Righteousness
Sermon Transcript
0:00:14.0
Well, good morning, everyone. Let’s take our Bibles and turn to Matthew 5. We’re working our way through the Sermon on the Mount, and we’ve come to verses 17-20. And I’d like to read them for us by way of introduction this morning. Matthew 5 beginning in verse 17. These are the words of Jesus. He says, “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” One of the first heretics or false teachers to get kicked out of the early church was a man by the name of Marcion, Marcion of Sinope. His false teaching arose in and around the 2nd century and lasted in one form or another until the 4th century, when something called Marcionism was absorbed into the gnostic movement of that time. The most egregious thing that Marcion did was to reject the Old Testament in its entirety. He believed that any reference to the Old Testament in the New Testament represented a Jewish corruption of the Christian faith. And that was egregious enough, but that’s just a little bit of Marcion’s heresy. He also rejected all of the gospels except Luke. He accepted Paul’s epistles, of course minus any reference to the Old Testament, and Paul made a lot of references to the Old Testament. And he also believed that the God of the Old Testament was an evil creator God that Jesus came to destroy. Now you have some idea as to why the early church fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian rejected Marcion’s teachings and he was labeled a heretic.
0:02:51.5
Marcion died in A.D. 160, but the damage that he did to the early church I believe still lingers today. And here is where I think it lingers. Many Christians I know still are confused about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Some people, for instance, say that when the New Testament came that means the Old Testament is out. It’s out the old and in with the new, and we shouldn’t give any reference to the Old Testament. We shouldn’t study the Old Testament. We shouldn’t teach from the Old Testament. We should be in the New Testament, and especially the Pauline epistles. That’s one extreme. Other people say, “Oh, no, no, no. We are New Testament believers, but we are still under the Law of Moses.” These were the Judaizers in the 1st century. This is why Paul fired off his first letter to the Galatians to kind of quiet down the Judaizers who wanted to be Christians and accept Jesus but still be under the Law of Moses. I think there is a happy medium. I think there is a more balanced view. And the balanced view would say that the Christian faith has deep, deep Jewish roots. So deep that they go all the way back into the Old Testament. And we cannot understand our Christian faith…we cannot even understand the New Testament, the ministry of Jesus Christ and the gospels, let alone how the apostles interpret that through their epistles in the New Testament…we cannot understand that apart from the Old Testament.
0:04:26.3
In fact, I think it’s important to understand that this Bible we have and the 66 books from Genesis to Revelation is one continuous story. We kind of divide in half with, you know, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament, and we come up with these 66 books. But it’s one continuous story, God’s continuous story of redemption that begins in creation, the first book of the Bible, and ends in the last two chapters of the last book of the Bible, Revelation, in recreation with the new heaven and the new earth. And the main character of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is the coming of Messiah, Jesus Christ, God’s only son. The first prediction of that was in Genesis 3:15. And Revelation concludes, you know, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” and, “I am coming quickly.”
0:05:21.3
And Jesus came 2000 years ago, and He punctuated history. And in doing so, He fulfilled all of the prophecies and the typologies and the dreams and the visions and the foreshadowing that we have in the Old Testament of the coming of our Redeemer. He fulfilled all of that. But still today, and in every generation, people raise questions about the connection between Jesus and Moses, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And in fact, long before Marcion came on the scene. Early in Jesus’s ministry, there were some questions that people had about Jesus and His relationship to the Law and the Prophets. And that’s a little background to the verses that I just read, Matthew 5:17-20.
0:06:15.2
This Sermon on the Mount comes fairly early in Jesus’s ministry. And I think He’s addressing some of those questions. And He says a number of things here. I just want to make some observations as we go through these four verses. They’re packed with a lot meaning and a lot of stuff for us to understand. And if you have ever had questions about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, this may not answer all of the questions, but it certainly gives us a good head start. And I just want to make four observations here and comment upon them.
