Awaiting The Dawn

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why, but I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories have lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding onto something, that there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for”—Samwise Gamgee,  The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I’ve titled this message this morning “Awaiting the Dawn” because it’s all about hope. Hope is something we can’t live without. Hope is what gets us up in the morning. Hope is what gives us reason to endure. Hope lifts our eyes beyond the shadows to the dawning of the light. And as the book of Malachi draws to a close, it ends with a wondrous vision of hope.

There’s been a whole lot of tough love in this book. God hasn’t pulled any of His punches as He disciplines His beloved children, but His final words are full of tender mercies. It is hope that God leaves ringing in the ears of His people because, friends, hope breathes courage into our timid souls. Amen? Hope breathes courage into our timid souls. Is there anybody here this morning who can use a little bit of hope? Anybody? Anybody can use a bit of hope this morning?

Friends, with all that we’re facing in this dark and broken world, you and I need a little bit of hope this morning because we, too, are awaiting the dawn. We’re awaiting the dawn.

Grab your Bibles. Matthew—I’m sorry. Matthew? I’ve done that like twice in this series. Let me do that again. Grab your Bibles. We’re going to be in Matthew. Ah, I did it again! [laughter] Man!

Grab your Bibles. We’re going to be in Malachi, chapter 4, verses 1 through 6 this morning. That’s pages 802 and 803 in the pew Bible. If you have that grab it. Join us there. Malachi, chapter 4, verses 1 through 6.

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all of Israel.

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to the children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

Thanks be to the Lord for the reading of His word.

Don’t you just love it, right in the middle this poetic imagery? “The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.”

So here you’ve got the sun peering over the dawning horizon with beams of righteousness, piercing the shadows, darkness fleeing over the edge of the world, rays of light spreading like wings out over the horizon, bringing healing warmth wherever the light falls, greening, and brightening and nourishing, and enlivening, making all the world whole and healed, and good, and beautiful in the light of the risen sun. Oh, don’t you just want to go there now? Oh that we could go.

Oh friends, that’s soul stirring imagery. It inspired me a little this week to give a bit of a creative outline for this text. We’re going to see the Sun of Hope, the Soil of Hope, and the Seed of Hope this morning. Very imagery rich because listen, hope is not something you get with your head. It’s something you feel in your heart. We get to have a visceral encounter with hope this morning.

So, the Sun of Hope, the Soil of Hope, and the Seed of Hope. There’s our outline. Would you bow your heads? Let’s pray.

O Father, would you teach us to hope in the glories to come? Father, help us not to put our hope in the temporary things of this world, but in the glories of all that you will do one day in the dawning of the new creation. Draw our hearts upward, we pray. Further up and further in. In Jesus’ name, amen. Amen.

The Sun of Hope. Let’s start. So, we’ve got to remember who this text is written to. Israel has been in exile under foreign oppression until very recently. Now they’re back in the land, but it’s not like it was before. The temple is small. It’s diminished. The government is weak and almost powerless. The economy is struggling, barely getting by. The boot of their enemies, their foreign oppressive enemies are still pressed down upon their necks. And they’ve grown weary of waiting for God to intervene, to act. “How long, O Lord?” they keep crying.

Now, let’s reread these verses in light of where they’re coming from. Chapter 4, verse 1: “For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.”

Remember back in chapter 3, verse 15, the people were complaining that the arrogant were experiencing blessing, and the evildoers were getting away with everything. They had tested God and were escaping, and God here says (in chapter 4), “Not for long. Not for long.”

Oh, a day is coming, and it’s burning like an oven, like a kiln, when all the arrogant, those who defy the Lord, all the evildoers who perpetrate injustice, they’ll be stubble—like the worthless stalks that are burned in the fire after the grain is harvested off the end. They shall be set to blaze. Consumed, root to branch and everything in-between, all of them.

“One day, friends,” Malachi is saying, “evil will be vanquished forever. One day justice will roll down like a mighty river. One day righteousness will come like a never-ending stream.”

