How Sweet the Name, Part 18: Risen Lord | Matthew 28:1-20
March 27, 2016 | Brian Hedges
The Lord is Risen! [Congregation: He is Risen Indeed!] Amen. Well, the resurrection of Jesus is the central event in the history of the Christian faith. It stands right alongside the incarnation and crucifixion. But if Jesus had not risen from the dead, the Christian church wouldn’t have been born, and we wouldn’t be celebrating as we are this morning. Without the resurrection of Christ there would be no Christianity. As the apostle Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.”
I am a Christian because I believe in the resurrection. Even though I was raised in the Christian church, I have not always found it easy to be a Christian. And the reason I am is because I am convinced that Jesus of Nazareth came out of the tomb on the third day some two thousand years ago.
And this morning we have the great privilege to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, to think about the resurrection of Christ. Really every day and every Lord’s Day is a resurrection day for the Christian. But it is good for us at least once a year to just really focus in on what we believe about the risen Lord.
For those of you who have been here for the last number of weeks and months, this message is the conclusion of a series that we have been in for about 18 weeks now on the names of Jesus. And we have thought a lot about who Jesus is and what He has done, as we have surveyed the names of Christ, and the images of Christ, and the offices of Christ. And today we come to Christ the Risen Lord.
And as our passage this morning, we are going to take the account given by Matthew in Matthew chapter 28, verses 1-20. I’m going to begin by reading it. You can follow along on the screen or read along in your own copy of God’s word.
Matthew 28:1-20: Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2 And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. 4 And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” 8 So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” 11 While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. 12 And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers 13 and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14 And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15 So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. 16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This is God’s Word.
Now as we think about the resurrection of Christ this morning, I just want to ask three questions.
I. What happened?
II. Why believe it?
III. Why does it matter?
I. What happened?
Christianity teaches that in the resurrection, Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried, rose from the dead on the third day, coming physically back to life. Herman Bavinck writes, “The resurrection was the event in which Christ, by His divine power, revived his dead body, united it with his soul, and thus left the tomb.” So what we mean by the resurrection—what happened is that Christ came back to physical bodily life.
We see this very clearly in Matthew’s narrative, first in the announcement and then in the appearances. In verses 5-7: “But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” (Matt. 28:5-7)
So this is what we mean. This is what happened. And then two appearances follow in the rest of this chapter. We will see shortly the record of Christ appearances are two pieces of credible evidence for the authenticity of Matthew’s record.
But I want to just focus for a minute on the sensory details of the appearances themselves. They saw him, it says in verse 17. They saw him. The disciples saw him in verse 17, the women in verse 9. They heard him, as well. And not only did they see him and hear him, they touched him. In verse 9, when Jesus appears to the women, it says that they took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Now the sensory details just tell us that something tangible happened. They didn’t just see a vision. They didn’t just see a ghost. They didn’t just see a spirit. They saw a body. And they touched the body.
Now the most famous tactile encounter with the risen Jesus is found in John chapter 20. Do you remember when Thomas had been told about the resurrected Christ and he didn’t believe? I’m just going to summarize (but this is on the screen for you). He said, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I won’t believe.” And then Jesus appears and tells him to do this. “Touch my hands, touch my side.” And then Thomas confessed “My Lord and my God,” and, verse 29, Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now I just want you to see that something very physical happened here.
So the resurrection of Jesus cannot be explained as the disciple’s vague consciousness that Jesus was somehow with them even after death. It can’t be explained is some sentimental sense that the spirit of Jesus lived on even though he had died. It wasn’t simply that Jesus gave them the assurance of life after death—that somehow Jesus went to heaven and therefore we will go to heaven. That doesn’t explain the resurrection. That’s not an adequate explanation of the resurrection. The resurrection was a physical, material, embodied reality. It means that the heart that was in the corpse started pumping again. It means that the lungs inflated with air. That the neurons in the brain started firing. And that the corpse rose and came out of the tomb. It was a bodily resurrection from the dead.
As John Updike, a Pulitzer prize winning American author, wrote in his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter”,
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
Or, in the words of the apostle John, “That which was from the beginning which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you.” (1 John 1:1, 3a)
The resurrection was the physical bodily return of Jesus from the grave. And if that didn’t happen, it does no good to try to demystify the resurrection and turn it into something else. If that didn’t happen, then Christianity is false. So that’s what happened. That’s what we mean.
