Christ & You

Today's reading is Colossians 1, 21 to 23.

And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

This is God's word.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Let's pray, and then we'll get into our text for today.

Holy Father, we praise you for your loving kindness, which never ceases, your compassion which never fails, that it is new every morning for us.

Lord, we pray that we would participate in that grace this morning, what you have for our church here in your word, which goes out and never returns a void.

Lord, we pray that your word would work on our hearts, that it would show yourself to us, that we might relate to you and understand what you've accomplished for us and give us some bearing and direction in a chaotic world.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, that was the prayer.

Now we now we see if it happens.

That's how prayer works.

Today we are going through a small portion of scripture, uh, just three verses, which which means it can't be as long as last week, which many of you will be thankful for.

Uh last week the sermon was titled Just Christ, and this week it's titled Christ and You.

Now, uh John Calvin, um who's like one of the most influential people in our culture and guides a lot of the baseline intuitions that we have as a culture, but is also like completely forgotten.

It's very strange.

One of my favorite authors, her name's Marilyn Robinson, and she's an American literature professor as well as an author.

And she has this great book of essays called The Death of Adam, and one of the essays is um uh I'm gonna butcher the name, but it's titled Marguerite Desnevers or something like that.

But if you're actually French, however an actual French person would say it.

And uh she she says this is uh uh uh an essay about a woman who wrote letters to John Calvin.

And this is actually an essay about John Calvin, but I know that if I named it an essay about John Calvin, nobody would ever read it.

So I named it this, uh I kind of took this back door into uh talking about who Calvin is.

And uh I kind of uh became uh more interested in Calvin.

Actually, I was a Calvinist, you know.

You know what I mean?

But and part of being a Calvinist is you've never actually read Calvin.

So I was like, all right, I should bring these two things together, and then read Marilyn Robinson, and she said you can't understand Moby Dick without understanding John Calvin.

And you'd think being like a Calvinist pastor, that would have been motivation enough.

But it wasn't.

I needed to hear that you won't be able to understand Moby Dick, and I love that book.

Um So I started reading The Institutes, and I'm about a quarter of the way through.

That's sort of John Calvin's masterpiece, and uh it is, it's it's wonderful and and beautiful, and he's uh uh he he's the type of Bible interpreter that interprets with his whole heart and uh very pastorally, which is helpful um because he's it's it's he's constantly thinking in terms of the people that he's pastoring.

It's it's wonderful.

But it begins, uh, the Institutes begins, want to hear the opening sentence?

It says, They call me Ishmael.

That's not the way it begins.

But wouldn't that explain, wouldn't that explain the Moby Dick stuff if it was like, oh yeah, that does explain.

You really can understand it exactly.

This is the opening sentence to the Institutes.

Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two proceeds and precedes and gives birth to the other.

So he's beginning this exploration of who God is, and he wants to lay out how do we even begin knowing a topic like God.

And he says, I just need to make this plain at the very outset that any true and solid wisdom that we arrive at always involves these true components, these two components, both a knowledge of who God is and a knowledge of who we are.

And these seem to play together in such a dance that you can't even tell which one came first.

You can't tell what which is this?

Is this I'm un I'm able to understand God and his love because I have something of that in me?

Or is it I'm able to understand the love that I have in me because this I see this love that takes place in God?

It's they're too tightly wound together because it's a relational type of knowing.

And we talked about that a lot last week, how our knowing of God, our knowing of the truth is an intrinsically, a necessarily relational type of knowing.

And this becomes plain with the incarnation, where Jesus says things like, I am the way, the truth, the life.

And so that means truth is the type of thing that we know like a person, not that we know like principles.

That's transformative.

And our minds will have to change, and our approach to something like truth will have to change in order to know it, because of what it means that Christ is truth.

And Paul went in this just explosive, glorious presentation of who the incarnate Christ is.

He calls him the firstborn of creation and the firstborn from the dead.

Excuse me.

Sorry, I was mic'd.

But I have tissues right here, and I'm gonna wipe my nose.

Put it in my pocket for later.

