From Ignorance to Repentance

Please open your copy of the Scriptures to Nehemiah 8. I will read verses 1 through 12. That runs a little past where we are going, but the context will matter. These are the words of God.

And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose. And beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand, and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people, and as he opened it all the people stood. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the law of the Lord, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the law. Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” So the Levites calmed all the people, saying, “Be quiet, for this day is holy. Do not be grieved.” And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Three Ways We Are Ignorant

Many, many times in my life I have been ignorant of my sin, and I have needed the mentors and authorities God placed in my life to help me understand God’s word. They took me from ignorance about my sin to the understanding that it is sin, and so to conviction, so that I wanted to turn from it. So that I would repent.

A few examples stick out. Together they show three different ways we can be ignorant.

A few years ago a close friend and mentor helped me see that I was behaving in a way that was insubordinate to the authorities over me. I genuinely thought I was trying to be helpful, to show good, godly, biblical conviction, and to stand for truth. The reality was that I was pridefully and inappropriately grasping for a place that was not mine. My mentor helped me see that, so that I could be embarrassed, turn from my sin, be convicted of it, and change my behavior. In this case I was ignorant of sin because I did not have the self-awareness to understand what I was actually doing.

Years before that, I was studying for my undergraduate degree and having an easy time with a freshman-level class. Do not be impressed. It was a very easy class. I turned in work that was good compared with what others were turning in, but nowhere near as good as I could have done. I thought I was being shrewd with my time. I thought I had already done enough to get an A, so I was using the rest of my time for something else. The professor called me into his office and helped me understand that it was not working as unto the Lord to make a half-hearted effort, even if that effort was going to get me the result I thought I wanted. In this case I was ignorant of my sin because I misunderstood what God was asking of me. I misunderstood what it meant to work as unto the Lord.

Another example. As Maddie and I began parenting, like many of you, we were not exactly sure when to use physical discipline and when to use verbal warnings and expressions of disapproval. The result was that we were raising our voices too often and not physically disciplining when we ought to have. The writings of Wilson and others in our life took us back to God’s word, so that we could repent of our ignorant parenting and turn to parenting God’s way. In this case I was ignorant of my sin because I simply did not know what God required of me.

This passage in Nehemiah 8, especially verses 1 through 9, teaches us how God’s people move from ignorance of their sin to understanding what God wants, so that they are convicted of their sin and can begin to change. Whether you are ignorant because you do not know what you are doing and lack self-awareness, or you misunderstand what God wants, or you simply do not know what God wants, this passage outlines how God uses his word so that his people recognize their sin and repent of it.

I am glad to preach to you this morning about how God plans to move us, as a people, from ignorance about our sin to an understanding of what he requires, so that we are convicted and can repent. I want to start by setting this episode in the larger story of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Problem in Ezra–Nehemiah

I need to remind you of the problem being solved in this section of Ezra–Nehemiah. At the beginning of chapter 7 the problem is introduced. Chapter 7, verse 4: “The city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt.” That is the problem. The city is there. It has a temple and it has walls, but there is not a godly people to occupy it. The rebuilding project is not nearly done, because the nation is not just a city and walls. It is a people who occupy that city and those walls and live godly lives of worship in it.

In chapter 11 the solution comes. Chapter 11, verses 1 and 2: “Now the leaders of the people lived in Jerusalem. And the rest of the people cast lots to bring one out of ten to live in Jerusalem the holy city, while nine out of ten remained in the other towns. And the people blessed all the men who willingly offered to live in Jerusalem.” There is the problem solved. Jerusalem is populated.

The question for me is how you get from the beginning of chapter 7 to the beginning of chapter 11. What convinces the people living in the towns they are already in that they are on the mission they came back to with Nehemiah, the mission to populate Jerusalem and live as a godly people in God’s city? This middle section, between chapters 7 and 11, is fascinating to me, and I hope to you, because it shows how Ezra and Nehemiah go about solving the problem of how to build up a people who will live lives of worship in the holy city.

