The Beatitudes - Part 3

Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

And we are once again going to read these eight Beatitudes of Blessings.

But the Lord Jesus starts the sermon on the mount with.

Before I read any, pray for us.

A prayer taken from Psalm 119.

Blessed are you, O Lord.

Teach us your statutes.

You are good and you do good.

Teach us your statutes.

Open our eyes that we might see wonderful things in your word.

In the name of Christ we pray.

Amen.

Matthew, chapter 5, starting at verse 2.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

And he opened his mouth and saw them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for that is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

So theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In his novel, The Great Divorce, C.

S.

Lewis imagines a trip to heaven.

It's in the form of a dream, so he gets a sort of get-out clause, if I've got anything wrong, it's not actually heaven, all that sort of thing.

But various interesting things.

One of those C.

S.

Lewis bits where he gets lots of things right and a bunch of things wrong as well, and so you have to sort of approach it with caution.

But there's a really interesting scene where the guy who's visiting heaven sees coming a uh across the gulp, sort of the green fields, a procession.

There is someone very important coming.

There's all sorts of sort of courtiers around this person.

Magnificent song and dance.

As the procession gets closer, he sees that the person who's coming is a woman.

And she's so beautiful, so radiant in her heavenly clothing that he says he can't look at the beauty of her face.

Not straight on.

He's got a guide to heaven with him, and he wonders to the guide, is that Mary?

Could that be the sort of the most the woman that every generation blesses?

And the guide goes, No, no, that's not her.

That's a woman you've never heard of.

Her name was Sarah Smith, and she lived with gold as green.

Just an ordinary, and as the story unfolds, you find this is a very ordinary Christian lady, married to a very unpleasant man, and very sort of ordinary things going on in her life, and yet in heaven, she is counted one of the very great saints.

The structure of the Beatitudes goes like this.

The first three we looked at first are about giving up on yourself, recognizing your poverty of spirit, mourning that poverty, and learning to give up on yourself in meekness.

And then the hinge of the Beatitudes that we spent last session on is the fourth one.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, as we see our poverty, as we give up on ourselves, we long for something more.

We long to be filled with righteousness, and the Lord does in fact satisfy us with the righteousness that we long for.

And then we see in the second half of the Beatitudes what that righteousness looks like.

The three that we're going to look at in this session, Numbers five through seven, are really the way that Christ unpacks that righteousness that he will fill us with.

And it is, I think, a pretty unexpected little list.

There's various lists of virtues, lists of kind of good things in Scripture.

This is not the only one, and so I don't want to say ignore all others.

These are the only ones you should care about.

But it is striking, isn't it, that the Lord Jesus, having commended to us such humility, brings out these particular virtues for our attention.

Mercy, purity, and making peace.

My guess is that as for those of us who are here yesterday, and as I talked about kind of hungering for righteousness and mentioned kind of the things that we desire to have that we don't yet have, might I imagine that you were thinking of particular things in your own life, particular gaps that you feel in your soul, things that you love to see, ambitions that you have.

I wonder whether these three were echoing particularly loudly in your thoughts.

Certainly, for me, if the Lord Jesus hadn't put these in there, it would take a while before I came up with them.

There'd be many other things that I would have higher up that list.

And so it's a wonderful opportunity this morning just to consider these unobtrusive virtues that the Lord Jesus Himself considers very precious.

We're going to go through them: mercy, purity, and peacemaking.

Then we're going to think about what that shows us as a whole.

And finally, I want to come, we'll do something slightly different.

I want to zoom in in the final little bit of this session on that middle blessing, for they shall see God.

So let's go for mercy first of all.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

There's a, I think a sense that these three that we're looking at this morning parallel the first three that we saw.

You can kind of line them up.

Mercy particularly flows from poverty of spirits, just as we'll see purity particularly flows from mourning and peacemaking from being meek.

Mercy particularly flows from poverty of spirits.

The one who is the one who knows his own poverty is kind to the poverty of others.

Because that is what mercy is.

Mercy is a particular kind of love.

Love is a general thing.

Love can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways.

Mercy is love shown to the miserable in their misery.

