Now, our Heavenly Father, who we are before
Thee, we think that it's hot, and we're
just slightly uncomfortable, but, O God, if we
knew for positive certainty that Thy holy Son
Jesus were coming at midnight tonight, nobody'd mention
the weather, we'd be alert, and our loins
would be girded, and our lamps lighted, and
our shoes on our feet, and our staff
in our hand, and we would be looking
and hoping.
But, Lord, we pray Thee that Thou wilt
help us to live now, and to think
now, as if that coming was, indeed, as
soon as midnight.
And we pray that Thy blessing may be
on us as we think together about the
call of the Holy Ghost to men.
O God, help us, we pray.
May our minds be brought in from the
busy world out there, and from the noise,
and may they be centered upon holy things
and holy thoughts.
But I know, Lord, it's not certain how
much longer any of us will be this
side of the border, so we pray Thee
while we are here, and the opportunity is
ours to live hold of it and do
what we can to make our calling and
election sure.
Help us now tonight in the giving of
this word, we pray in our Lord Jesus
Christ's name.
Amen.
I've been talking over these nights about the
voice of God calling people to himself, always
calling them to himself, calling sinners out of
the wild, calling half-converted Christians into a
life of complete victory and dedication.
And I talked about the love of Christ,
the voice of God's love.
Then I talked about the voice of reason,
and I said that while it was all
based upon the love of God for his
people, and all these voices are the voices
of God's love, yet there was a voice
that we call the voice of reason.
It's a reasonable thing to be a Christian,
it's a right thing to be a Christian.
You don't have to do anything unreasonable to
be a Christian, it's right that we should
be Christians.
And then last Sunday night, I talked about
the voice of blood, the eloquence of Jesus'
blood, and pointed out that while the voice
of Abel cried for vengeance against his murderer,
the voice of Jesus' blood cries for mercy
for all sinners.
Tonight I want to talk about the voice
of conscience.
There are several places in the Bible where
conscience is mentioned, and yet some of the
Lord's people are very gun-shy the word
conscience, because they know that some people think
you get saved by obeying your conscience.
And so, because there are those who say
that you're saved by obeying your conscience, they
won't believe in the conscience at all.
They throw out the baby along with these
bathwater and will have nothing to do with
the conscience.
I preached on the conscience one time over
in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one old man
said he got a burden of the Spirit
about it, that I was very heretical and
off-base and out in left field.
He didn't believe in the conscience.
A lot of the Lord's people don't.
But I find the old devotional writers have
no hesitation in mentioning the conscience, and I
find also the Holy Ghost talks about the
conscience, and if God talks about the conscience,
I'm not going to try to be so
spiritual as not to believe in it.
You can always be wrong in being unspiritual,
but some people are wrong by trying to
be more spiritual than the apostles.
I'm satisfied if I can go right along
with the apostles.
So I want to talk now about the
conscience and point out to you that the
devil, that cagey old fighter, for there is
no fighter cagier than the devil, by means
of pseudo-learned propaganda has brought many a
life of verities into disrepute.
Even the short time I've lived, and I've
lived longer than some of you, but I
haven't lived yet as long as Methuselah and
some others, and even the period of time
that I've covered that I can recall, there's
been a great change about certain verities of
truth.
There was a day when worldliness was looked
down upon by the people of God.
They didn't have to be told what it
was to be worldly, they just sort of
knew what it was to be worldly, and
so they gave up worldliness and turned to
the Lord.
But then the devil began to send people
around to argue about it, and they have
what they call a dialogue.
Christians are always engaging in a dialogue now,
one fellow talking to another fellow, putting on
panel discussions, which I call pooling of their
ignorance.
One talking to the other, and the other
talking to the other, and pretty soon we
said, well, because people's views of worldliness differ,
therefore we can't be sure what's worldly and
what isn't worldly, and so we just opened
our mouth and gulped the whole world down.
And the result is that Christians now are
worldly, and if you say anything to them
about it, they say, well, that's old-fashioned
because, don't you know, worldliness is what we
believe it to be, and Christians are not
agreed on it.
Now, the devil did that by what they
call religious conversations, tossing it back between two
professors before a student, telling them that worldliness
was different, believed in differently by different people.
Same with the flesh and sin.
Sin was a great verity at one time,
and when a man went around preaching the
gospel, he preached that people should quit sin
and come to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But because sin has now been redefined.
You know, when you don't want to do
a thing, you just redefine it.
That's quite the thing now.
We redefine it.
If we don't want to obey God, we
redefine the commandment.
We redefine it.
If we don't want to give a thing
up, we write to the editor and get
a redefinition of what it means to give
it up, and so the result is we
hang to it.
We lose our power, of course, by doing
it, but then the devil sees to it
we don't notice that.
Now, conscience is another matter here, a great
verity which the devil has, in recent times,
taken away from the world and from the
Church, for that matter.
And conscience is mentioned only with a good
-natured smirk now, and when it is used
seriously, after a while, the use of it
has to be defended.
