Heart of Kings - David 17: David's Lament

Good morning, church.

Today's word is from uh 2 Samuel, first chapter 17 through 27.

And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and Jonathan, his son.

And he said, It should be taught to the people of Judah.

Behold, it is written in the book of Jeshar.

He said, Your glory, O Israel, is slain on your high places.

How the mighty have fallen.

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised exult.

You mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you, nor fields of offerings.

For there the shield of the mighty was defiled, the shield of Saul not anointed with oil.

From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty.

Saul and Jonathan believed, are beloved and lovely.

In life and in death, they were not divided.

They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.

You daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you luxuriously in scarlet, who put ornaments of gold on your apparel, how the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle.

Jonathan lies slain on your high places.

I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan.

Very pleasant have you been to me.

Your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women.

How the mighty have fallen and the weapons of war perished.

This is the word of God.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to church this morning.

My name is James.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

If you weren't with us last week, we've got some news to announce.

The building that we've been leasing, but been in forever, has sold.

This building has sold.

And so that means we uh it was, well, I'll tell the story.

It was sold to the Heights Church, uh, which is another local church, an excellent congregation.

We've gotten to know their leadership, just such great people.

We're thrilled that they're going to be using this space, that the space will remain a church.

Um and we are uh going to be switching for the next six months to an evening service time.

The evening service time will start on June 9th.

And right now, uh, if you got the newsletter, you could go and vote for one of three times uh for which we'll meet in the service.

The votes are rolling in.

And uh also uh you can also go to the connect button on the app and vote there.

Just tap connect and it'll say vote for service time.

You can vote there.

So we're gonna be moving to evening services on June 9th.

Also coming up this summer, uh, we gather here at Redemption Church Denver in two ways.

We gather large and we gather small.

So that means we gather large on Sundays together as a whole church, and we gather small in each other's homes throughout the week.

And we're continuing that on this summer.

So redemption groups are continuing through the summer.

If you're not involved in a redemption group, uh you can connect through the app, just go in, tap groups, and then tap join a group, and you can browse, find one that's closest to you.

We recommend trying to group yourself geographically.

We do that in order to keep the groups uh having a diverse presence.

Uh this summer, uh the new redemption group content just dropped today.

We do surprise drops like Beyoncé.

And they uh uh just dropped today.

So if you go to the app, you can see that content now.

For the summer series, we're moving through the Psalms of David.

So we're going to be moving through six Psalms of David.

And we are going to be approaching them in this Lectio format that we're practicing here as a large group.

So when you gather small together, you'll move through that say those same movements of the Lectio Divina and be able to process together uh what you're seeing in the Psalms of David.

So uh sign up for that.

Uh also Gotham applications uh are rolling in.

We've got seven in now, and we're aiming for that about 10 people mark.

Um so uh applications are open until the end of the month.

Uh so if you would like to be a part of that, recommend getting it in quickly because those spots tend to fill up.

Um Gotham is a nine-month discipleship intensive that we do here as a church to make a real intentional investment in a small group of people.

We'll go we'll cover some of the most foundational texts in Christian history and develop a real community around um this idea of spiritual formation.

How is it that the word informs every aspect of our lives?

That's what we explore in the Gotham Fellowship.

Uh also, we are in the midst, there's so many announcements, there's so much happening.

And I'm not, we don't even do birth announcements, because that would just be the whole service, every church.

Because there's like three from this week, I think.

Um, which is great.

Make disciples.

That's right.

That's right.

We are culture makers.

Uh that means we don't just make art projects, we make humans.

Um I got distracted by all the birth.

Um there's so much there's so much happening in our church right now.

It's kind of it's kind of incredible this season.

So we are uh in the midst of our elder selection process.

So that is still continuing on.

We had a two-week congregational feedback period, and we are in the midst of follow-ups from the feedback that we've received.

So we're following this process as long as seems necessary to arrive at the conclusions where we can uh stand up and nominate the elders who we see fit.

So uh I'd love to offer a very specific timeline, um, but at this stage we're going slow and prayerfully uh through the process.

So uh we'd appreciate your prayers through this time.

Uh okay, that seems like enough for today.