Second Peter 3, verse 7, says, “The heavens and the earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” In this day, Malachi is saying (the Lord is saying), “The wicked will not stand. Evil will come to an end.” Hallelujah. Right? Hallelujah.

[Malachi 4] Verse 2, “But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.” If you fear my name, and if your name is written in my Book of Remembrance (Do you remember that in chapter 3, verse 16?), that day will be a different day. For you, the sun of righteousness will rise. It’ll be a new dawn. It’ll be a new day. The sun will rise with healing in its wings, and everywhere the light falls the world shall be healed and warmed and green and new. And you will go leaping like a calf that’s been pent up in the stall all winter, and finally the stable doors are flung wide, and the light pours in and the scent of a fresh verdant spring reaches your nose, and you rush out with all the vibrancy of youth, skipping, and frolicking, and dancing, leaping into the vast sunlit lands for which you were made, and you will be home finally, at long last.

Verse 3: “And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet.” So, notice the Lord has judged them and they’re just ashes, but now the righteous are running over the ashes “on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.”

So, the oppressors, the ones with the boot on the neck of the people of God, they shall now be under their feet. They shall tread on the ashes of the remains of the wicked. Who’s on top now? And for those of you who were wondering back in 3, verse 14, if serving God mattered, if there was any profit in it for you, on this day you will see. You will see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked. You will see how the wicked are vanquished and the righteous delight in the dawn of the new creation.

Now there’s a very interesting phrase all the way down at the end after we get the label, “the Great and Awesome Day of the Lord.” It’s down in verse 6. God says He’s going to send Elijah to prepare the hearts of His people for the Day of Judgment. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.

But this is what he says. Verse 6: “He (this is Elijah) will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” This phrase here, “the decree of utter destruction,” is weird. It’s very odd. It’s rarely used in the Bible, but it literally means, “I will place a ban upon the earth.”

“I will place a ban upon the earth. The earth will be forbidden, off limits, marked out for divine destruction.”

So, here’s what you have as you look at this passage as a whole. He’s talking about the great and awesome Day of the Lord, and four things will happen on that day. Number one, evil will be vanquished forever. Secondly, the earth will be banned, purged with fire, and destroyed. Third, then upon the scorched ashes of the world that was, the sun will rise with righteousness and healing in its wings, and wherever the healing rays land, new life will spring into new creation. Everything ailing will be healed. Everything broken will be mended. Everything marred will be beautiful. From the ashes will rise the dawn of a new creation. And number four, the righteous shall inherit the earth, set loose like bounding calves into the wide world of the new age. 

Friends, what Malachi, and the Lord are telling us is one day the darkness will give way to the dawn. One day the darkness will give way to the dawn. This is what the story of the Bible is really all about. The world is good. God made it. The world is fallen. We broke it. The world is being saved. Jesus is rescuing it, and the world will be redeemed and glorious in the end.

This is the story God is writing. Oh, it’s a story of hope. And friends, do you realize secularism cannot give you this kind of hope? Secularism cannot give you this kind of hope. If you take God out of the story— listen. If you are the product of a meaningless evolution with time and chance on your side, if the history of the world is the strong eating the weak, as Tennyson says, “Nature red in tooth and claw,” and if in all of creation you just puff up and build up a little story for yourself, you make whatever life you can, but in the end the sun goes dark, the universe gets cold, everything freezes, spins out in entropy and death wins in the end, there is no basis for hope.

There’s no basis for hope in the secular story, but that is not the story that is real. This is the story that the Bible is giving us, that history is actually going somewhere, that we are not trapped in an endless cycle ad nauseum where we just have to do the same thing over and over again forever. Nor are we stuck in a tragedy where everyone dies in the end. Nor is it a cheap feel-good comedy that’s just for laughs. No, the Bible tells us that the world is an inherently good, fatally broken, divinely rescued, and one day gloriously redeemed story.