And there's various different forms of it.

Perhaps the one that we might immediately think of is forgiveness.

And the Lord Jesus Himself highlights that very firmly.

If you were to go and have a look at Matthew chapter 18, you'd find the great and sobering parable of the unforgiving servant.

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

I won't go over it in detail, but in this parable, a great king has a servant who owes him an unimaginable debt, ten thousand pounds.

And the servant begs for mercy, and the king has mercy and says, I won't hold you to it, and lets him go.

And as the servant goes out of the throne room where he's just been relieved of this debt, he finds another servant who owes him still a significant amount of money, a thousand denarii, that's a third of a year's wages.

Not a small amount, but tiny compared to the debt he's just been forgiven.

And he shows no mercy.

The other servant begs him for time to pay back his hundred denarii debt, and instead he grabs him, chokes him, pay back what you owe me, has him thrown into debtor's jail.

The other servants, distressed at what they've seen, go to the king, who furious summons his servant back in.

And Matthew 18, verse 33 picks up this exact language, the language of mercy, and says, Shouldn't you have shown mercy just as I showed mercy to you?

Matthew 18:33

So mercy is a matter of forgiveness.

And the Lord Jesus emphasizes this both negatively, as in that parable, and as in Matthew chapter 6, he says, If you do not forgive others their sins, your Heavenly Father will not forgive you your sins, and also positively, in a wonderful way.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

And we have that in this verse here, we have it in the Lord's Prayer, for example, where we pray.

Imagine you pray regularly, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And in that little clause, as we forgive those who sin against us, the Lord Jesus is providing us with a divinely authorized kind of argument to make for our own forgiveness, isn't that remarkable?

That we get to say to the Lord, I don't deserve mercy, otherwise it wouldn't be mercy, but you have given me such grace that I can see in my own heart I have been forgiving others.

You've been fitting me for that.

And so you've been showing me mercy, so continue to do so.

Forgive me as I forgive those who sin against me by the grace of your spirit.

So there is a warning here, let me say.

So pursue forgiveness and kill the bitterness in your heart.

But there is, I think, I want to say much more clearly in this verse, uh, just a wonderful encouragement.

If if you know your own sin, the thought of God's forgiveness to you can sometimes feel ridiculous.

Other people might be forgiven their sins, but how on earth could he forgive that one?

I I even feel my own repentance, so inadequate, so incomplete.

But the Lord Jesus in his kindness gives us an encouragement here.

Yes, you sinned that great sin.

And you might think that the fact that you have not held that thing against that person is totally irrelevant and much smaller and all those things, but actually see that and take heart.

The Lord is at work in you, he is giving you his grace.

Trust him for this great grace as well.

Blessed are the merciful, they'll be shown mercy.

I want to say mercy is not just forgiveness.

Sometimes I think in our uh language about it, we can uh have that idea.

But in scripture it is wider than that.

And in particular, a great focus of mercy in scripture is kindness to the poor.

If you look at this, the Greek word that Jesus uses here and trace that back into the Greek translation of the Old Testament that he would have been familiar with and the New Testament writers use, find in the book of Proverbs, for example, that word keeps on coming up for those who are generous and kind to the needs of the poor.

It's there in the book of James, for example.

James has this great chapter 2, verse 13, where he talks about mercy and judgment.

Mercy triumphs over judgment.

But the whole context of that verse, both before and after, is speaking about kindness to the poor and care for the particular material needs of those around us.

And there's a great, again, great theme in scripture that if we have received higher spiritual blessings from the Lord, one of the ways that's going to work out is that we are generous and open-handed with lower physical blessings.

Your money is less important than your forgiveness.

And so as you've received forgiveness, you become generous and open-handed with your money.

Thomas Watson, the Puritan, as he uh surveys this Beatitude.

By the way, his book on Beatitudes is really good if you're able to read English from the 1600s.

It's uh well worth your time.

And Thomas Watson on the Beatitudes, but he reckons that actually mercy to the poor is the primary thing that Christ is talking about here.

He mentions forgiveness as well and thinks that's less important.