Let's uh pray and we'll go ahead and enter our text.

Father, pray for uh all those poor people in the Colfax Marathon, what a horrible thing.

Lord, I pray that you would uh, as we come before you with our uh your scripture in mind and our hearts open, would you please move so that your scripture would be applied to our hearts and we would learn and grow in you?

God, would your presence shape us?

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

So as we follow David's story, it makes you wonder how is he able to keep taking it?

Because it's just one thing after another.

It's insane, the situations that David finds himself in.

Where is this well of fortitude that David seems to have in himself that allows him to keep going through these outrageously difficult circumstances?

In our text today, we're going to see two things that are a part of David's character, two things that are part of the way David processes his circumstances that allows him to keep moving forward faithfully to God.

And those two things are David takes action and David laments.

He takes action and he laments.

I think if you reflect on yourself personally, you will find that you are probably good at one of those things.

You will probably have a tendency towards one or the other.

You're probably good, if you're good at lament, then it's likely you're not good at taking action.

And if you're good at taking action, if that's your default response to sadness and the difficulty of life, then you will probably find that you are not good at lament.

But David, as we've seen, is kind of a freak of nature.

The poet king is good at both.

He laments and he takes action.

And that's what we're going to look at today.

We're going to look at this process when David receives more bad news.

How does he handle it?

He takes action and he laments.

We're gonna learn how to do that together with David this morning.

So, where did we leave off?

David last week had escaped from this terrible uh situation in which he was going to have to fight with the Philistines against the Israelites.

David is hiding with his enemies, the Philistines, and they are going to war against the Israelites.

He, by his own reputation, is rescued from that terrible circumstance, which would have meant certain death.

And when he returns with him and his men back to their sort of exile city, a city called Ziklag, they find that it's been ransacked by the Amalekites, and their wives and families were kidnapped.

So David consults with the priest, the priest says, Let's go, and they go after the Amalekites, they ransack the Amalekites' camp, and they're able to rescue their wives and families so that no one was lost.

It's an incredible story.

And after this, David returns back going through this kind of roller coaster that seems typical of David's life.

One near escape.

I'm almost, I'm gonna get discovered by the Israelites, I'm gonna get killed by the Philistines, and now I escape that.

Okay, I'm back to this home base.

This home base has now been ransacked.

Okay, I'm gonna go capture the people who have ransacked it.

And I've made it through that.

He has this type of life that just does not let up.

It's like having a two-year-old.

And so now he returns, perhaps expecting some semblance of peace.

I know that's what my expectation would be.

My expectation would be, God, look at the difficulty of these seasons that I've been through.

When am I entering a season of peace?

Where are the green pastures?

Where are the still waters?

Where's the time of rest for my soul?

And yet it doesn't seem to appear.

So David returns to Ziklag and he gets more news.

More news that with it seems something really good, and then things that are just absolutely awful.

So here's the news that he receives from the front.

And when he came to David, he fell to the ground and paid homage.

David said to him, Where do you come from?

And he said to him, I have escaped from the camp of Israel.

And David said to him, How did it go?

Tell me.

And he answered, The people fled from the battle, and also many of the people have fallen and are dead.

And Saul and his son Jonathan are also dead.

David stands outside Ziklag, his temporary home, a burnt city.

And he learns that his true home, Israel, has been conquered by the Philistines.

In the previous chapter, it describes the cities were emptied, and now Philistines have moved into them and are living in these Israelite cities.

And then he gets this news that must have been this tinge of incredible relief for David that the one person who's been pursuing him for these years, who's made him an exile, who is Saul, is dead.

But that news doesn't come alone.

It comes with this incredible, almost unbearable tragedy that Saul's son, David's greatest friend in the world, the one who their souls were knit together, the one person in the world who he likely really felt at home with and had communion with, Jonathan, has also died.

Often in our lives, we can approach them as though there's one uh problem and one solution.

If I could just get over this thing.

You know, for David, how many times did he think hiding in a cave, you know, if Saul were just gone, if that Saul problem were just gone, then this would all go away?

And then the day that he gets the news that the Saul problem is gone, is also a day where it's no less complicated to return to Israel.