So that leads then to the second question.
II. Why believe it?
Is there evidence that this really happened? And of course whole books have been written in defense of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. And it may be that there are some of you here today who have doubts about the resurrection of Christ. And so I am really glad that you’re here. And if you have doubts, I just want to encourage you to research the evidence for yourself. And I would recommend in particular a fairly lengthy book, but I think the most important book written on the resurrection of Jesus in history. N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It’s about 800 pages. A very careful historical investigation, not only of the biblical records, but of the Dead Sea scrolls, and Jewish writings around the second temple period, when the New Testament was written. And the expectations of Jewish people from the Old Testament, as well as the mythical and pagan beliefs of Greeks and Romans of that day. And Wright, in this study, just tries to account for how the church came to confess that Jesus rose from the dead. And his conclusion is that he must have really bodily come back to life. And I’m going to give you a couple of quotes from him in just a few minutes.
What I want you to see here in Matthew 28, is just three lines of evidence that I think, taken at face value, would indicate that this really did happen.
(1) And the first line of evidence is: The first witnesses themselves. Who were the women who saw the risen Lord, here in Matthew chapter 28? And it is really interesting that this would not have been persuasive to first century readers. Because the eye witness testimony of women was not accepted in either Roman or Jewish jurisprudence. No one would accept the eyewitness testimony of women. Such was the prejudice in that day. So the gospel writers would not have invented this. If they have invented this story, they would have said that at least one of the apostles would have been the first to see Jesus. Or maybe they would have even thought of some historically credible personage, and they would have said this person saw Jesus. But instead they said that it was the women who saw Jesus. So N.T. Wright makes the point: “The point has been repeated over and over in scholarship, but its full impact has not always been felt: women were simply not acceptable as legal witnesses.”
In fact, you may not know this, but probably the first critique of Christianity was a document written in AD 175 by a person named Celsus. It was called “The True Word”. We only know of it because Origen quotes it. But in Origen’s quotation of Celsus, one of his attempts to discredit Christianity was to discredit the resurrection as being witnessed by “a hysterical female.”
So, in its original context, this would not have been persuasive, but with the distance of years, it is persuasive because the only reason this would have been recorded is if this is what the early church really believed had happened.
So just the eye witnesses themselves become a line of evidence for the resurrection of Christ. And of course, we can go elsewhere in Scripture and show that there were many other eye witnesses, as well. In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul says there were over 500 who witnessed Christ risen, all at one time, some of whom were still living when he wrote that letter. That’s the first line of evidence.
(2) Here’s the second: the cover up. Now on one level, the cover up is kind of a smoking gun. You know, when there is a scandal, there is always a story. And the fact that there was a story, there was a scandal, there was some kind of a cover up. That tells us that something had to have happened. At the least it tells us that the body wasn’t in the tomb anymore. Right? The body somehow disappeared. So Matthew gives us this record in verses 11-15, that the soldiers are paid off to say that the disciples had stolen the body. But again the fact that this is included in the gospel record, in the historical narrative, is a line of evidence that something had happened.
So again let me quote N.T. Wright, who says: “It is implausible to suppose that the whole story would have been invented in the first place, let alone told and finally written down, unless there was already a rumor going around that the disciples had indeed stolen the body . . . the telling of the story indicates well enough that the early Christians knew that the charge of stealing the body was one they were always likely to face – and that it was preferable to tell the story of how the accusation had arisen, even at the risk of putting ideas into people’s heads, rather than leave the accusation unanswered . . . this sort of story could only have any point at all in a community where the empty tomb was an absolute and unquestioned datum.”
Or in other words, if I can just put it in a very simple syllogism here. If the stolen body accusations had not arisen, Matthew wouldn’t have invented it. But if there had been any lingering doubt concerning Jesus’ resurrection, Matthew wouldn’t have included it. So the very fact that these accusations are included in the gospel record and then answered is another line of evidence for the bodily resurrection of Christ.
(3) And then you have, as a third line of evidence, just the existence of the early church. As you know, the Christian church was born out of Judaism. And Jewish people were monotheists, which means they only worshiped one God. They worshiped the one and true God. The God revealed in the Old Testament. Idolatry was an abomination to them. To worship a man would have been unthinkable to them.