Now, our knowing of Christ requires this relational type of knowing, and Calvin says that right out of the gate.

And so the radical implications of the incarnation is that we know the truth, we know who God is by a relational means.

And so that means knowing Christ is more like knowing a friend or a spouse than it is like knowing principles.

When you know another person, that means it's bound to be full of surprises.

And those surprises also often come in this sort of twofold way.

It's a surprise about your friend or about your spouse.

It's a surprise about the other person, but it's also a surprise about yourself.

My wife and I are moving, and that means we're packing up our home, which means we're full of surprises.

For example, uh just earlier this week, we had taken out a bunch of old toys, old toys like from our kids, and uh they're in a box in our garage.

And my wife is like, great news.

I found like a next Tuesday, there's a donation that we can, if we get there, like within this window, then we can donate these toys.

Now, this, surprisingly, filled me with an incredible rage.

Because what I would like to do is throw them away immediately.

I would like to make them vanish, be returned to a landfill, and then add thousands of years till they become Earth again.

That's what I that's my plan for these toys.

And so there was a double surprise there.

One was she wants to donate these toys.

You don't just want to throw them away.

And the other was, I can't believe how mad this is making me.

And that's what relational knowledge is like.

It's always this type of double movement where there's a disclosure of the other person, which you experience in a self-disclosure to yourself.

And that's what knowing God is like.

That's the pattern.

So, right after we see Paul go uh give this overflow of who Christ is in the passage right before this, what do you think he would turn to?

He would turn to, who are you?

Because that's the shape of our knowing.

And the way that we understand who we are is by understanding who we are in relation to Christ.

We're obsessed with figuring out our identities.

We're obsessed with knowing reflexively, this is who I am.

This is it.

There's a deep desire, like we want to find ourselves.

If you wrestled with that question, I think it will be reframed in a way this morning where you might actually be able to engage with it.

So this who Christ is, Paul pivots to an and you.

And he describes us in light of what Christ has done, us to ourselves.

First, he describes us as alienated, and then we see that we are reconciled, and then we see that we live in hope.

First, our alienation.

Colossians 1, verse 21.

Colossians 1:21

And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds.

All right, there's a lot to learn from this.

Obviously, we see the and you is connected to a previous, the previous uh section of scripture, the the right before it part of the letter, which is this description of Christ.

And then there this dovetails into an and you, because any true and solid wisdom is that double knowledge.

And you, who were once, or who once were.

That means that he's not describing to the Colossians what they are right now.

Part of their self-knowledge, part of their understanding of who they are, is not just a reflexive, this is my identity.

You know, they can't, uh there's no tests that they can take.

Uh, there's no Myers Briggs or Higgs Boston that says, this is that's not actually a personality test, but I always say it whenever I mention personality tests because it's funny.

Um that I can point to and say, I am an ENFJ or something.

Now I know myself.

No, instead, Paul is teaching us to know ourselves in story.

That we are the types of things that can only be known in a transformative process.

So if you are to be truly known, you have to start with a sentence like, and you who once were.

There's an arc to you.

And in understanding our relationship to Christ, we have to understand how we play into that arc.

And here are the factors.

And I should say this because I wrote it down.

We try and pin ourselves down, but a true perspective on meaning and understanding who we are isn't a definition of ourselves.

Where we can say, there, here's that person now, here's the definition of that person.

It's not like that.

But true self-knowledge rather is being integrated into the story that we are living, so that we become honest participants in it with Christ.

That's what self-knowledge looks like.

It's something that's lived out rather than stood back from and reflexively known.

Does that make sense?

It might make more sense as we continue on.

This is where our story starts.

We once were alienated.

Notice that the first word used to describe our pitiful state outside of Christ is a relational word.

If somebody existed in a vacuum, or if humans, if us people were the types of things that uh did not exist essentially relationally, then the word alienated would have no meaning.

But we know that alienated is a bad thing for a person.

And what's implicit in this is that we are alienated from God.

That is our initial position.

This is the beginning of our story, that we are alienated from God.