0:06:49.1
The first is simply this- that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets. He’s says as much in verse 17. Let’s look there again. He says, “Do not think that I have come destroy the Law and the Prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” Now, the first three words there, “Do not think,” suggest to us that there were probably some people in and around the 1st century who thought that this new rabbi, this new rabbi who had come upon the scene with His new teaching, as some people would say, this guy came to destroy the Law and the Prophets. He came to destroy our law and our religion and our traditions.” And folks were getting stirred up about that. You say, “Well, how did that happen so early on in Jesus’s ministry?” Well, perhaps it was because He had healed a man on the Sabbath day. In Mark 2 we have a record of that. (Cell phone rings) Early on in Jesus’s ministry, early on in the Gospel of Mark…and then they didn’t have cell phones back then or anything like that to tell them about this. They just… (Laughing) I’m trying to track my thoughts over here, all right. But Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath day, and that stirred some people up. It stirred the religious leaders up. It stirred the Jewish people up. How could He be so crass and heal a man on the Sabbath? Well, that was the occasion where Jesus said that the Sabbath was for man, not man for the Sabbath. And He declared Himself Lord of the Sabbath. In other words, “Guys, I created the Sabbath, and I can do whatever I want with it.” And, in fact, what we find with the Ten Commandments, not just the Sabbath command, is that the New Testament reaffirms nine of the Ten Commandments, even ratchets them up a bit in the New Testament. But Jesus does something different with the Sabbath command. He’s the Lord of the Sabbath. In fact, He is the fulfillment of the Sabbath command. “Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” Sabbath rest. He is that Sabbath rest.
0:09:03.3
That’s perhaps one of the reasons they were all stirred up about this. The other reason might be because He did come with a teaching that had an unusual authority to it. And people were wondering, where does this young rabbi get His authority? Because Jesus used a rabbinic formula they hadn’t heard before. He would say things like, “Truly, truly, I say unto you…” That was strange to their ears. And they were saying, you know, “This guy teaches with an authority, and it seems like His authority rests in Himself.” “Truly, truly I say unto you…” And so there was some discussion about that. There was some stirring up about all of that. “He’s come to destroy a religion and the law and our traditions.” And Jesus says, “No, no, no, no. Let me clarify your misperceptions about Me. I did not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets. I came to fulfill them. To fulfill them.”
0:10:12.2
Now, when you see the word “law” in your New Testament, sometimes it’s capitalized, sometimes it in lowercase letters. It means one of three things or all of these things. It could mean the Ten Commandments, that part of the law of God that codifies the moral law of God. And we understand what the Ten Commandments are all about. It could also refer to the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—known as the Pentateuch. This represented the Jewish, kind of, law library, we might say. But then when you see a phrase like “Law and the Prophets” together…and in my Bible “law” is capitalized and “prophets” is capitalized. And when you see that, that is kind of a technical reference to the entirety of the Old Testament. The 39 books of the Bible that, yes, the Jews had in the 1st century are the same 39 books we find in our Protestant Bible. They ordered them a little bit differently, but ours is from Genesis to Malachi. They had all those books as well. And so Jesus says, “I didn’t come to destroy the entire Old Testament, the Law and the Prophets. No, I came to fulfill it.” What does He mean by that? What does He mean to “fulfill the Law and the Prophets”?
0:11:25.9
Well, the word “fulfill” means to fill up. It means to fill it up. And the implication is whatever came through the Law and the Prophets, well, it was incomplete. It was just partially full. And, yes, we know that the Law and the Prophets is full of prophecies and typologies and dreams and visions and foreshadowings, a glimpse here and glimpse there of God’s grand plan of redemption. But it was just partially full. And when Jesus came, He filled up…He fulfilled all of those predictions and typologies. And there wasn’t any more need for foreshadowings and glimpses here and glimpses there. He was the fulfillment of all of that.
0:12:11.5
Now, here is a couple of illustrations that might help you understand the word “fulfill.” Supposed I have an acorn in my hand. And I can do one of two things with that acorn. I can put it on the ground and take a hammer and smash it into a hundred pieces. I could destroy it. Or I could take that acorn, and I could plant it in the ground and allow it to fulfill itself or fulfill its destiny in becoming a beautiful oak tree. That’s one way of thinking about it. If you still need help, here is an illustration for the sports fans among us. Think of the Law and the Prophets, the entirety of the Old Testament, as sort of like the Redskins driving the length of the field, okay. Go with me on this. They’re driving the length of the field, and they end up in the red zone, you know, that space inside the 20-yard line. And then Jesus comes along and He fulfills the Law and the Prophets. And it’s sort of like…if your imagination can go there, it’s sort of like the Redskins ending up in the end zone. You’ve got the red zone. You’ve got the end zone. You got it? So I came to one conclusion in verse 17 here. And that conclusion is that the Redskins need Jesus now more than ever. By the way, so do the Cowboys, but that’s for another sermon, all right.
0:13:43.2
How does Jesus fulfill the Law and the Prophets? Three ways. Number one, by keeping the moral law of God perfectly. Now, we’re talking about the Ten Commandments. That standard of righteousness that God established in the Old Testament. Nobody for centuries, not even the Pharisees and the scribes, were able to maintain that standard of perfection. Not a single one of them. But Jesus, the perfect Son of God, came and lived a perfect, sinless life. And He achieved the standard of righteousness that was demanded by the moral law of God. He fulfilled it.