I want to know how that happens, because I want to see it happen here. I want this people to know how to live lives of worship, and so to build lives of worship here in Stillwater. Chapters 7 through 12 are a look at how godly leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah build up a people, a community looking to glorify God in all of life.

It should not surprise us that step one is conviction and repentance. That is where change begins. As chapter 8 opens, the people are ignorant. They do not know the first thing about how to worship God. But when the law is read to them, and they understand it, and they see how far short of it they fall, they respond with conviction. They want to mourn and weep over how far short they have fallen. They hear the law. It reveals how far off the road of righteousness they have gone. So they are convicted, and they want to come back. The first step is always conviction and confession.

In the next sermon I will get to the second half of this passage, where Nehemiah and the other leaders actually tell them, “Don’t mourn. Don’t weep. It is not the time for that.” They are convicted, but they are confused about what to do with their conviction. We will get to that the next time I preach. This week we are going to focus on how they move from ignorance to understanding, and so to conviction, in verses 1 through 9.

There are four means God uses to take his people from ignorance to understanding.

The first means is that the people gather. God is not dealing with each of us as isolated individuals out in the world. He is dealing with his people as a people. And so it is with us. They gather.

The second means is that the people revere God. Their reverence is part of what makes them able to feel convicted. They do not come to God flippantly. They have made extensive preparations so that everyone will be able to hear. They have teachers ready and organized. They have a wooden platform built especially for the event. They also demonstrate their reverence with their bodies. They lift up their hands and bow their heads. They demonstrate with their ears that they revere God. They attend to his word as it is read.

The third means God uses to take them from ignorance to repentance is that they read the law. They do not just talk about the law. It is not the law of Ezra that is read. It is God’s words that come to his people and so convict them. They actually read what God instructed them to do.

The fourth means God uses to take them from ignorance to repentance is that they teach the law. They do not treat it as a magic book, as if reading it all day will make everything better by itself. They understand that people have to understand the law if it is going to change their lives. So they make sure the sense is given. It is explained to the people.

Those four things together, gathering, revering, reading, and teaching, are the means God uses to take a people from ignorance to understanding, so that they are convicted. Now we will talk about each of those means, one at a time, in this passage.

They Gather

First, gathering. It is obvious from the text that they gather. That is what it says right at the beginning. They gather as one man. But it is actually a profound pushback against modern individualism, and against the way you and I probably think by nature.

As I said, in verse 1 they gather as one man. In verse 2, Ezra reads the law to the assembly. The text emphasizes that everyone who could listen was there. Men, women, young, old. They do not just gather. As they are gathered, they act together. Ezra blesses the Lord, and all the people participate in the gathering. They say, “Amen, Amen.” They lift their hands. They bow their heads. They are acting as a group as they come before God. God is dealing with them together, as a people.

And so he is with us. God is not working with isolated individuals out in the world. He is not planning to change you all alone in your prayer closet. He acts on people as groups. That is why Ezra does not just send a Levite to each person’s house to teach them individually. Their lives would not have been interrupted that way. They would not have had to stop what they were doing, come to Jerusalem, gather outside the Water Gate, and be there together. Would it not have been so much more efficient to send a Levite to everybody’s house, teach them all, and in a couple of months everybody would know?

That is not the way God works in the world. Instead they get everyone together and approach God as a people. God is still dealing with us in this way. We are his people, his holy nation, his royal priesthood. God’s people are privileged to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

In the Old Testament, God’s people were marked off as Abraham’s children, an ethnic and national group. In the New Testament, God’s special people are those who are Abraham’s children by faith, gathered into covenant communities, local churches, local gatherings of saints who are here to receive God’s word and enjoy the sacraments.

This is part of why church membership is so crucial for your spiritual health. God is dealing with the world through covenantal groups of his people, that is, local churches. If you do not join a church, you are opting out of the means God plans to use to take dominion of the world and bring his people to repentance and forgiveness. So do not strike out on your own. Do not flippantly miss gatherings of the church body. This weekly gathering is where we come to meet with God and so be changed. Do not opt yourself out casually or flippantly.