Back in 2020, in 2021, I was reading a lot of dystopian fiction because I wanted to make sure I had no escape.

And uh one of the books I read was Brave New World.

Aldu I don't know, so many French names this morning.

Huxley.

That's British, isn't it?

British.

Uh then Algis or something.

Whatever, doesn't matter.

The opening chapter of that book, um uh it it opens in London, and uh it opens in this particular building called the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.

So in this dystopian future, humans aren't born uh by mothers and fathers into families where they find their context.

Instead, they're created in a lab.

And this lab is called the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center.

And they're they're made in a lab and they're grown in these batches.

People are farmed, and then they're born with no familial context whatsoever.

And the way that they're raised without this family context is by being transferred to the uh Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Center, which was actually the the working name for TikTok.

But they they it didn't, they A B tested it on AdWords, decided to change it.

Neo-Pavlovian conditioning centers.

Now here's the picture.

They're alienation.

They're born with no context, no family, no support, no love.

They are part of nothing, and that makes them utterly vulnerable to just be conditioned by whatever society feeds to them.

This is our picture of alienation.

We are separated from any sort of true relational loving context, and because of that, we become no person in ourselves.

We just become a receptacle for whatever conditioning the world gives to us.

This is a picture that type that central London hatchery is a picture of the way that we are born in sin, alienated from God, ostracized from that true relationship, which provides us any sort of grounding identity.

Instead, we just are empty and vulnerable to a world that will condition us.

We look around for a loving face to ground us, and it is not there.

And so, what does this alienation produce?

The next way that we are described is we are alienated and hostile in mind.

Now, there's so much to say about this, but in, and you can think of this on like so many different levels.

And if you keep it at just a personal, a personal level, continuing with like the birth metaphor, you're alienated, so you're alone, and you become hostile in mind, which means your disposition becomes almost 100% self-centered and self-protective, because there's no one there to receive love from.

And in this self-protective and self-centered disposition, you become hostile to everything in the world, and you become particularly hostile to the relationship that you most need, which is your relationship to God, the creator-creature relationship.

And that hostility in mind means we're constantly producing ways to say that God is only here to remove our joy, control, manipulate, deceive, that these become the purposes of God in our lives, because what we idolize is a freedom from oppressive relationships.

Now, this is particularly true of our culture, and we can see the hostility in mind uh tearing through our culture, especially a week like this after the overturning of Roe versus Wade, where we see that freedom can occupy such a place in our culture, such an idolatrous position, that we view the constraints.

Sorry, I forgot something.

We view the the constraints of an ordinary family only through the lens of oppressive relationships.

Do you see that connection?

This is the type of hostility in mind that we develop.

And look, that's a big picture one.

But you do this in all kinds of relationships.

Where any sort of proximity, where we might uh enter into a real relationship of knowing we are entering into it in a way where we're utterly gripped with fear that we might hurt another and that another might hurt us.

And we say that's just not worth it.

We would prefer our alienation.

So our our alienation becomes an aspect of us hostility in mind, which seeks to preserve our alienation.

Now, this hostility in mind results in doing evil deeds, so that we operate in a way which reinforces our hostility in mind.

The way that this is formed in the grammar here is actually meant to show us that the doing evil deeds is in a sense prior to our hostility in mind.

Now that's strange.

That's not the way we would expect it to work.

We would think that it was first hostility in mind and then doing evil deeds.

But actually, the way this grammar shows us is that they're related to one another because our doing evil deeds works to harden our own hearts, harden our minds, so that this becomes who we are, and what flows out of us naturally is a doing evil deeds and then justifying them, so that our minds are working over time to justify the evil that we are participating in.

We saw earlier, a couple of weeks ago, this growth spiral that Paul describes that the Christian life is.

It's a knowing God and seeing what he's done for us, and then participating by obedience in what he has done for us, and then knowing God more, which draws us into further and further wonder, which means further and further growth and closeness with the Lord.

It's a growth spiral.

What is described here outside of Christ is a death spiral.

What are we?

We are alienated, hostile in mind, and doing evil deeds.