0:14:26.4
Secondly, He fulfills the Law and the Prophets by making obsolete the sacrificial system in the Old Testament with His own death upon the cross. If you read the Old Testament and you know anything about the Jewish faith in the Old Testament, some have said that it was a bloody, bloody book and a bloody, bloody religion full of the sacrifices of bulls and goats and lambs. Remember, it all started on the Passover day when the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt. And God instituted the Passover, and they were to find a perfect, unblemished lamb and sacrifice that lamb on Passover night and take the blood and paint it on the doorpost. And when the death angel came through Egypt, he passed over those who had been covered by the blood. Beautiful typology, a foreshadowing of things to come. And God took centuries, century after century after century, teaching His chosen people of Israel and preparing the world for the day when He would send His Son, heaven’s perfect lamb. And John the Baptist would look at Him and say, “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” And the centuries’ worth of lessons that they learned through all the sacrifices that had to be done over and over and over and over again, the blood that was shed to atone for their sins, it prepared them for that day so that those people who had ears to hear would say, “I get it. I understand. Now the perfect Lamb of God has come, and He gives a once-for-all sacrifice for our sins, shedding His blood.” And when Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished,” those who had ears to hear said, “Now I understand. Now I get it.” Now, of course, everybody didn’t have ears to hear in the 1st century, and not everybody has ears to hear today. But Jesus fulfilled the Law and the Prophets. He filled up…there was no more need for typologies and prophecies and foreshadowings and glimpses here and there. He’s the full enchilada. He’s the full thing.
0:16:58.0
Third way that He fulfilled the Law and the Prophets is by filling up the predictions in the Old Testament about Messiah, and there were hundreds. Hundreds of predictions, hundreds of prophecies about the coming of Messiah. And the scholars have shown how Jesus’s unique life fulfilled those prophecies. And one mathematician who is smarter at math than I am tried to determine the probability of all those prophecies being fulfilled in one person’s life and just basically said it’s impossible. It’s mathematically improbably that one life would so align to fulfill all of these prophecies, pointing us again to the fact that Jesus Christ was exactly who He said He was, the Son of God and the savior of the world.
0:17:49.9
He came to fulfill those prophecies. And I counted 37 times this week in the gospels where He used a phrase similar to this in Luke 4:21. You remember the time when He stood up in the temple and He grabbed the scroll of Isaiah. And He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” He read that scroll, and then He looked at the people and said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Time and time again we read something like that through the gospels where Jesus said, “Here is something I did. Here is something in the scriptures. Here is something I’m saying in fulfillment of the scripture,” the Law and the Prophets that He had.
0:18:30.9
So first of all, verse 17, He fulfills the Law and the Prophets. He didn’t come to destroy. Didn’t come to abolish them. He came to fulfill them. Second thing that He says in verse 18 is that He affirms the trustworthiness of scripture. And I love this verse. He says, “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is (0:19:00.0) fulfilled.” The Bible that Jesus read, the Bible that Jesus knew, the Bible that Jesus memorized, the Bible that Jesus used to saturate His heart and His mind was the Law and the Prophets. It was the Old Testament, Genesis through Malachi. The New Testament hadn’t been written. The gospels were being written by His own life as He lived them and would later be put down on parchment paper. But this was the Bible He had. And we have record in the scripture that even by age 12 Jesus had so saturated His mind and His heart with the Word of God that He ends up in the temple one day. And He is teaching the teachers. This one who would one day be called Rabbi is teaching the rabbis a few things about the scriptures. And I would have loved to have been in on that conversation, wouldn’t you? Just a fly on the (0:20:00.0) wall to hear what He was saying to them, how He was going to this scripture and that scripture in the Old Testament and saying, “That’s Me. I’m here.” You know? It was just fascinating until His mom and dad came and said, “What are you doing, son?” But Jesus saturated His heart and His mind with the scriptures. And every opportunity He had, He affirmed the trustworthiness of the Old Testament.