I'm not sure I agree with him, but it's certainly something to consider in an age when perhaps uh we uh think about that less and emphasize that less in our churches.

Before we move on from this one, I want to just highlight to us, as I've been trying to do all the way through this weekend, that the one who speaks this to us embodies it.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

I just want to highlight to your heart the way that all the way through the gospels you find a merciful Lord.

Don't miss that in those stories as people come and plead with him and find over and over and over again not just a Lord who is sufficient for their need, but a Lord whose heart goes out to them, who looks on his people and sees they are scattered like sheep without a shepherd, and has compassion on them and gives himself and gives himself and gives himself.

He is a merciful Lord, he is merciful to you.

Go and do likewise.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Again, there's a connection with the second beatitude in this sixth one, and blessed are those who mourn as we mourn what we see in ourselves, we long then to not see that.

And so through that fourth beatitude, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, the gift the Lord gives is actually a whole and a restored heart.

What does purity mean?

Well, I guess you could look at it both negatively and positively.

Negatively, purity refers to being kind of unspotted, unstained.

Here we have a heart that doesn't go, I'm really keen on these bits of righteousness and also these sins.

And I'll try and kind of hold on to both of them at the same time.

Rather, we want to be wholehearted.

This is not talking about perfection in the sense of complete sinlessness, that's not attainable for believers in this life, and yet clearly Jesus is talking about actual people here when he talks about being pure in heart.

Uh a wholehearted commitment, a refusal to let any particular sins have a permanent place in my heart, a desire to fight them.

You could think of the uh the little illustration we get in in Nehemiah.

Nehemiah building up the walls of uh Jerusalem.

That's his great job, as we go to Jerusalem to do.

And uh it's interesting as he builds up the walls of Jerusalem that he doesn't build them up by building one bit up to full height and then going on and building the next bit up to full height, and so on all the way around, but rather he he sets people to work such that the whole wall goes up together.

And there's a moment in I can't remember if it's chapter four or chapter five where uh it says the wall was built to half its height, and it's still going up, but it's a significant thing that there's a there's a whole sort of circle, and obviously there's a kind of tactical reason for that.

If you've got a really impressive front wall and absolutely no back wall at all, then your enemies are not going to find that very difficult to figure out what to do.

Uh but there's a spiritual lesson there as well, that we don't seek to build up very impressive godliness in one area and totally neglect all our raging sins in another.

Rather, we seek in all the ways that the Lord shows us to grow up in our sort of spiritual walls, our self-control, our godliness in all areas.

So purity has that sort of negative, it's unspotted, but positively is that whole, that single-minded uh devotion to the Lord.

We see this various places through scripture that in fact that this is the way that the Lord describes his people, those who worship the Lord from a pure heart.

2 Timothy 2 22.

And I want to say to us this morning that when the Lord blesses the pure in heart, I imagine most of us will feel some measure of pricking from that.

The very fact that you still live in your flesh will mean that you look at yourself and you see all sorts of things that are not quite right there.

And yet I want to say the Lord does in fact make you pure.

There's a wonderful uh verse in Hebrews chapter 10 where it says that he has by one sacrifice perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

And you have there, at the same time, there's an ongoing process of sanctification and a completed thing, a perfection.

What the Lord has done in saving you is give you a whole heart, a renewed heart.

And it's right for you to feel the blots and blemishes that are still on it, and also right for you to rejoice in the way you are not torn apart as you used to be before Christ.

As I say, I want to come back to that right at the end, so we're gonna largely leave that now.

But again, I want to say here is the Lord Jesus Christ.

He is the one, isn't he, who is pure in heart.

And how perfectly pure he is.

It is a wonderful thing to consider the temptation that Christ faced from the devil in the wilderness, and how the devil gives him really sort of strong attacks on kind of all the key things that the Lord Jesus Himself actually wants.

He attacks him on all the desires of the flesh in the sense that he's been fasting for 40 days, that he's pretty hungry, and he's offered something which is actually legitimate, even bread.

And yet the Lord Jesus has so consecrated himself to the Father that he goes, I'm not going to do that until the Lord gives it to me.