There is one more thing I want you to notice about the gathering, and that is who gathers. Look at verse 2. It says that both men and women and all who could understand what they heard gathered. The children were not excluded, even though they met for a really long time. Verse 3 says they read from early morning until midday.

It says specifically that it was all who could understand. I do not think they made every one-year-old who was not going to hear it sit through the gathering. The point of saying this was that everybody who can understand God’s law needs to be here, so that they can hear it, understand it, and learn to walk in God’s ways. They were not thinking, “Our kids will be accountable to follow God when they turn eighteen. Until then we may as well have them go somewhere else.” They were supposed to be there in the gathering, learning from God’s word.

Kids, that is part of why I am so glad you are here in our gathering. I know it can be hard for you sometimes to keep your attention on what is happening at the pulpit the whole time, to listen to all the Scripture that is read and to listen through the whole sermon. I am glad you are here, understanding everything you can. You are supposed to be here, gathered with us.

So the first means God uses to bring this change in his people, so that they move from ignorance to understanding, is that the people gather. God plans to act on his people, not just on individual persons.

They Revere

The second means God uses to bring them to conviction is that he brings them to himself with hearts ready to listen, hearts that are reverent toward him. This will be the longest section of the sermon, because this passage talks about reverence in so many different ways.

We see the people’s reverence in at least two ways. First, in their planning. Second, in their actions once they are gathered. Let’s look first at their planning, their preparations, and how that shows their reverence.

In Their Planning

They did not think, “Let’s pick a day, gather, and figure it out after we get there.” That is not how they approached this gathering. They planned it carefully, even more carefully than you might see on the surface.

The leaders who first called this event did it at this time because Deuteronomy 31 says that every seventh year the law was supposed to be read before the Feast of Booths, which is what they are about to celebrate. The people who are gathering do not even know about the Feast of Booths yet. They are going to find out they are supposed to celebrate it. But the leaders are carefully planning this event at just the right time, according to God’s law.

We also see their preparation in getting a fitting space and sorting out the logistics. They need a location that will hold everyone, so they select the Water Gate, where there is room for everybody to gather. Verse 4 says they build a wooden platform specifically for this gathering. They wanted to make sure everybody could see and hear Ezra as he read clearly from the law.

They also plan who will stand beside him, and which Levites will be stationed among the people to give the sense and teach everyone, so that the people will understand what is read. That is quite a few logistics to sort out. They make sure it is ready so that, when the gathering comes, everybody can leave with a full understanding of what God’s law said. In short, they are treating this gathering like it is a big deal, and in that they demonstrate their reverence for God. They treat it as a weighty and important thing, rather than something to be flippant or casual about.

In our culture we do the same thing when we plan weddings and receptions, or big family vacations. We put a lot of planning and effort into weddings because the institution of marriage is important to us, and so we make our weddings a big deal. We love our families and want good time with them, and so we make a big deal of planning for them.

In Their Bodies

You can also see the people’s reverence not only in their planning, but in their body language. Verse 6 says that they raised their hands and bowed their heads, which tells you that their reverence extends into the actual meeting. They did not get the gathering ready in a merely perfunctory way because they were supposed to, and then, when it came time to be there together, not really care about it. They were in the gathering with reverence for God in their hearts, and you can tell by what is coming out of their mouths and what they are doing with their bodies. They were not like Martha, who was too distracted by all the serving to revere God in the moment. They are in the gathering, reverencing God.

Brothers and sisters, I would love for you to apply this to our gathering on Sunday mornings. When God calls us to worship, we are not being called into a casual gathering. He is calling us to come into the heavenly places and worship at the feet of the King of kings. If this gathering in Ezra and Nehemiah was a weighty, big deal to them, how much more weighty ought it to be for us to get together and worship the risen King Jesus, Sunday by Sunday. It is not a small thing to come before God in the name of Jesus, hear his word, respond to it, and receive again the sacrifice of his body and blood.