0:20:24.6
And I love the way the King James says it here. “Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law until all is fulfilled.” What’s a jot and what’s a tittle? Well, they’re the smallest marking in the Hebrews alphabet. And the Hebrews alphabet is kind of a scratchy looking thing that you read from right to left, not left to right. And they have just little small markings. It’s kind of like in our English alphabet there are small markings that differentiate one letter from another. Think of a capital P and a capital R. There is a little serif marking. It would be called a tittle in the Hebrew language. This little serif marking that differentiates the capital P from the capital R makes all the difference in the world between the word “Raid” or the word “Paid”. And insert that into a sentence that, you know, has all the…makes all the difference in the meaning of a sentence. And so put that idea on steroids when it comes to the Hebrews language and it would be sort of like us saying that the Word of God is trustworthy because the author dots his I’s and crosses his T’s, down to the smallest, little bitty markings in the Hebrews language. The Law, Jesus says, will be fulfilled. Every bit of it. He affirms the trustworthiness of scripture. And Jesus has a high, high view of scripture, doesn’t He? He doesn’t come at the ancient writings with skepticism and slicing and dicing parts and saying, “Well, I’ll believe this, but I’m not sure about that.” Or like Jefferson said, “Well, I love Jesus in the Bible, but let’s take all the miracles out.” And he ended up with a Bible about that thing. No, Jesus doesn’t do that. He affirms every bit of it, and we should to. What is your view of scripture? How do you come to Word of God? The Holy Spirit will shed light upon this book, I believe, to the extent that we know it and trust it as God’s Word to you and God’s Word to me, His love letter to us, as it were.
0:22:41.8
Now, there is a third thing that Jesus says in verse 19. Here He reveals rankings in the kingdom of heaven. Listen to this. “Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments…” You would expect Him to say this given His view of scripture, His high view of scripture. He says, Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Did you know that in heaven there will be rewards handed out for faithful service for believers in Jesus Christ? Rewards. And we could take some time to go through the New Testament and talk about that rewards system that will be in heaven.
0:23:26.8
But this verse of scripture also tells us that there are rankings in the kingdom of heaven. That some will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven, and others will be called the greatest in kingdom of heaven. Now, we’re right in the middle of college football season. And if you're a college football fan you know that the rankings come out every week. Top 20, sometimes the top 10, even down to the top 5. And that number one ranking is a coveted ranking, isn’t it? There’ll be rankings in heaven, least to the greatest. I would rather be the least in the kingdom of heaven than the greatest in hell, wouldn’t you? Amen? Right? Or, oh me! Wherever you are. But I’d still like to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And it all has to do with my view of scripture and how I respond to what God says. And it makes sense, doesn’t it, that the Lord who wrote this Word, if we honor His Word, then He says, “Man, hey, you’re one of mine. You’re one of the greatest in the kingdom because you respect my Word. You teach it and you do it.”
0:24:44.6
But notice the phrasing here. Jesus says, “Whoever therefore breaks one of these commandments…” No, that’s not what He says. He says, “Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments…will be the least in the kingdom of heaven.” Let’s think about the Ten Commandments for a moment. There are only ten of them, but we tend to think that some are more important than others, like “Thou shat not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Thou shalt not have any graven image.” You know, no idolatry here. Those are some of the biggies, right? And then we say, well, you know, the other ones, “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.” Okay. “Thou shalt not covet anything of your neighbor’s.” Okay. Well, that’s kind of hard to do, you know, when I look at all the advertisements and all that. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against my neighbor.” Wow, you mean I’ve got to tell the truth? You mean sins of the tongue are a concern to God? Gossip, slander, backbiting, all of that? Yeah. He says…let’s read it again. “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so…” You don’t have to be a teaching pastor or a Sunday school teacher or a small group leader to teach. You can teach by your example. Your kids and your grandkids are picking up on that example of things that come out of your mouth. You’re teaching them. The things that you say, the things that you do, you’re teaching them. “Whoever breaks the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” He says, “I want you to honor my Word. I want you to honor it.”
0:26:28.6
But He turns it in the positive direction. “But whoever does and teaches…” And I love that ordering there, “does and teaches.” Not “teaches and does,” but, “does and teaches.” So, teachers, let’s not traffic in unapplied truth, starting with me. That’s hard to do. Week after week, week after week, you know, I’ve got to run this through my own life as much as you Sunday school teachers and small group leaders and even non-verbal teachers need to do. He who “does and teaches, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” It’s a pretty sobering thought, isn’t it?
0:27:04.5
That’s why we’ve got to move onto number four here. And this is where Jesus raises the bar on righteousness. Look at it verse 20. He says, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” Wow, I wish this was easier, not harder. But now He’s really raised the bar. Think of a high jump bar. You know, 6 feet, and now we’re gonna go to 7 feet. He raises the bar on righteousness. You and I have a view of the Pharisees, the scribes and the Pharisees that…you know, we kind of think of them as legalistic and rule-keeping and prideful and controlling and, you know, those rotten Pharisees in the 1stcentury. But you need to understand, these were respected religious leaders in the 1st century. And, in fact, the common people looked at the Pharisees and really understood them to be the holiest men in the community. And for centuries they dedicated themselves to studying the Law and the Prophets and doing it to the best that they could. In fact, they even added their own rules and regulations to make sure that everybody maintain the standard of righteousness that was established in the Law of Moses. And so when Jesus said to the people on that hillside overlooking the Galilean Sea, this Sermon on the Mount—He says that “unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, you won’t be able to enter the kingdom of heaven,”—do you know how they received that? You ever play the game Battleship? You know that little board game you call out the letters G4 and S10 and T6 and A5 and before long, “You sunk my battleship!” That’s how they received it. These guys were considered the holiest in the community, and the people were saying, “Jesus, you just sunk our battleship. If the Pharisees can’t achieve the standard of righteousness, what hope do I have of achieving it? You’re telling me I have to exceed their standard?”