And it's a day of deep mourning for his greatest friend.

How's David not thinking, when is it just gonna be good news?

When is it just gonna be relief?

We can have this vision of life as though it's learning how to navigate peaks and valleys.

But I don't think that's a necessarily helpful metaphor.

I don't think that would have been a helpful metaphor for David.

Because he just would have thought, like, okay, we're tunneling at this point.

I think for David, it seems more like how do we handle these false summits?

How do I handle a day that is so mixed?

Where, yeah, there's something to celebrate, and yet in the midst of it, there's this terrible, heartbreaking sadness.

How do I handle that type of a day?

When we reduce our lives to one problem and one solution, we do that, I think, to provide ourselves a sense of control and even a sense of comfort.

But David has a very thick view of sin and the corruptedness that sin entails in creation.

David lives in a world that he looks at head on and he sees as very dangerous, even very sinister, a world where he really is exposed, where there is real harm, real suffering, real consequences, real repercussions.

Sin has corrupted everything.

And so even the good days are tinged with this loss.

But because of that, David has a view of God that is just as thick.

He has a view of God that is able to enter into the realities of the hardships of the world and be a comforter in the midst of them.

God to him is not someone who just swoops in at the last minute and then provides some mountaintop, and that's how we know he's God.

Instead, he is the one who is with him through these trials.

He is comforting him in the midst of them.

He's entering into the suffering that David is experiencing.

And David's God is incredibly strong and incredibly loving.

So because David knows a God like that, he's able to move through a life as dangerous and complicated as it actually is.

And so the way that David does that is he takes action and he laments.

So let's look at the action that David is able to immediately take in the midst of this really confusing day.

David inquires further of the messenger, and he asks him, okay, how precisely do you know that Jonathan and Saul are dead?

Are you sure?

You can hear in David there's this kind of hope that, like, yeah, Saul and Jonathan are dead, but it's just this rumor.

But the messenger tells a story.

In 2 Samuel 1, 9 through 10, it says, And he said to me, This is the messenger speaking, and he's speaking of what Saul said to him.

And he said to me, Stand beside me and kill me, for anguish has seized me, and yet my life still lingers.

So I stood beside him and killed him, because I was sure that he could not live after he had fallen.

And I took the crown that was on his head, and the armlet that was on his arm, and I have brought them here to my Lord.

So David asked, How do you know that Saul is dead?

And the messenger says, Well, because I was standing next to him, and he tells this story of Saul being wounded and experiencing this incredibly deep suffering on the cusp of death.

And he says, Saul asked me to kill him and put him out of his misery, and so I followed the orders of the king and I killed him.

So how do I know he's dead?

Because I'm the one who did it.

I'm the one who killed him.

Now there's a problem with this story.

It's not true.

Saul is dead, but this messenger is not the one who killed him.

At the end of 1 Samuel, 1 Samuel chapter 31, the events of what actually happened are recounted.

1 Samuel 31 · chapter mention

And they're similar, but this isn't it.

Saul is wounded in battle, and he does ask not this messenger, but his own armor bearer to kill him, to put him out of his misery.

But the armor bearer won't do it.

He knows better than to raise his hand against the anointed one of God.

And so Saul falls on his own sword and kills himself.

That's what actually happened.

But the story that the messenger tells to David in order to ingratiate himself to David is I'm the one who killed your enemy.

I know that Saul was pursuing you, and so in order to gain your favor, he makes up this story of how he's the one that killed Saul.

But here's what this messenger doesn't anticipate.

He doesn't anticipate the same thing that the Philistines didn't anticipate, which was that David's loyalty extends beyond his own self-interest.

David is serving a kingdom that is greater than him.

David is serving a kingdom that is designed and appointed by God.

So that when he hears that Saul has been killed, he is still loyal to Saul.

He's still loyal to the king that God chose.

He's still loyal to this structure that God is building into the world, which is Israel, and the redemption that that will entail.

That's unimaginable to this messenger, just as it was unimaginable to the Philistines, that David would truly be someone who was after God's own heart.

And because he was after God's own heart, he acts justly.

So David, David's line of questioning continues in 2 Samuel 1, 13 through 16, it says, And David said to the young man who told him, Where do you come from?