And these are all mutually reinforcing, so that we, left to our own devices, are in a spiral of death.

We become the types of things that when we deny the creator and we ourselves become alienated from who God is, that means we treat ourselves as though we have no creator.

Which means that we become the type of people who set our Own purposes.

Think of what it means to be a created thing.

Like, here's an object lesson.

People have runny noses.

People also have purses.

What if we made a little pack of tissues that can fit in your purse?

And uh that will allow people to wipe their runny noses.

Okay, so what do we have there in that creative endeavor?

There's a uh purpose, and because we've set the purpose, then we know what we're creating the thing and how to properly use it, and then we can name what the thing is in line with its purpose.

So its purpose and its identity are related.

When we have no creator, then we set our own purposes.

I would like to do these things.

And because I would like to do these things, do you see what we're simultaneously doing?

We're giving ourselves an identity.

That's why our culture thinks of identity almost exclusively in terms of desire.

Because if you don't have a creator that made you for a particular purpose, then all that is left is for you to set your own purpose, which are your desires, and then your desires become your identity.

And we become tossed around into a chaotic world, tossed back and forth by our by our desires.

Do you see the pattern of how our alienation leads to this hostility in mind in doing evil deeds, which reinforces our hostility in mind, so we do evil deeds and then we become further and further alienated.

This is a bad picture.

Colossians 1 22.

He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

Remember the way the first sentence started?

And you who once.

And you, that's yours.

But what is the good news?

He has now reconciled.

He has now.

Imagine how different this could have been.

Imagine if Paul had instead written something like this.

And you were once alienated and hostile in mind, but then you heeded Christ's advice, and the Lord welcomed you back again.

That's not what it says.

It doesn't say, and you were alienated and hostile in mind, and you heeded the Lord's advice.

Many of us think of the gospel in that pattern.

That it's a double and you.

And you were alienated and hostile in mind.

And then by a stroke of genius or luck or the right supportive context or something, or whatever it might have been, then you again reconciled yourself to the Lord because you were smart enough to heed his advice.

That's not what it says.

It's not a double and you.

It's an and you once, he has now.

Do you see the asymmetry of the gospel?

That's part of the shocking, surprising good news.

This is part of how we know we're dealing with another person who's relating to us differently than we'd expected because there's this built-in surprise here.

This is not a mechanical description of something that might take place if you tap into the right energy waves in the universe.

No, this is a person who saw you acting a certain way and said, I'm intervening.

In the way that only persons do who love other people.

And so we see that in this false pattern of the gospel that's a double and you, and you were once alienated and you got yourself back again.

We see a double denial of what the gospel really is.

It denies, first of all, that death spiral that we're actually in.

There is nothing that could be said to you which could overcome your hostility and mind of its own accord.

You would deflect it.

You would not hear it.

You're practiced in an avoidance of the truth, cursed to it, literally cursed to it.

And two, it's a denial of what it is that actually brings us back to God.

It is not our own effort.

It is Christ who has reconciled us to him.

He has done the work.

So how has he done this?

What is the means of Christ's reconciliation?

Well, look at the words.

He is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death.

Now there's kind of a redundancy there because the word body, soma, and the word flesh, sarks, both mean body.

They both mean, you know, you know.

You all have one.

I can see them from here.

Those words kind of mean the same thing, but for Paul, flesh is a technical term.

Flesh is that aspect of ourselves, which is our corruption that aligns and agrees with our alienation.

It aligns and agrees with our own alienation.

That's what our flesh is.

So he's saying that Christ has reconciled us in his body of flesh by his death.

What does this mean about Christ?

He's saying, don't you see, Christ has taken on your body and corruption.

Christ has taken that upon himself.

And by that means, he has reconciled you to him.

You see, our sin, we participate in the flesh.

Our sin creates this alienation from God because we broke his conditions.

We broke the relational conditions of how to interact with God.

He is God, he is the creator, we are the creature, we are to worship him as Lord and live in obedience to him.

And when we break that, then we move into a place of alienation from God.