0:29:20.5
Now, Jesus doesn't go on to explain what righteousness He’s talking. But we know from the rest of the Gospels and the New Testament that the Pharisees were all about an external righteousness. They were good at cleaning up the outside but not the inside. And, again, all their rules and regulations, you know, were part of cleaning up the outside. But Jesus looked at them and called them hypocrites. You know, you look all good on the outside, but when I look at your heart,” He says, “I see corruption. I see duplicity. You’re hypocrites.”
0:29:55.1
He also called them whitewashed tombs. He really knew how to win friends and influence people, didn’t He? Think of a beautiful grave marking. Think of a beautiful mausoleum and the beautiful marble that kind of sparkles in the sunshine and the beautiful etchings on there. But inside that mausoleum is death. That’s what Jesus said about the Pharisees. The best rule-keepers the Jews had ever seen for centuries were the Pharisees and the scribes. And Jesus says, “You're like a whitewashed tomb. You look good on the outside, but inside is death.” What are we to do?
0:30:34.8
Well, it gets back to our understanding of the Old and New Testament and our understanding of the Law and the Prophets. Turn with me to the book of Galatians real quicly. 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians. If you hit Ephesians or Philippians, take a hard left and come to Galatians 3:22. And kind of midstream in Paul’s thoughts. Remember, this letter he fired off to the Galatians to correct the Judaizers in the 1st century and their understanding of the relationship between the Law and the Prophets. Paul says in verse 22 of chapter 3, “But the scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came,” he says, “we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed.” Kind of an allusion to some of these prophecies and typologies and foreshadowings. And then in verse 4 he uses a school analogy. He says, “Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ.” It was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, “that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor,” or the schoolmaster.
0:31:58.9
You see, the righteous standard, God’s righteous standard in the Old Testament, codified in the moral law or the Ten Commandments, revealed—if I can use this school analogy—God’s grading system. And He doesn’t grade on a curve. It’s a pass/fail test. If you fail in one, you’ve failed in all. And even the best, righteous standard rule keepers the Jews had ever seen, the Pharisees, failed. They fell short of the righteous standard. But the idea is this. The law was given to show us our need for a savior. The standard was set. And it was set so high. This is the righteous standard of God. It established in order to show us that we needed somebody else to take the test for us. Remember Jesus who fulfilled the Law and the Prophets? He perfectly kept the moral law of God. It’s like—if you use the school analogy—He took the exam for us and He got a perfect score. And now we are able by faith to take His perfect score and apply it to our test book. And that’s how we exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees. Because in theological terms, His righteousness is imputed to us. And that kind of righteousness, by the way, has always, always been by faith.
0:33:31.7
In fact, look in Genesis 15:6. Abraham, the father of faith, “Abram believed the Lord, and He,” the Lord, “credited it to him as righteousness.” When God saw faith in Abraham, He took the righteousness of God and credited it to his account. And that’s how even by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who took the test for us and got a perfect score…by faith in Lord Jesus Christ, that score is applied to us. And through faith in Christ, we now achieve the righteous standard of God. Not a righteousness on our own and through our own efforts, but by everything that Jesus did on our behalf.
0:34:26.0
Does that make sense? Does anybody know what the Redskins are gonna do today? Red zone, end zone. Let’s hope they get it into the end zone. And I hope that you, by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, have also gotten in the end zone. Let’s pray together.
0:34:45.9
Our Father in heaven, we thank You for Your Word. And thank You for making it so clear to us as we study it. I pray that if there is anyone here today who is still confused about why Jesus Christ came and fulfilled the Law and the Prophets, well, that You would teach them and make that clear by Your Holy Spirit. But most importantly, Father, that today would be a day of salvation for every person in this room, to see Jesus for who He really is—the fulfillment of everything You prophesied, everything You foreshadowed, everything that You gave us a glimpse of—and how, by faith, Your righteousness, Your righteous standard can be met in Christ. And we pray this in His name, amen.
0:35:59.3