The devil offers him the kingdoms of the world.

And it's important to remember that is what Jesus wants.

That's what he's come to get.

He wants the world, he is going to be king of the kingdoms of the world.

So when the devil offers that to him, it's not like I'm so too big for that or whatever.

He deeply desires it.

The devil offers him the recognition by the world that the father loves him.

So throw yourself off the temple, and angels will bear you up, and the whole world will know that you are who you say you are, and that the father does, in fact, love you the way he says he does, and that is the deep desire of the Lord Jesus' heart.

That the world might know that the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father.

The devil offers him all those deep desires of his heart, and his commitment to the Lord is so pure, so wholehearted that not without effort, surely, but without any doubt, he repels the Lord.

Of course not.

And again, you see this all the way through the Gospels.

It's just sort of we can get used to it almost.

The sense that obviously in any story you read, there's just gonna be nothing wrong with it.

There's no hint of any false motive.

No hint of any kind of divided affections or attention.

It's so beautiful.

As you read those stories, consider your Lord and love him.

And I just want to say before move on from this one, I said we'll largely talk about seeing God later, but don't miss the fact that that that's the great desire of the Lord Jesus.

Don't miss in his farewell discourse as he speaks to his disciples how excited he is to be returning to the Father.

If he loved me, he says, He wouldn't be sorry that I'm going away because I'm going to the Father.

The one who's always eternally been with him is longing to be back with him in his human nature.

And we just catch a glimpse there of how very good the Father is and how worth a while it is to see him.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

Well, again, I want to say this connects to a previous Beatitude: blessed are the meek.

In our giving up on ourselves, we we give up on our demands to God, our demands to the world, and we receive with meekness what comes.

That connects deeply, I think, with being a peacemaker.

If you like, meekness is the sort of passive form of peacemaking.

You do not start fights, you don't rest, sort of insist on your own demands.

Um rather you receive.

You receive reviling and you don't revile in return.

That is the passive side and the internal side of peacemaking.

Here we get the active side and the external side of peacemaking, those who not just have peace in their own souls, quiet in their own souls, but go out and spread peace.

I want to say there's uh various different forms of this.

Um there's we might obviously think of peacemaking, where you go and make peace with someone who's trying to fight you.

Um that they would like an argument, perhaps it's someone in your family who has beef with you, and you think and you pray, you want a good relationship.

And in desire for that, over desire for your own little benefits and holding your grounds, you make moves that restore that relationship.

There's peacemaking there.

Peacemaking can be between you and others.

It can also be between where you help two other people who were at war to come to peace, where you mediate, where you step in and help broken relationships to flourish.

Perhaps most wonderfully of all, there is the chance to be a peacemaker between other people and God.

To take those who are at war with the Father and turn their hearts to him.

It is, I think we know this, but I just want to rub this home.

It is a very, very beautiful virtue, the virtue of peacemaking.

I just want to turn to James chapter 3.

James 3 · chapter mention

James, as I mentioned back on Friday evening, those of you who are here, has lots of echoes of the whole of the Sermon on the Mount and particularly the Beatitudes in this book.

I think you looked at it earlier this year.

I just want to highlight James chapter 3.

James 3 · chapter mention

In James chapter 3, he picks up all three of the of the blessings that the Lord Jesus has just looked, spoken to us of this morning.

James 3 · chapter mention

Mercy and purity and peace.

And he talks about it in terms of wisdom.

Verse 13, who's wise and understanding among you?

By his good conduct, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.

And then he contrasts it with worldly wisdom.

If you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, don't boast and be false to the truth.

This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but it's perfectly unspiritual demonic.

For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there'll be disorder in every vile practice.

So don't sort of pat yourself on the back if that's the description of you, says James.

But here's the wisdom from above.

The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.

Verse 18.

And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who made peace.

Wouldn't you like that to be your epitaph?

People remember you and you go, there's a harvest of righteousness sown by that man or that woman.

They sowed peace, they made peace.

The blessing at the end of this seventh Beatitude is a remarkable one.

They shall be called sons of God.