So do not allow these gatherings to become small to you. The fact that you have been invited, called by God to gather week by week, should not decrease the incredible magnitude of getting to come and meet with God. It should increase it. You have not been called once to come before him, or a few times a year. You have been called week by week by week, given the honor of coming with God’s people to worship the King of kings.

This is also a good time to thank all the guys who set up our sound and our pulpit and everything else each week. They do it carefully and faithfully, and that shows reverence for God. We also make sure that the folks serving in other roles, passing the offering or the communion, giving the exhortation, and the other parts of the service, know about it with plenty of time to prepare, and even get feedback where it would help. We do that because this gathering is a weighty, big deal. It is important. We demonstrate our reverence by our preparation.

I am privileged to plan these services, to make sure we have songs to sing that will please God, and to make sure the order of worship is clear. We publish it early enough that you have time to prepare before you come. Our preachers prepare ahead of time, and we share sermon feedback with one another so that our sermons are as accurate and helpful as possible. This gathering is our most important appointment every week. So let us come with the reverence God deserves.

In Their Ears

We see Israel’s reverence in their planning. We see it in their body language, in the fact that they are actually reverent in the moment. And we see it in their attending to God’s word. Verse 3 says that the ears of the people were attentive to the book of the law.

That is what reverence looks like. If you respect and revere the person who is speaking, you listen. If you respect somebody when they talk, you stop talking and you listen closely. As God speaks in his word, the people listen. They attend, because they revere the God whose word is being read.

There is no way to gain understanding, and so come out of ignorance, unless you are attending because you revere God. Sitting through a hundred sermons will not do much for you or your soul if the word goes in one ear and out the other. But attending, and listening closely to even one, can change your life.

Beloved, please do not make excuses to yourself for a lack of attention. Aim to love God with all your mind, and so give him the very best of your attention as we come together to meet with him. Do not tell yourself that you cannot focus this long. Kids, do not tell yourself you cannot focus this long. You know you can, because when you sit down to watch a two-hour movie, you do not get distracted halfway through. When you are interested, when you are attending, your focus follows. In this gathering in Nehemiah 8, the people give their ears to the book of the law. As we gather, let us do the same. Let us give our ears to God’s word.

Remember with me that the Bible is not just a collection of interesting ideas that would be good for us to understand if we wanted to be well-rounded people. That is not what the Bible is. The Bible is divine communication. When you hear it and understand it, God has spoken to you.

I remember the first time this really hit me. I was an undergraduate. In fact, it was my very first day of classes, 7:40 in the morning. I can still see the classroom. Dr. Stevenson walked in. He slapped his Bible down on the table. He sat down at his podium and said, “Who wants to hear from God this morning?” I thought, “Me. I want to hear from God. That is why I am here. Show me. How do I do it, Dr. Stevenson?” He turned around and wrote John 1:1 on the whiteboard. His point was that God is speaking. The word is living and active. If you will attend to it, if you will listen to it, if you will revere God and so understand it, God is speaking to you and to me.

We have grown too used to the miracle of the Bible. I do not believe it is possible for any further divine revelation, on par with the Bible, to come. But imagine with me for a minute that it was, and that I told you it was going to happen tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. in Texas. What would you do so that you could be there and hear it right away? Because you revere God, you would want to be there. “What is God saying? I want to know.”

Then remember: that is happening here. Not new revelation. God’s communication is coming to us here every week. We usually sing, on average, three or four psalms. We read at least two chapters of Scripture. Six chapters of God’s word come to you and to me each week as we gather. Do not let your familiarity with God’s word reduce your reverence.

The point is this. God uses the people’s reverence as a means to move them from ignorance to understanding, and so to conviction, as they gather. If we will gather in the same way, God will do the same for us. Come knowing, deep in your bones, that it is a big deal to get together as the people of God before our great God. Let us revere God, treat this as a weighty thing, and show our reverence by giving our full attention while we are here.

They Read the Law

Of course, reverence with nothing set before it would be empty. So God does not leave the people just standing reverently before him from morning until midday. He gives them his word to read, so that they can reverently attend to what he says.