The Bible helps us see the world as it really is, the profound depths of the darkness. There’s no flinching in the Bible when it comes to evil and injustice and the pain of this world, and there’s no denying of this. But it also isn’t full of despair because the Bible also holds out the hope, the resplendent heights of hope of the dawning of the light.

See, the Bible helps us see the darkness of crucifixion in the light of resurrection. One day the darkness will give way to the dawn. Healing will come to all creation with the rising of the sun of hope.

Alright, the Sun of Hope, Now the Soil of Hope. What difference does it make when this hope falls on the soil of your life? What difference does it make when hope rains down upon you and soaks into the soil of your life and saturates who you are? How does this hope change you? Well for one, it changes how we look back. It changes how we look back. Look at verse 4: “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.”

See, if you know that evil will be vanquished, if you know that this cursed earth will be destroyed, that a New Creation will dawn and that the righteous will inherit the earth, you want to get on the right side of history. And so you remember the Law. You remember “my servant, Moses.” This is language of the Covenant. Remember Moses came down Mount Sinai at Horeb with the Ten Commandments. He’s the one who inaugurated the Covenant. He brokered the Covenant between God and the people, where they promised to obey God, and He promised to bless them for their obedience. And Malachi is saying “Remember.” The Lord is saying, “Remember. Remember who you are. Remember your relationship with me. You are my people. You are my sons. You are my daughters. You’re members of my Covenant, and I am preparing glory upon glory for you, so I want you to live like it now. Remember who you are. Remember the Covenant you’re in. Remember the Law you are to keep. Let this future hope remind you to walk before me right here and right now in purity and holiness.”

First John 3, verses 2 to 3 say something very similar to New Testament believers like you and me, members of the New Covenant in Christ. This is what John writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”

Do you see that? If you know you are going to be glorious when you see Jesus face to face and are transformed into His image— if you know that’s coming, you start walking in purity right here and now because one day “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father (Matthew 13:43, words of Jesus).

When hope like this sinks into the soil of our lives, it changes how we look back. It reminds us of who we are. It reminds us to walk in purity and holiness before the Lord, but it also changes how we look ahead. It changes how we look ahead. Look at [Malachi 4] verse 5: “Behold, I will send Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” Before the great and awesome Day of the LORD comes, you will get a final warning, a final grace, a final prophet. I will send you Elijah, and Elijah will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers.

What’s with that phrase? If you do a quick study of that phrase in the Bible you will always find it’s connected with spiritual revival and renewal. When God’s people get right with God, they get right with one another. Those things are intimately connected. Love God, love people.

Now, you’ll recall that Elijah was a prophet from the ninth century B.C. many years before this prophecy is given, but he never died. It’s an interesting story. You can read about it in 2 Kings, chapter 2. He never died. He was taken up in a chariot of fire into heaven. God just snatched him up. Why? Malachi, chapter 4 is telling us why. Because God has more work for him to do. God’s not done with him yet. He’s going to send him back to prepare the way of the Lord, and when he comes he’s going to bring spiritual revival and renewal to the people of God. God says, “You’ll return to me, and you’ll return to one another.”

And just as the expectation of Messiah’s coming (Jesus) actually occurs in two phases (the first and second comings of our Lord Jesus Christ), Elijah’s coming also takes place in two phases. So, for example, we see the first stage of this fulfillment in John the Baptist. So, if you read in Luke, chapter 1, verse 17, Gabriel, the angel, announces the birth of John the Baptist and says “He will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, and make ready for the Lord a people prepared.” And so, Gabriel was saying, “This is him. This is the Elijah we’re talking about.”

Now, it’s interesting because John was not actually Elijah reincarnate. Right? And so, when they pressed him and they said, “Are you Elijah?” he said, “No.” That’s in John 1:21. But later Jesus said in Matthew 11, verses 13 and 14, “All Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come.”