And I know what you're thinking, oh, this God that you're describing with all his rules, it's it there's no way that we could A, ever live up to that and B, ever have any sort of relationship that's governed in that way.

How could we possibly have a thriving relationship with someone with all these rules and boundaries around it?

To which I say, no, you're not thinking about this enough.

How could you not?

This is the only way that any relationship plays itself out.

There is no relationship without certain boundaries and rules and mutual obligations to one another.

The absence of those equals the absence of a relationship.

I have a great friend.

We're so close.

We have this wonderful, thriving relationship.

We never speak.

He never texts me back, says my friend.

I'm sorry.

I'm getting to it.

I should have confessed it.

You see, there's these ordinary boundaries.

You only sleep with your spouse.

Try it another way.

Our culture is like, I think I can try it another way.

And ending up in relationships that are utter catastrophes.

Like we're such a double-minded culture.

It's so bizarre.

We'll watch under the banner of heaven and say, look at this misogynistic polygamy.

And then we'll read an like an Axios article about polyamory and be like, uh oh, it's so enlightened and wonderful.

It's like, what are you talking about?

It's the same look.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Is the but there's the point is that all of our relationships have boundaries, and that when we live within those, we're experiencing the truth of that relationship.

What if our relationship, our primary relationship was with an absolute, was not with a living thing, but with life, was not with an existing thing, but with existence, was not with a loving thing, but with love?

What if our fundamental relationship was with an absolute like that?

Then a break would be a break towards something else that was absolute.

That's what that broken relationship would mean.

So do you know what that would result in?

Death.

Can you think of something more absolute?

And that is precisely what it results in.

Our sin and broken relationship results in death.

I want you to see that that is a pattern that you participate in all the time.

Because when you violate the ordinary means of your relationships and maintaining them, that relationship dies.

Now consider that same pattern with your relationship with God.

This is not rocket science.

You just have to think much more ordinarily about this.

How could anyone be held to such a standard to have a relationship with an absolute?

Have we just painted something impossible?

Did God set us up for failure from the beginning?

In Job chapter 9, verse 32 through 33, Job is in the most incredible suffering that we could ever imagine a person being in.

Job 9:32–33

And he cries out to the Lord this.

He's complaining to God.

He says, This, for he is not a man as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together.

There is no arbiter between us who might lay his hand on us both.

Do you hear what he's saying?

I'm in this relationship with this absolute, and I'm experiencing this incredible suffering.

And yes, I know that there's this, this is the complexity of our human suffering.

We are involved in it.

But what can I do?

Who can plead my case to the absolute, the one who is always right 100% of the time, who is truth and goodness, the one who is those things, all these things that I am not, who can lay their hands on us both, that there might be some reconciliation between us?

If the violation is that I have plunged myself by sin into death, then who can possibly lay their hands on life and death, that we might be brought together and reconciled once again?

Who can do that?

Do you hear the cry of Job's heart?

Do you do you hear that that question that you might have been brought to, it's in the Bible already?

And then hear again, this insanity of he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death.

This Christ is the answer.

This cry of Job is a cry for Christ.

Who can set their hands on us both?

God becomes incarnate in the world because of the love with which he loved us.

He takes on flesh that way he might, not metaphorically, but that he might literally lay his hands on us, and so that he might take on this most brutal aspect of being in relationship with us, which is death.

So that Christ himself, by his death, might reconcile us to him.

Who can arbitrate between us?

Who can lay their hands on us both?

Could there be someone who is God and man?

This is the answer.

It is Christ.

This is his reconciliation.

He takes on our death.

You cannot do this.

You are not your savior.

Christ is the savior.

This is what we mean when we say these things.

And what was the purpose of him doing this?

Why does he do this?

In the second half of verse 22, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

Picture this.

Let's just follow the story.

Alienated, hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, God looks down, loves you, takes on flesh, endures the punishment that you deserve, gives to you his holiness, and you stand before him, and he says to you, You are holy and righteous.

You are above reproach in my eyes.

This means that there's nothing he can count against you.