And yet in the record itself, we see, in verses 16-20, that when Jesus appeared to his disciples, though some doubted, verse 16, some of them worshiped him. They worshiped a man. A man who had come out of the tomb. Why? Because they were somehow convinced that he was the Son of God. That he was the Son of God. And here is the deal. Christianity never would have started out of Judaism, unless these eyewitnesses had been completely convinced that Jesus had come bodily from the grave. But they did worship him. Then they went around preaching him, and proclaiming him, and baptizing in his name, as we see in verses 18-20, as they fulfilled this great commission.
And again this is a large part of Wright’s case for the authenticity of Jesus’ resurrection. He convincingly argues that there has to be an explanation for how the Jesus movement started out of Judaism. There had never been anything like it before, and there has never been anything like it since. And so he says: “The only possible reason why early Christianity began and took the shape it did is that the tomb really was empty and that people really did meet Jesus, alive again.”
So when you take that evidence, and of course there is more that we could say, it does become pretty convincing that the early church believed that Jesus had bodily risen from the dead, and historians would be hard pressed to come up with another solution to the enigma, the mystery, of the existence of the church, and the empty tomb, than what, in fact, the eyewitnesses have told us.
III. Why does it matter?
But I want to move now, thirdly to ask: “why does it matter?” I would guess that most of us in this room believe in the resurrection of Christ already, and that just going through the evidences only confirms the faith that you already have. But what we need sometimes is to draw the connections between this historical event and life as we now live it. And so I want to ask “Why does it matter? What is the significance of the resurrection for you and me today? And I want to suggest three answers that have to do with our past, our present, and our future.
(1) The past: the resurrection assures of God’s forgiveness of our sins. The fact is we all have a past. Right? We have all committed sins. We have all done things we are ashamed of. We are all guilty.
And the resurrection assures us that what Jesus did on the cross was sufficient and completely satisfactory to the Father to forgive our sins. To quote Herman Bavinck once more, who was a Dutch reformed theologian around the turn of the 20th century. Bavinck said that the resurrection was “the ‘Amen’ of the Father to the ‘It is finished’ of the Son.”
And I think we get a glimpse of this—the power of this—in the story of Mary Magdalene, one of the women who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus, here in Matthew 28. Now we know a little bit about Mary Magdalene. We know that she is the woman out of whom Jesus had cast seven demons. So she had been demon possessed. She had been a woman who knew deep bondage and spiritual and emotional oppression. If she had lived today she would have been institutionalized. She certainly wouldn’t have had any social capital at all. She would have been despised. At best, she would have been tolerated. At worst, she would have been vulnerable to further victimization and abuse. But whatever her past, Jesus had met her, and had forgiven her, had freed her, had cleansed her, had changed her.
But she wasn’t expecting Jesus to rise from the dead. Mark tells us in Mark 16 that the reason she went to the grave was to finish the process of burying the body. To complete the anointing of the body of Jesus for burial. She was not expecting resurrection. And we can only imagine what must have been going through her mind. How her hopes must have been dashed. The sorrow she must have felt. She must have wondered if everything she had experienced would be undone. Here was this man who had cast the demons out, but now he was dead. Would the demons come back? Here was a woman who had been set free from her guilt and her sin, but would the specter of her past come back and haunt her once again? And the answer to whatever doubts she had? The answer was in this encounter with the risen Christ himself. The risen Christ assured her that everything that he had done to save her, was actually lasting and it was final and it was complete and it was sufficient. The resurrection of Christ assures us of God’s forgiveness.
In John Bunyan’s famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, there is a man going on a journey, and he has a huge burden on his back. Many of you have heard this story, or maybe even heard me tell this story before. He has this huge burden on his back, and the burden represents his sin and his guilt. And the one thing he wants is to be released of this burden. And he tries all different kinds of things to release the burden. He tries going to the law. He tries morality. He tries all these different things to release the burden. Nothing will release the burden, until he comes to Calvary. There at the foot of the cross, the burden rolls off of his shoulders, and (very significantly) it rolls down a hill and into an empty sepulcher. To an empty tomb. And then the man sings out,
“Blest Cross! Blest sepulcher!
Blest rather be
The Man that there
Was put to Shame for me!”
You see, the empty tomb assures us that the burden of sin has rolled from our shoulders. That it is rolled away. That our sins have been buried. The past is done away with, in the death of Christ and through his resurrection.