So, Jesus says John is. Then a couple chapters later at the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus is glorified before His disciples, there are two individuals that stand at the top of the mountain with Jesus, Moses and Elijah. And the disciples go, “Wait a minute. I remember Malachi.” This is a big deal, and they ask Jesus about it. This is how Jesus responds.

Matthew 17, verses 11 to 13: “‘Elijah does come, and he will (future tense) restore all things. But I tell you that Elijah has already come (past tense), and they did not recognize him.’ Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.”

So, John the Baptist is the first stage of fulfillment of this promise of the coming of Elijah, he prepared the way for the coming of the Lord, the first coming of the Lord. And many scholars believe that the second stage of fulfillment of these promises of the coming of Elijah will take place as an individual, Elijah, comes to prepare the way for the second coming of the Lord. And we see a glimpse of this in Revelation, chapter 11, verses 3 to 12, where we get the picture of these two witnesses at the end of the age, making one last extraordinary call to Israel to repent and to prepare for the impending judgment that is coming. And one of those witnesses, which is almost certainly the final Elijah, is described as having the power to shut up the sky so that no rain may fall, which is exactly what the ninth century [B.C.] Elijah did in his day.

So, here’s the whole point. When this kind of hope soaks into your soul, into the soil of your life, it causes you to look back to remember who you are, whose you are, to live in purity and holiness before Him. It causes you to look ahead, to wait with eager expectation, to prepare yourself for the glories that are coming, to be ready, to not be caught off guard.

And then the third thing it helps us do is it helps us look beyond. Look beyond. Look back, look ahead, look beyond. Remember God’s people were in a terrible scrape, lousy circumstances. They were oppressed, they were weak, they were trampled, they were battered. And with these promises God is inviting them to look beyond their circumstances and lift their eyes to the horizon of everlasting hope because hope is the fuel of perseverance. Hope is the reason we keep going when all else seems lost.

Viktor Frankl who was the Austrian psychologist and holocaust survivor, wrote a famous book called Man’s Search for Meaning, and he described the power of hope as he saw it functioning in the concentration camps that he was in. And he said, “Those who had no reason to hope, no reason to live, they quickly broke down. They succumbed to disease more rapidly than anybody else, and they withered away long before they died.” He said, “But those who had hope, those who had a reason to live— they had family, friends; they had faith. They showed higher levels across the board of resilience, perseverance, and endurance.” And Frankl said this. He said, “He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’”

He who has a “why” to live can bear almost any “how,” because endurance grows in the soil watered with hope. Endurance grows in the soil watered with hope.

I’ve long found it fascinating that “the blues” and “the spirituals” came out of the same soil of oppression, one of them hopeless, another one saturated with gospel hope. What makes the difference? Hope makes the difference. Hope makes us look back and remember who we are. Hope helps us look ahead to remember all that God has promised, and hope helps us look beyond our circumstances to the glories that are awaiting us.

Second Corinthians 4:16 and 17: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

Romans 8:18: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

At the risk of quoting too much from my favorite book, The Lord of the Rings, there’s another scene in The Return of the King where Sam is losing heart. In the first scene I quoted from Frodo’s losing heart, this time Sam’s losing heart, and Frodo can’t help him. And he’s lying there exhausted on the slag heaps of Mount Doom, and this is what we read:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

Don’t you see, friends, endurance grows in the soil watered with hope. When you know there’s light and high beauty forever beyond the reach of the small and passing shadow, it gives you courage, courage to endure because hope has soaked into the soil of your life.

The Sun of Hope, the Soil of Hope, and finally, the Seed of Hope.

Don’t you see in these verses God is planting a seed, a seed of hope that all things will one day be set to rights? And God is sowing this seed of hope all throughout His scriptures. Let me just read a couple of these to you. There are so many I couldn’t even prune it out. This is a long list, but there are more.

Psalm 9:7-8: “The LORD sits enthroned forever; he has established his throne for justice, and he judges the world with righteousness; he judges the peoples with uprightness.”

