New Year.

What do we do with this?

How do we respond?

Let me give you just three responses.

First, we gotta resist a quick fixed mindset.

Jeremiah talks about this.

He says, They dress the wounds of my people as though it were not serious, peace and say peace, peace, when there is no peace.

I mean, that's this is where the phrase uh bandaid on a bullet wound, I think, originated from.

And this is what we do in this area because it's uncomfortable and it's hard work.

Is we want just a quick fix, especially the American church.

Oh, let me say it, the white American church.

We gotta resist quick fixes.

Uh over the holidays, I popped into the office, and there were a couple chairs that needed to be built for a little uh kitchenette uh table.

And so I had my two boys with me uh to help build it.

Uh it's interesting, as I was talking to my boys asking them if I can share the story.

Uh I was like, no, keep your names anonymous.

And the one who's kind of the hero of the story is like, no, Dad, tell the names.

Tell the names.

I want credit.

And so there once were two boys.

It's a parable.

Open up the boxes.

And one boy opens up the directions and very focused, following step by step, the other boy, like a man, just threw the directions away.

And he begins to build it on his own.

And in fact, it looked like he was doing, like he was gonna finish earlier because his looked like a chair, where the other just looked like a pile and a mess in the corner.

And yet, what was interesting is the one who did the directions actually finished sooner.

And when the one who didn't do the directions, I come to see his chair, um, it was together.

It looked right, you could sit on it, but what was interesting was there's all these washers.

Like literally all of them.

Like, not one washer was you it the washing package, that's not even how you say it.

The washer package was not opened.

These aren't the washers, this is way too big.

I just wanted you to be able to see it.

And he said, Dad, what's the big deal?

It works.

I said, Yeah, son, it does for today.

And anybody who's built things, and if you don't do it correctly, you know what the washer's for.

What the washer's for is to spread out the distribution of pressure.

The washer's for these little angles as it's put into the wood, as you kind of get pressure on it, this digs in and begins to pull away, and eventually, maybe weeks or a month goes by, it has developed grooves into the wood, and the chair will fall apart.

And so you put a washer into it to hold it into place.

In fact, there's another washer there called a lock washer that helps hold it against the vibrations of it.

And friends, I would say in our attempt of talking about this, we've put together some things, but often miss the washers and the hard work because it takes time, and we have to go back to the direction manual of God's word to say, God, what have you called us to do?

Who have you called us to be?

What does justice look like?

And we're gonna resist quick fixes.

It's gonna take a little bit longer.

It's gonna look messy in the beginning.

But man, we're gonna build what God said he called us to build.

Seconds.

Respond with confession.

Resist quick confession, respond with confession.

Micah said, wash yourself, take out your evil deeds.

It's been said that confession is good for the soul, but bad for the reputation.

The church today needs to do more looking internally and confessing rather than looking externally and criticizing and condemning and correcting.

And I really believe as the leader goes, so goes the church.

And I was on a run this last week, a very painful memory came to mind, and I've wrestled deeply of even whether I should share it.

I grew up in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz is super diverse in thought, not very diverse in ethnicity, it's mainly white and Hispanic, but but it's this very diverse, you know, celebrating the diversity of thought.

Lived in Chicago.

Uh my two backgrounds, music and sports, super diverse.

So when I think about having prejudice in my heart, I don't actually think it's there.

I just didn't like, like, there's nothing there.

Like prejudice simply means to pre-judge someone.

In my 20s, this memory, it's just like how the Holy Spirit, like when you're teaching on stuff, he just brings stuff to mind, and it was just like, oh God.

I was driving into Orchard Supply.

Remember when that was a thing?

Yeah.

In my 20s, I was in a hurry.

I was always in a hurry.

Rushing in, pulling through the parking lot way too fast, and a car backs out and we hit one another.

I'm in a hurry, I'm frustrated, I'm angry.

I get out of my car and I'm ashamed to say my first words were because of the how the car looked.

Different ethnicity.

So, do you have insurance?

And it wasn't that kind of like, do you have insurance?

Like, this is just we're talking about, you know, you it was a an evilness in my heart.

And we can explain it away of like, hey, um you're having a bad day, or hey, you're in a rush.

Jesus said, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

There's something in my heart that I needed to root out.

And the minute those words came out of my mouth, I was shh filled with shame.

And apologized to the person.

See, we gotta respond with confession.

We gotta respond.

It begins with an awareness of what's wrong, agreeing with God about our current reality and addressing the issue.

That's what confession is.

And then finally, let's take a step this week to do justice.

Let's take a step to do justice as a church.

One writer said this to act justly is most important.

For it does not mean to talk about justice or to get other people to act justly.

It means to do the just thing yourself.

What's your step?

Of justice.

When Jesus returns, there'll be ultimate of justice.

Until then.

It's just us.

He's shown you.

He's shown me what's good.

What is good.

The Lord require.

But to act justly.

To love mercy.

To walk humbly for God.

God's will for your life and my life in 2022 is clear.

I tend to complicate it.

So I don't have to obey it.

In 2020, literally January of 2020, I started a book called Your Best Year Ever.

Wow.

I'm like, this book stinks.

You know, I think 2020 was a year we needed as a church.

A friend of mine called it the Great Reveal.

It revealed we're not in control, right?

It revealed racial inequity.

It revealed political tribalism.

It revealed that life's fragile.

I actually believe 2022 can be your best year ever.

I believe 2022 can be awakening's best year ever.

Now note, not easiest year.

Best and easiest are different.

But it's up to us.

Will we do justice?

Will we love mercy?

Will we walk humbly with our God?

God, would you make us that kind of church?

That kind of people.

People that don't merely hear your word and do nothing about it, but actively respond and obey.

And so right now, Heavenly Father, would you give us the wisdom to know what to do with what we just heard and the courage to do it no matter how hard it is.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

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