And just a little question to ask yourself who is calling you a son of God in that verse?

And perhaps as we read it, we don't even ask that question.

Perhaps if we do ask it, we naturally think of other people calling us sons of God, recognising in us something of the quality of the Father.

But I think as much as that's true and wonderful, that is not really what Jesus has in mind here.

Many commentators will pick up on the fact that Matthew, in the sort of classic Jewish tradition, likes to use what's called the divine passive.

But when he's speaking about God doing stuff, he'll often sort of cast it in passive form so that he can reverently refrain from actually naming him.

And I think you see that all the way through the Beatitudes.

Second one, blessed are those who mourn, verse 4, they shall be comforted, who's compassing them?

Verse 6, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they shall be satisfied.

Who's satisfying them?

Who's filling them?

Blessed the merciful, they shall receive mercy.

Who's showing that mercy?

It's the same.

Same all the way through.

So then say, Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called sons of God.

Who is calling you son?

It is your father in heaven.

I think we need to say that in two ways.

God speaking to others, to the angels, in the I can speak of this reverently, in the kind of form of a proud father.

Look, that's my son.

There he is.

And look how like me he is as he makes peace.

And God's saying it to you.

You are my beloved son.

And in Christ I am well pleased with you.

And of course, once again, we look at this beautiful blessing, and we see that the one who speaks it is the one who embodies it.

Christ, the peacemaker, who comes and makes peace between warring humanity and loving God.

And there is a lovely sense that although he is always the Son of God, it is particularly in his peacemaking that we see that there's a remarkable little phrase in Romans chapter 1 where it says that he was sort of always the Son of God.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

He was descended from David, and the Son of God is in his descent from David, obviously he was divine, and all the rest of it.

But also he was declared the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.

He goes on the cross and makes peace, and then the Lord God raises him by the Holy Spirit in a declaration to the whole world, this is my son, the one who's made peace.

Look at how like me he is.

Three beautiful blessings.

And I don't really want to do much more today than just sort of commend them to you.

As I said at the start, they can be things we think of little and put further down our list of Christian virtues, and the Lord Jesus lifts them up to us that we might see their deep value.

I also want to give us a particular encouragement with that.

These things can be very much present in a Christian life which looks outwardly very unimpressive.

You forgive a slight or you forgive a serious harm.

And although sometimes you know that might catch people's attention, get in the news, you know, this person suffered, somebody murdered their husband or whatever, and they forgave the that kind of people to sit up and take notice.

The truth is that the vast, vast majority of showing mercy is something that even the person you've shown mercy to doesn't notice.

Being pure in heart.

No one cares.

It's not a big deal.

Being peacemaker, that can be incredibly hard work.

But it's very rarely trumpeted.

I don't talk about that.

Wouldn't that be a great epitaph?

Very rarely an epitaph, because people will forget that you did that.

If you did it really well, maybe won't even notice that you did it.

Unimpressive.

The Christian who works quietly at promoting love, who works with that in their household, between their children, in their marriages, who works with it in their church.

It's just often an unimpressive thing.

There's a lady called Rachel Jankovic, who um in her family, she has a podcast and stuff and talks about kind of home life in the Christian world, and uh mentioned that in their home they have a little phrase of praise for someone, but they say that person's a wet log.

And what that means is that sparks of conflict fizzle out when they get to that person.

If you try and light that log on fire, it won't catch.

A person's a wet log, sort of gossip dies with them, conflict dies with them.

And I love that phrase because I think it highlights not only that's a really good thing, it's nice to have that as a phrase of praise, but also how deeply unimpressive that is.

Who cares about being a wet log?

And that is what the Lord Jesus looks at.

And I want to say, therefore, to you, it may well be that the things that you do not think of at all as virtues, things that you've perhaps even forgotten that you did, the Lord Jesus treasures up.

There's a wonderful uh scene that he gives in Matthew chapter 25.

Matthew 25 · chapter mention

I think it's often kind of avoided by Christian because it is also incredibly challenging.

Uh parable, the parable of the sheep and the goats, uh, where the Lord speaks of how some who consider themselves his are turned away.

I never knew you.