And he answered, I am the son of a sojourner, an Amalekite.

David said to him, How is it you were not afraid to put out your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?

Then David called one of the young men and said, Go execute him.

And he struck him down so that he died.

And David said to him, Your blood be on your head, for your for your own mouth has testified against you, saying, I have killed the Lord's anointed.

That's swift justice.

So David is being deceived by this man who is an Amalekite.

And in his line of questioning, the case for why this Amalekite should be killed is built.

David gives him an out.

Where are you from?

How do you get this news?

You know, perhaps if he had said, uh I'm an Amalekite and I just happened to get caught up in that army, uh, and so I ended up right there, wrong place, wrong time, right place, wrong time, whatever I killed Saul.

David might have said, okay, you couldn't have known any better.

But he says, I'm an Amalekite, I'm the son of a sojourner, which means he'd been living in Israel.

Which means he is submitted to the laws of Israel.

And that's why David could ask a question like, How is it you were not afraid to put out your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?

He would have known, he would have been taught that this was the Lord's anointed, and yet he wasn't afraid to strike him.

A fear that we saw David have twice, with much more reason to kill Saul.

And yet David held his hand because of a greater fear of the Lord.

Also, we might say then, yeah, but as a matter of fact, the Amalekite didn't kill Saul.

So he's being punished for a crime that he didn't do.

That may be the case, and it is the case, in fact.

But the crime that he did practically commit was bearing false witness in a case that involved murder, which under Levitical law is punishable by death.

And so he does break that law, and saw, excuse me, and David, acting as king, moves to administer justice in his kingdom.

A justice that might look to go immediately against his own self-interest, but is in the interest of the kingdom.

Do you see the wise action that David takes?

That there might actually be some justice being administered in Israel.

Not just a justice according to his own self-interest, but one that serves the interests and the law of the Lord.

This is what a king is called to do.

It's called to administer justice.

And David moves into that action and he does it immediately.

So we may be thinking, and depending upon your disposition, you're thinking, that's right.

David was able to be in the sad moment and he pushed his emotions aside, and so he moved in and he took right action.

And that's the model.

We push our emotions aside and then we move in and we take right action.

But the text doesn't allow us to do that.

Because actually, the verses before the execution, right after he gets the news, here's the way the text reads right after he hears that Saul and Jonathan are dead, says this in 1 Samuel 1, 11 through 12.

Then David took hold of his clothes and tore them.

And so did all the men who were with him.

And they mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son, and for the people of the Lord, and for the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword.

Immediately they lament.

They immediately enter into this sadness.

And yet in the midst of this sadness, David acts rightly.

It is not a lament that paralyzes, but somehow it's a lament that gives wisdom, gives the wisdom of how to act rightly, how to move into this position as king.

And this lament that they hold becomes, at a certain point, is a public lament at first, and then at some point David moves away alone, and he does that thing that David does where he goes and writes a song about it.

Because he says, this is such a sad moment.

That this is not something to just be shoved aside and moved through or moved past, but this is a sadness that demands to be entered into.

And part of our right action, part of his right leadership, is teaching the people how to enter into that sadness.

And so David writes a lament.

That's what we're going to look at.

David's lament.

In 2 Samuel 1, 17 through 18, it says, And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and Jonathan his son.

And he said it should be taught to the people of Judah.

Behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.

So before we get into the text of the lament itself, and if you have a nap with a Bible on it, or your Bible, I'd recommend go ahead and turn to 2 Samuel chapter 1, because it'll be helpful to follow along with the words of this lament.

2 Samuel 1 · chapter mention

But right here, in this very verse, we see kind of the difficulties of translating poetry already starting to rear their ugly heads.

So there's words that our beloved English Standard Version leaves out.

And it's a really important word for capturing this theme of how David holds together action and lament.

In verse 18, where it says, and he said, it should be taught to the people of Judah.

The text doesn't actually say it should be taught, but it says the bow should be taught to the people of Judah.

David named this lament the bow.

Bow as in an archer's bow, as in a bow and arrow.

So why does David name this lament the bow?

And then why does he say the bow should be taught to the people of Israel?