The third means God uses to move them from ignorance to understanding, and so to conviction, is the reading of his word. Verse 3 says that they read it from early morning until midday. Ezra gets up in the sight of all the people and reads it clearly, so that all of them can hear.

Here is what is crucial to notice. It is the law of God that sets the agenda for their meeting. You can tell God is in charge of this people because it is his word that is in charge of this gathering. The leader is not in charge. They are not reading the law of Ezra to the people. They are reading the law of God to the people and teaching it to them, so that they will understand what God wants them to do.

This is crucial for you and me to understand. God has chosen to rule his people through his word. Right in this chapter we are watching one of the shifts, as God prepares his people to hear, not directly through the mouth of his prophet, but from the teacher, the Word of God that has been written down, and so to understand it. God has chosen to rule us through his book. There is no way for us to revere God in the abstract and not care much about the Bible. That is not a possibility.

You might not like the fact that God decided to rule his people through a big, thick book, but he did. If you love and revere and fear God, then your reverence will extend to his word. You will hear it thinking, “Thy will be done. Show me the way, O Lord. I want to follow your paths. I want to know you better. What is it you have to tell me today?”

One of the things that strikes me is that in this gathering, God’s word is the main attraction. I think most people, as they come to gatherings of God’s people in our day, leave talking about the singing. They leave talking about the songs. Maybe they leave talking about the eloquence of the preacher. That is not the main attraction when God’s people gather. The main attraction is God presented through his word. His word sung, his word prayed, his word read, his word preached, and his word presented to us in the bread and the wine.

It is also clear that their leaders are acting according to God’s word. Deuteronomy 31 says that every seventh year they should gather and read the law before the Feast of Booths. Even the reason they are gathered at that time is according to God’s word. They gather at the time God appointed, to read the words God said, so that the people would understand what God wants them to do.

As we come each week to be sliced up as living sacrifices by the double-edged sword of God’s word, come knowing that the main attraction is what God says. Come with hearts that are attentive, so that you are ready to receive it and change. Look to hear with an inclination to obey. Do not hear with a desire to make excuses, or to carve out a section you do not really need to obey. Come with a reverent desire to obey all that God says to you in his word.

They Teach the Law

And yet a word that is only heard is not yet understood. If you are going to be changed by God’s word, you need to understand what it means, and that is why they teach it. They station Levites all through the people so that they can give the sense of what is being read. It is crucial that the people understand what the words of God mean, so that they actually move from ignorance to understanding. They have gathered so God can deal with them as a people. They have come reverently, ready to hear. The word is there. Now they actually have to understand what is said to them.

One of the things this teaches us is that the Bible is not a collection of magical verses that make everything better, or make things change, simply because you read them. It is not a spell book, where reading something off gilded pages makes life start looking up. We need to beware a therapeutic approach to the Bible that imagines that just speaking the words, without really understanding them, starts making everything better.

I know of one public figure who wrote Bible verses on the foundation and on the insides of the walls of a building he was putting up. I think that is an interesting symbolic act. In fact, if I got to build a house someday, maybe I would do it. But what he was thinking is that by putting those words in that place, there would be some kind of special spiritual protection for that particular building, because those words were written in Sharpie on the concrete and the drywall. Of course that is not true. The Bible is not a spell book made to change life by the mere reading of it. We are supposed to understand it. That is why we need teachers to help us understand God’s word. We need to understand what God is saying to us, because it is divine communication. And if it is communication, you have to understand it.

Under the new covenant, God requires that all pastors be able to teach, because the pastors are not the ones personally in charge of the church. God is in charge of his church. Jesus is in charge of his church. The pastors are the ones who rule that church with God’s word, so that they do not just do whatever they feel like. They lead the people in obeying what God has written down.

These four means, gathering, revering, reading, and teaching, take this people from ignorance about how far off the path they have gone to understanding what they ought to be doing, and so bring them to conviction.