Isaiah 2:2-4: “It shall come to pass in the latter days that...[the Lord] will judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Isaiah 11:6-9: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb...the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra...They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”

Daniel 2:44: “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed...it shall stand forever.”

Zechariah 14:9: “And the LORD will be king over all the earth. On that day the LORD will be one, and his name one.”

Daniel 7:14: “To him (to the Son of Man) was given dominion glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom is one that shall not be destroyed.”

Titus 2:13: “[We are] waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Philippians 3:20-21: “For our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”

Colossians 3:4: “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

Revelation 22:1-5: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.”

[applause]

These promises are sown in hope all over the Scriptures, but the greatest seed of hope ever sown is sown in Jesus Himself. Because in Jesus’ death and resurrection what you and I are getting is a preview of what will one day happen to us, and what will one day happen to all of creation, because when Jesus died and rose again he actually blazed the trail from the old creation into the new creation.

He became one of us, part of the old creation under the curse, frail, mortal, killable, and he died. He took the old world down into the grave with Him, and He rose again into resurrection life and came out on the other side immortal, indestructible, glorious forever.

See, the new creation is already started in Jesus. It’s already started. Like a seed that has dropped down into the broken decay of this world, the seed of the gospel of what Jesus incarnates and lives through His death and resurrection into newness of life, the beginning to dawn of the new creation has begun. And like Him, we will go through death into resurrection life. These old bodies will die, but in the resurrection, we will be given a new body. To use Paul’s language, we will be clothed with immortality. We will be revealed as the sons and daughters of God forever. And this same thing is true of all creation. The old world will pass away through fire. It will perish, only to be raised in the dawn of the new creation. Do you see that?

Jesus is a microcosm of new creation hope. Jesus is a microcosm, a mini cosmos of what will one day happen to all of creation. He’s the firstborn of all creation, the beginning, the first creation. And He’s the firstborn from the dead, the firstborn of the new creation. The seed of new creation hope has dropped down into this world.

The new creation’s coming, friends. We can see it in Jesus. Jesus himself blazed the only trail there is from the old world to the new, from the old creation to the new creation. And the path runs through death to resurrection. It’s the only way, so our only hope is to follow Him through death into resurrection hope. And the only hope for the cosmos is to be taken by Jesus through death into resurrection hope as well.

And so, you see the seed of Christian hope is founded on more than just a whole bunch of promises. The seed of Christian hope is founded upon the crucified and risen Son of God, who blazed the trail through death into everlasting life. And He beckons us “Come, come, follow me.” Further up and further in. Some of you know that line. It’s from C. L. Lewis’ The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia where Narnia is unmade, and the stars fall, and the world is destroyed. It descends back into the chaos from which it was born. And the people of Narnia finally reach Aslan’s country, and this is what Lewis writes:

It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that. If ever you get there you will know what I mean.

It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried, “I have come home at last. This is my real country. I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up and further in!

The things that began to happen after that were so great and so beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world, all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Revelation 21:1-5: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’

And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’”

Friends, all shall be well; and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

“‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.

Would you say that with me?

Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.

Let us pray.

Father, it is in sure and certain hope of these resurrection realities that we cling to you. Father, I don’t know how I would ever live in a world without this kind of hope. I think I’d go nuts, trying to invent the hope that I could invent, knowing that it was all my creative invention. Father, all of our hopes fade in the light of the glory that is coming. Help us to hope in the glory of God.

Thank you for sending Jesus, so that by grace through faith in Him we might be tethered to His life forever, so that the seed of immortality might be planted in our souls, so that we might never be separated from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Even death itself cannot take that from us.

Father, we give you worship because you have triumphed over darkness and death, and we hold fast to you into the resurrection hope of the new creation. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, we pray. Maranatha. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Editor’s Note: In this transcript, the verbatim intelligent transcription process simplifies and enhances spoken content by eliminating redundant words, unnecessary sounds, fixing grammar errors, and clarifying meaning while preserving the author's original intent. All Scripture quotes are according to the biblical text, not as they were originally spoken.