There's nothing that he there's nothing when God looks upon you because of what he has done in Christ, you are above reproach.

Do you know what your reputation is to God?

He looks at you and he says, You have the righteousness of one who would go to the cross for me.

You have the righteousness of one who would unceasingly love their neighbors, who would lay down their lives for even their enemies.

You have the righteousness of one who would never leave or forsake.

You have the righteousness of one who would never sin against me in the garden.

This is what Christ this is what God sees when he sees you as we are in Christ.

Because of He has now reconciled.

So who are you?

Who are you?

What if someone were to ask?

You have to say something like, Well, it's a bit of a story.

Once I was alienated.

I couldn't know who I was.

It was like being locked in a padded room and thinking that I just if I just searched the depths of my own desires, that I would be able to know who I was, name me.

I tried to name myself.

But I couldn't come up with a name that stuck.

But then my creator, because of the great love with which he loved me, he became one like myself.

And he took on my own flesh, and he bore the punishment of my sin, that I might be reconciled to him forever, and I'm restored to the relationship that I most desperately needed, which was to him.

Then someone might ask a follow-up question.

So what so, like, but like what does that mean for your life?

How do you live now?

Well, Paul anticipates that.

And in the beginning of verse 23, he says, If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.

I can hear the bells going off in your minds right now.

Ah, this felt like such good news.

It felt like just this free offering of something that Christ has done that I could stake my name on.

And then you add it.

If indeed you do some other thing, if indeed you measure up to some standard, which of course you'll never be able to measure up to.

No, no, no.

Get that out of your mind.

Stop that.

That little part of your mind that's saying that.

Turn to it and say, it's me again.

Stop it.

Instead, consider this.

You have been restored to a relationship with God, the one that you were meant to have from the beginning, no longer alienated, no longer hostile in mind.

And so what is Paul saying?

Continue in that.

How do you continue in that?

In the faith.

Well, what is faith?

You know, have you ever sinned against a friend?

And then had to come to them and say, I, you know, sinned against you.

And then they say, I forgive you.

Now you've got a couple of options then to restore the relationship.

One thing that you can say is, that's really nice of them to say that they forgive me.

I don't believe them.

I'm gonna earn this back.

And then you become weird.

And you start overcompensating in all kinds of ways.

And then that overcompensation is met with this second thing, which is the second they do something that hints that they might not actually have forgiven you, you collapse in a ball of insecurity.

And the relationship becomes fragmented and dissolves completely.

Or you do this other thing, and they say, you say, I've sinned against you, and they say, I forgive you.

You have another option.

You believe them.

And that restores the relationship.

You once again act as yourself, and you are received as yourself by your friend or spouse or whoever it is.

And so Paul says, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.

What is the hope of the gospel?

He has now reconciled.

He has now reconciled.

What is the condition of this restored relationship with God?

You trust him that he has restored it.

You trust him that he has restored it.

Come to him today.

Come to him as the one who has restored, has reconciled himself to you.

Come to him.

This is what it means to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of God.

That's what the growth spiral looks like.

You can move towards it as stable and steadfast as it is towards you.

He who didn't spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him freely give you all things?

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

He has now reconciled you in his body of flesh by his death.

Believe him.

Are there any questions?

Great.

We get to participate in this type of reconciliation.

Let me pull up the text.

First Corinthians 11, 23 says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

We participate in a proclamation, as he calls us to his table and says, Take, eat.

This is my body, which I am breaking for you.

This is my blood, which I am pouring out for the forgiveness of sins, that we might be reconciled to him.

Table fellowship is always a picture of reconciliation in Scripture.

Come to the table, share a meal with me as a friend.

And what you're doing when you do that is you're saying, Christ, when you say that you've reconciled me, I trust you.

I trust you.

And so I'm going to live in that reconciliation.

Holy Father, we pray that you would bless this time.

We lift this meal up to you because of the great love with which you loved us, because you reconciled us in your body of flesh by your death, that way you might present us to yourself.

Lord, as we walk down this aisle today, might we consider it as you presenting us to yourself, holy and blameless and above reproach before you.