There is a great old hymn that we rarely sing anymore. But the words are wonderful. John Wilbur Chapman. Many of you will remember this maybe from your childhood.
One day the grave could conceal Him no longer,
One day the stone rolled away from the door;
Then He arose, over death He had conquered;
Now is ascended, my Lord evermore.
Living, He loved me; dying, He saved me;
Buried, He carried my sins far away;
Rising, He justified freely forever:
One day He’s coming—O glorious day!
So the resurrection deals with our past.
(2) Secondly, the resurrection gives us new power for living in the present. It gives us something in the present. Now there is just a hint of this at the end of Matthew 28, where Jesus tells his disciples, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” And the question we have to ask is, How is that Jesus is with us always? Because he is not here physically. He is not here bodily. And the answer of Scripture is: through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Christ. Jesus poured out his Spirit on the church on the day of Pentecost, and now the Spirit of Christ lives in our hearts. And in scripture, the glorious reality is this, that if the Spirit of Christ lives in us, Christ lives in us. And by the Spirit we are then united to Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. And so Paul will repeat this again and again and again in his letters, that something has happened through this faith union with Christ, so that when Christ died, you died with him.
Remember that old African spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The answer is, Yes. Yes, you were. And you were also there when he was laid in the tomb. And you were also there when he was raised from the dead, if you believe in Jesus. You were there because you were united with Him.
Paul, of course, tells us this in Romans chapter 6: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-4). Do you know what that means? It means that if you are a Christian, resurrection power is in you. It’s in you. The Spirit. The very one, who by His power, raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, lives inside of you, and there is power to live in a new way.
In fact, it means that God’s glorious future, the age to come, with all of the power and the glory of the resurrected Lord—God’s glorious future has invaded this present world, so that you and I, though we now live in the present, we live as citizens of the future kingdom in the power of the Spirit. The power of the resurrection.
Rebecca Manley Pippert, describes this so well in her book Hope Has Its Reasons. It’s also another book, and a much shorter one, if you are a skeptic and have questions. I recommend that book. Rebecca says: “The very same power that raised Jesus from the dead, that made the amino acids rekindle and the corpse sit up, that revitalized dead cells and restored breath to empty lungs, is the power that is given to us when we receive Christ. Everything about the resurrection speaks of empowered newness “
Or, just one more hymn. We already sang it this morning. Charles Wesley. He’s exactly right.
“Soar we now where Christ hath led,
Following our exalted Head.
Made like him, like him we rise,
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.”
You know what he is describing there? Union with Christ. “Ours the cross, ours the grave, ours the skies.” Why? Because we are united by faith through the Spirit to the crucified, risen Christ.
So the resurrection matters for our past. It matters for our present.
(3) Thirdly, it matters for the future. The resurrection declares that death is defeated once and for all. Peter proclaimed it on the day of Pentecost, God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep hold on him. To paraphrase, death lost its grip on Jesus. Jesus slipped through the fingers of death. It couldn’t hold him. It couldn’t hold him! Paul said in Romans chapter 6 verse 9, “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.”
The stranglehold of death is broken. Jesus defeated death through his death. But he didn’t defeat it only for himself. You see, Jesus died as a public figure, not just for himself. But he died as a representative. As we have seen in this series, for those of you who have been here, Jesus lived and died as the Second Adam. The Last Adam. So that he died and then he rose as a new representative for humanity. Paul tells us this in 1 Corinthians 15. “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”
And nobody has put this more eloquently than C.S. Lewis in his book Miracles:“The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the “first fruits,” the “pioneer of life.” He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has been opened.”
Someone else one time said, “The King of Glory has conquered the king of terrors.”
Now this has both personal implications and cosmic implications. And as we draw to a close, I just want to comment on each one of these.
First of all, the resurrection of Christ and his defeat of death has very personal implications. Because it means that all of our pain and suffering, all of our losses and our sorrows, all of the deepest aches of our broken hearts, will someday be mended.
Now I know there are some of you in this room who have already buried a spouse. Or a parent. Or a child. I know that there are some of you in this room who are battling a chronic, maybe even a terminal illness. I know that all of us are on this track between birth and death, and that the mortality rate is 100%. So this is very personal, and it becomes very personal the older you get. The older you get.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve seen suffering in my immediate and extended family. And the more I have witnessed the ravages of sin and sickness and suffering and sorrow and death in a fallen world among those whom I love, the more convinced I am that if the resurrection is not true, there is no hope. But if the resurrection is true, then there is hope that extends far beyond the grave.