A Heart Ready to Repent

This is always the first step if, as a people, we want to be built up to obey and worship God in all of life. There is no starting without acknowledging our sins, regretting them, and asking God to forgive us of them. Ephesians tells us to expose the unfruitful works of darkness, because anything brought to the light becomes visible, and anything that becomes visible is light. These four things, gathering together, revering God as we are gathered, the reading of his word, and understanding it in the teaching, are what will take a people from ignorance about their sin to an understanding of how far short they fall.

I want this to be the normal experience of all of us as we gather. We gather with reverence to read the word and receive it as it is taught, and so it should be our regular experience that sin we were ignorant of, we become aware of.

When that happens, you have two choices. You can try to push it back down, hide it, and ignore it, or you can deal with it and let God change you by gathering, revering, reading, and teaching. If you decide to hold it down and hide it, it will be because you are ashamed, because you do not trust God’s forgiveness, or because you care more about your reputation than about returning to God. Beware.

Every time we hit our knees and God reveals another sin you had forgotten, every time we preach and you see another way you are falling short, do not hide from it. Joyfully acknowledge it. Thank God for taking you from ignorance to understanding, so that you do not continue down a road you did not want to be on. Keep a heart that is ready to repent, instead of stubbornly standing in your sin.

If you decide to stay stubbornly in your sin, you will find, just as Psalm 1 says, that standing in the way of sinners leads to sitting in the seat of scoffers, and eventually the wicked will not stand in the congregation of the righteous. So keep a heart that is ready to turn away from your ignorant former way of living the moment it comes to your attention.

Remember, there are three ways you can be ignorant. You might not see yourself clearly. You might lack self-awareness about what you are doing, and so you need the gathering to help you see what you are really doing. You might be misreading what God wants. You might think you are doing what God wants, and you are actually not, and the reading and teaching of God’s word will show you the right way so that you can turn from what you were doing before. Or you might simply never have known that what you were doing was wrong in the first place, and the reading and teaching of God’s word will show you a path you did not even know was there.

To all of these forms of ignorance, the antidote is the same. Gather with God’s people. Revere God. Listen to his word, and understand it as it is taught.

If I had to guess, and if after this service you asked just about any of the members of our church, you would find that in our fairly recent past we came to understand that some aspect of our life, even a major aspect, was falling short. It was God’s people and his word that showed us the right way, so that we could turn from it. You will find people whose marriage was not what God had designed it to be, whose parenting was not what God designed it to be, who were not working as unto the Lord in all of their life. Together, God is bringing us to the realization that we were ignorant, and God’s word is bringing us to understanding, so that we can turn away from our former ways of living and please him with all our life.

Perhaps, like me, you have recently come to see your ignorance in the past, and how it caused you to sin and fall short of God’s glorious standard. If so, I would encourage you to take responsibility for it. Make no excuse for it. Own it. Do not try to hold it at arm’s length. Do not try to say, “Oh, it wasn’t really me.” Own it. Ask God to forgive you. And then repent. Go a whole new way. Commit yourself to avoid that sin no matter what it takes. Make no allowance for that sin, and then persevere in the new way. Walk by the Spirit, so that you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

Brothers and sisters, God did not leave you alone in the world to depend merely on your greatest efforts. He is with you. He made us his special people. He has promised to give us hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone. So as you look to persevere, to go in a new way, look to God. Trust in him. He rescued me from myself and from the consequences of my sin when I was blind, and instead he gave me sight. So let us come to the task of repentance with joy.

In my next sermon, as I said, I will show you how Israel’s weeping and mourning was not the right thing to do. Do not take this sermon and fall into a kind of morbid introspection about how bad you are, and forget to look to the cross, where there is forgiveness, and then to walk on joyfully. Confidently trust God, and then give yourself over to his rich grace, with the result that you follow him no matter the cost.

Amen. Please pray with me.

Heavenly Father, it is an honor and a privilege to come before you as your people and worship you. Thank you for giving us your word. Thank you for calling us to worship. Will you please, by your Holy Spirit, fill us with awe and reverence and fear and joy, so that we would be ready to turn from our sins the moment you convict us of them. We ask this in the name of Christ the King. Amen.