So the bow is a weapon that corresponds directly with Jonathan.

Jonathan is an archer.

Remember the signal that they had with each other for how David should know whether or not to flee?

It was Jonathan practicing with his bow, whether or not he shot it beyond the stone or in front of the stone.

And in this poem, in verse 22, it says that the bow of Jonathan was turned not back.

And so David in this relates Jonathan to the bow.

This lament is primarily a lament for Jonathan.

And so in this correspondence, we see these two things that are held together.

One is this lament over Jonathan, and he uses as kind of this synecdoche, where you like use a part to represent the whole.

The synecdoche is Jonathan's bow represents Jonathan.

And so the bow is a lament over Jonathan.

But also look at the context and the moment that Israel finds itself in.

They've been destroyed by the Philistines.

They have no king and there are no heirs.

This is a nation on the edge.

And in order for this nation to survive, they're going to need to learn the bow.

Our generous translations translate it, teach this to the people.

Excuse me, lamented with this lamentation, it should be taught to the people of Judah.

It doesn't say the people of Judah, it says the men of Judah.

This is a military teaching.

Teach the men of Judah the bow.

Because in order for us to survive this, we're going to need to be like Jonathan.

And we're going to need to be going back to war immediately hereafter.

Teach them the bow.

How did David envision his kingdom moving forward?

It was in lamentation and action.

It was in this deep sadness.

Teach them the bow, mourn.

Let us mourn together, enter the real sadness together of the loss of someone as glorious as Jonathan.

Let's weep together.

And in that weeping, knowing we're preparing our souls for the action that God is calling us to as a people.

Learn the bow.

It is both together.

So when we we can see in this text just how clearly and deeply and honestly David is willing to let himself mourn.

That's pretty good.

A better translation is the image that David actually provides.

This is a literal Hebrew translation.

If we go to the next slide.

To add that, it says, a literal translation would have been the gazelle, O Israel, on your heights it lies slain.

This is an image to look at.

Do you see the dead gazelle?

On the heights of Israel, where the glory should have been, where God should have been worshipped, is just death.

And so David paints the image.

He gives an image to his people and he says, Don't look around this.

You know, this psalm doesn't have a turn.

Or this poem has no turn.

It has no moment where it says, but we know that there will be this glory again.

He says, it's not the time for that.

Look, the gazelle, the symbol of glory, lie slain.

And so he allows all of these questions, he even cultivates these questions in the heart of the people of Israel.

How could us, the chosen people, experience this type of loss?

How could the king that was appointed and chosen specifically by God be dead without any heirs?

Are those things true?

Is God really with us?

Is God really for us?

Do you see what a meditation on this image would require of a soul in mourning?

He causes his people to enter this turmoil.

He even gives them the words to articulate the turmoil.

He continues, 2 Samuel 1, 25 through 27.

Excuse me, I skipped apart.

2 Samuel 1.23.

Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely, in life and in death, they were not divided.

They were swifter than eagles.

They were stronger than lions.

How is it that David could mourn Saul, the one who had become his enemy?

David mourns him by entering into the complexity that he experienced.

His beloved was Jonathan.

His greatest friend was Jonathan.

And Jonathan remained united to Saul.

They were never separated.

And so David doesn't do that thing that happens at funerals where a real jerk dies and then everybody lines up and is like, oh, he was amazing.

And it's like, no, he wasn't.

David's not doing that.

He's not performing a false eulogy.

He's saying if Saul was the type of person who Jonathan could honor, then Saul is honorable.

And that's this irreconcilable sort of tension that David has in his heart that he holds together.

Because his world is very complex.

But he has a God who's able to sustain him through that type of complexity.

And he continues on and gives voice to the very heart of his pain.

In 2 Samuel 1, 25 through 27, he says, How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle.

Jonathan lies slain on your high places.

You see, when he said the gazelle lies slain on your high places, when he starts there, finally at the end, he just makes it explicit.

He says, This is no image.

Jonathan, my friend, lies slain in the high places.

And then he switches how he's talking and he talks directly to Jonathan.

It becomes increasingly personal as his lament continues.

He says, I am distressed for you, my brother, Jonathan.

Very pleasant have you been to me.