One of the great examples in expressing this hope, is Joni Eareckson Tada. I know most of you probably know her story. She was only 18 years old when she was injured in a diving accident that left her paralyzed from the neck down. And Joni continued to practice her Christian faith. But it was difficult for her as a quadriplegic. She faced obvious limitations and challenges in her life, including in her worship. And in one of her books she tells the story of attending a convention where the speaker closed the service by calling everyone to kneel in prayer. And there she sat in her wheelchair unable to kneel. And she began weeping. But she tells us that the tears were not tears of self pity. She says: “Tears were streaming because I was struck with the beauty of seeing so many people on bended knees before the Lord. It was a picture of heaven . . . Sitting there, I was reminded that in heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick, and do aerobics . . . the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus . . .”
You see, the resurrection gives us great hope. It gives us great hope because it means that all of the sadness, all of the sorrows, all of the pain, all of the suffering, all of the wounds will be healed. Death will be undone. Death will work backwards. Everything sad will be untrue. The resurrection guarantees that death and dying will be no more. It shouts for us to hear, “Death be not proud! Death has lost its victory! Death has lost its sting! Yes, death itself has worked backwards! Our great enemy has been defeated once and for all!”So there are very personal implications for our future.
But (and I want to end on this) there are also cosmic implications for the future. Because the resurrection also declares to us God’s plan to renew and to restore the entire created order. The resurrection demonstrates what Bavinck described as grace restoring nature. And it affirms the basic goodness of the created and material world. You know, sometimes I think Christians can get the idea that the ultimate goal is to escape from the body and to escape from planet earth. And to go to a disembodied, kind of ethereal, spiritual afterlife.
But that’s not the Christian message at all. The Christian message is not a message of escape. It is a message of renewal and redemption and restoration, and re-creation, and resurrection. It’s the message that not only our bodies will be resurrected and restored. It’s the message that the whole created order will be resurrected and reborn. It’s the good news that Christ will make all things new. And that’s why the early Christians were so fired in their souls with the message of the good news. That they went out proclaiming forgiveness and renewal in the name of Jesus. And they did it in both word and in deed. Pouring out their lives to bring healing to the broken communities of the ancient world as they attended the sick, as they fed the poor, as they eventually built schools and hospitals, as they poured their lives out in deeds of mercy and justice in the name of Jesus. And that’s what you and I are called to do as the church today.
So the resurrection calls the church to serve the present broken world in hope, as we look back to Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we look forward to the resurrection and restoration of the world to come. And it assures us of this great hope that God will make all things new.
So… What happened? He was raised physically, bodily from the dead. Jesus is alive. Why believe it? Because of the eyewitnesses. Because of the faith of the early church. The vibrant faith. The very existence, really, of the early church. Why does it matter? Because it means your sins are forgiven. It means there is new power for life now. And it means that death is defeated and that someday all things will be made new.
So if you are a Christian this morning, we have great reason to rejoice! And, if you are not a Christian this morning, don’t you want this to be true? I mean, this is really good news if it is true. And if you find that there is a little kindling in your heart, maybe hope is beginning to dawn for the first time. And you are thinking, “Maybe there is an answer to these burdens that I’ve been carrying.” Then I just want to point you to God’s word and I want to end with these verses.
“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” (Rom. 10:9-10)
Let’s pray
Father, we thank you for your grace and mercy and your love that you would send your Son to die for our sins, and we thank you for your power and your goodness. And that you would raise him from the dead. We thank you for giving us your Spirit to unite us to this crucified, risen Savior through faith. We thank you that it means our sins are forgiven. And we can stand with confidence before you this morning. It means we have new power today to live in a new kind of way. That we are no longer bound by the shackles of sin and Satan and death and hell. That we can walk in newness of life. Help us enter into the fullest possible experience of that this morning. And we thank you that it means that death is not the end. That our futures are bright with the glorious hope of resurrection. So let us live in that hope today. Let us live in that hope this week. Let us spread that hope to others. In the power of your Spirit and in the glorious name of Jesus our Lord, in whose name we pray, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