You didn't you didn't come and you didn't look after me, you didn't feed me, you didn't show that sort of mercy to the poor.

Uh, and so you didn't show it to me.

But there's something very beautiful as well in that parable where he turns to those who are his and he says to them, Come and share my kingdom.

You clothed me when I was naked, you uh fed me when I was hungry, you visited me when I was in prison, when I was sick.

And they go, Did we?

I don't remember doing that.

And he said, Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.

And there is, I think, a deeper principle there, that the Lord Jesus treasures your works.

He loves your righteousness.

So often we can have this sense of having so desperately to grasp something, anything, to sort of show God, and that we think our works are so so awful and horrible, and uh you're we're right in lots of ways, yeah.

Our works are pathetic, and even the best of our works are dirty rags.

And yet there's a beautiful sense that the Lord sees.

Remember what he what he's like with that widow who gives just two little copper coins in the temple.

He calls his disciples, look, look.

He loves your little righteousnesses.

And you will be, if you are a if you're a believer, you will be surprised by the things he praises you for on that final day.

I want to finish my speaking it out.

The beatific vision.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Beatific vision means the vision which blesses, and it's this sort of theological term for the fact that the great hope of Christians is to see God.

I want to spend just a little while turning that over for us.

We are made to see, aren't we?

Your eyes are possibly the most important kind of organ you have in terms of your day-to-day life.

Your desires in many ways often operate through your eyes.

You know, hearing is important, touch is important, all those other things.

But advertisers want your eyeballs.

What you see drives your heart so often.

People will travel great distances to foreign lands in order to see something they've seen online with their own eyes.

You have people that you love and you want to see them.

You want to be with them face to face.

The way we're led by eyes can often be a problem, even in the Christian life.

Uh various things go on at that terrible moment in the garden where Eve takes the fruit, but one thing we're told is that she saw that the fruit looked good, that it was tasty.

She thought about it as well, she thought it would be good to make me wise, but it was her eyes as well, that led her on.

When the Apostle John is unpacking the ways in which the devil grabs us, he speaks about the desires of the flesh, kind of sensual things, and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life.

Our eyes can be a very big part of what's wrong in our hearts.

And so we have in Scripture very frequently an instruction not to rely on the immediacy of vision.

Many times in the Old Testament we have a sort of subtle contrast drawn between those who go on what they can see and those who go on the word.

Abraham and Lot are deciding how to divide up the land.

Lot looks, he sees, oh, that land's well watered, he goes there.

Abraham trusts and goes where the Lord has told him.

And so we're we find in the New Testament things like we're encouraged to walk by faith and not by sight.

Though you have not seen him, says Peter, you love him.

And so we could say, you know, our eyes are really important, mostly in order to clamp down on them.

We have to really fight that.

But there is another theme in scripture, that though we do not see now, yet one day we will.

I and not another.

How my heart yearns within me.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, and the great sort of high point of that letter as he's unpacking love and what love looks like in the Christian and in the Father, the high point of that high point chapter is as he says, now we see dimly as in a mirror.

Then we'll see clearly face to face.

Now I know in part, then I'll know fully, even as I am fully known.

I hope you know this, but I just want to reinforce for you that your great hope as a believer is that one day you'll see his face.

You'll be with him.

We have to go, I think, as well.

I will see the Lord Jesus' face physically with my eyes, and spiritually, in a kind of immediate way from my soul, I will see God.

Those two will go together in mysterious, wonderful ways.

That is the heartbeat of heaven.

There are many other blessings, no doubt, to heaven.

We think of those that we've lost and want to see again, we think of being free from tears, being free from physical pain.

There's so many wonderful things.

All those things will be wonderful because we receive them in seeing the one who gives them.

And we will love him and know him better and better forever.

Though you have not seen him, you love him.

So love him now and look forward to the day when you will love him.

Pray for us.

Father, we thank you for these things.

We thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ, who so perfectly shows them to us.

How beautiful he is.

We do want to see them, Lord.

Please keep us in this life.

Keep us from those things that would tear us away.

And give us these blessings.

In Christ's name.

Amen.