Your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women.

How the mighty have fallen and the weapons of war perished.

That's the end of the song.

Says, I felt this camaraderie with you, that it's greater than even with my spouses.

There's it we we have to say these sort of things, but there's not a homosexual undertone in this.

It's just most of us don't have a capacity to understand this depth of friendship, to see the real loss that Jonathan was for David.

And he makes that the song for the people.

That they might enter into and process this loss together.

Jonathan was the gazelle.

Jonathan was the glory.

Learning how to hold these two things together is extremely difficult.

Because our historic influences don't allow this to happen for us Western people.

I think in a lot of ways this was intuitive for a Hebrew like David.

But we draw such a stark line between our actions and our emotions, between our reason and our heart.

We can even consider the emotions of a situation to be unreality that aren't worth acknowledging or entering into.

But for David, it's precisely the opposite.

To say this is not just a situation to be overcome.

But this is a real sadness in the world.

And that needs to be mourned.

Because David has a view of the world that is deeply corrupted.

More corrupted than most of us would let ourselves imagine.

And that requires David to have a view of a God who doesn't just give advice to help you navigate the complexities of existence, but a God who rescues.

A God who shows up at the last minute and saves.

And when you have a God who saves, then you can enter into the pain in front of him, trusting that he will comfort you in the midst of it.

You can enter into the reality of the sadness that requires a lament, knowing God won't leave me here forever.

God will hear our cries, he'll join us and comfort us in this, and he will then give us the capacity for the action that he requires.

So this is our charge for us as a church.

The type of deep people that we could be, the type of people with these wells of fortitude like David has is we learn the bow.

We learn the lament and the action.

We learn the call to sadness over sad things as the action of moving forward.

Learn the bow.

Alright, let's take one question and then we'll pray.

How can someone love a friend more than your spouse, as David did with Jonathan?

Is that biblically good?

Uh yes.

Yes, it was it was biblically good.

I mean, this is not a um there's there's not a hint of anything negative or any sort of negative reading about this.

We tend to think of relationships in terms of a uh we tend to think of relationships in terms of quantity of love.

And if you're at this certain spot in in friendship, and then your love grows in quantity, then you're in a romantic relationship, and then if it grows in quantity, then you're engaged, and if it grows in quantity further, then you're married.

But that's not the biblical description of the way love works.

Those relationships are not uh quantitative, they're categorical.

And so for a uh for a love in friendship to grow and surpass the love that takes place in a marriage is not to diminish the love that takes place in a marriage.

They never jump categories.

Our culture, because we think in that quantitative perspective of love, we lose categories like love in friendship.

Because we think, oh, I'm loving this person so much, it must transition to romantic love soon.

It's because we've lost the categories.

And so it is a good thing.

Because a love that is incredibly deep in a friendship, what a gift that the Lord could provide, is no subtraction from love in the category of marriage.

We pray that we would experience both.

But those are categorical distinctions that the Bible makes, not quantitative.

Okay.

Our faith, more than any other, equips us to learn the bow.

Because in our faith, the way that we transform as people is death and then resurrection.

And so we need not fear entering the sadness of death.

Because we know that the resurrection is coming.

And it is God who meets us in that place of death, not to abandon us, but to rescue us from it.

We'll remember that as we take communion this morning.

What can allow us to enter this sadness in reality?

It is the hope that we have that we will share in the resurrection of Christ.

And that one day there will be no more sadness because of what He's accomplished.

So with that, let's pray.

Father, I pray that you would give us courage and wisdom to face the sadness that you have put in our lives and to mourn over it as you would mourn.

That our hearts would not be hardened in some sort of stoic resilience, but they would be softened, so that we would cry more and laugh more and mourn more deeply, so that we might truly participate in the loss and the horrors that sin has reaped in the world, and in doing so start to learn the fellowship of your sufferings, all the while entrusting our souls to a faithful Creator.

Jesus, you have been not just the model, but the provision of hope that we might enter death following you, knowing that because you entered it first, you will draw us out.

Lord, let us remember that and work that into our hearts and create space in our souls and in our church to mourn the real losses we're experiencing, that we might be moved towards action in you.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.