But I don't want to bother defending, or
take your time or mine defending, what the
universal wisdom of the race has accepted, and
what the Christian scriptures take for granted and
teach.
Now, I wasn't just using words when I
said take for granted and teach, because the
scriptures take some things for granted and teach
some things, and their teaching of certain things
requires that they take certain other things for
granted.
A sample of the some things taken for
granted, for instance, is that God exists.
You don't find any place in the Bible,
not one place in the Bible from the
beginning of Genesis to the close of Revelation,
where there's a chapter devoted to the proofs
that God exists.
Theologians go into what they call proofs, and
they have ontological proofs and teleological proofs and
cause-and-effect proofs, and all kinds of
proofs.
But the Bible knows that God exists, for
God wrote the Bible, and so the Bible
simply begins there.
And the learned brethren begin way out in
left field and reason themselves in toward first
base, and God's already been there, and all
the simple-hearted people that believe, they've been
there all the time, they haven't been away.
They believe God exists, and they don't give
any time on the question of whether he
exists or not.
But conscience now, what do we mean by
it?
We mean that the voice of conscience is
over on the side of God, just as
the voice of reason is over on the
side of God, if we listen to it,
and the voice of love is over on
God's side, and the voice of Jesus' crying
blood is over on God's side, all saying
the same thing.
Come home, come in out of the wilderness,
come back to God, come to the fold,
come in out of the wilds, all saying
the same thing.
But what is conscience?
Well, conscience always refers to right or wrong.
Not to the wisdom of something, but to
the rightness or the wrongness of it always,
and it always has to do with an
individual's personal relation to God.
It's individual and exclusive.
Conscience never deals with plurals.
There is something about what we call companionship
that is very comforting.
You're up in an airplane, as my wife
and I were this afternoon, flying along, and
we fly into a storm as we did.
It's a bit comforting to have somebody else
along with you, but you know if anything
happened, each person added would just be one
more dead person.
Yet there's something about companionship that sort of
comforts you.
And people in the world, when they face
up to the fact they've got to deal
with God, they take what consolation they can
from the companionship of the people round about.
But the human conscience never deals with companions,
and it never deals with plurals.
It never deals with two, always with one.
The human conscience deals with one.
Thou art the man, says the Holy Ghost.
Thou art the man.
Instead of you two are the men, it's
thou art the man.
Not you three are the men, but you
are the man.
One.
And so the human conscience deals not with
plurals, but with singulars, with that one individual,
and it gives moral inward awareness.
Now, the ground of the human conscience, somebody
wants to know about it.
I remember reading a book by a fellow
named Herbert Spencer, who was a great scholar
and philosopher and ought to have you back
a generation and a half ago, and he
claimed the human conscience was the result of
your parents telling you right and wrong.
You tell your little fellow at the table,
don't eat with your fingers, and slowly he
develops the idea that it's wrong to eat
with your fingers, and he builds that in.
They say it's the same thing with everything
else.
You tell him, don't lie, and slowly he
gets the idea that it's wrong to lie.
And he made conscience to be a synthetic
thing built into you by your parents.
Of course, that was one more effort of
the devil to take away a verity and
to substitute something else for it.
But the scripture tells us something else altogether.
The scripture tells us about a secret inner
light.
There is a light that lighteth every man
that cometh into the world.
That's in 1 John 1.9. Now, I've
seen how the different translators handle that, but
none of them manages quite to get rid
of it.
It remains there that the presence, the unseen,
mysterious, wonderful presence of that which we call
the logos, the word, the word which is
older than creation, the word which was with
God and the word which is God, that
unseen presence in the world is like a
fragrance, like light, like some strange thing that
you can't lay your hand on, but it's
there.
And it is this light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world.
Look over in Romans 2.
You'll find something there that most people skip,
but I want to read it to you.
For there is no respect of persons with
God, for as many as have sinned without
law shall also perish without law, and as
many as have sinned in the law shall
be judged by the law.
For not the hearers of the law are
just, but the doers.
For when the Gentiles which have not the
law do by nature the things contained in
the law, these having not the law are
a law unto themselves, which show the work
of the law written in their hearts, their
conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the
meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another."
Now, that's what the scripture says about conscience.
It says that the Holy Spirit is in
the world, and that there is a light
that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world, and that secret inner light, that secret
presence, that moral awareness, is everywhere throughout the
world.
So you don't have to preach the gospel
to a man to confirm his judgment.
If you preach the gospel to a man
and he rejects it, that of course is
the last thing that God can do, because
God ties up every man's salvation to the
gospel of Christ.
But a man is lost without having heard
the gospel, because there is a light that
lighteth every man that cometh into the world,
and that light ambidates and precedes the preaching
of the gospel so that it's in the
heart and conscience of man, that secret inner
light.
An example in the Bible of that secret
light, that thing that lays the lash onto
a man inside, is where they brought that
woman in the 8th chapter of John, and
they said, "'This woman was guilty of adultery,
what shall we do with her?' Jesus said,
"'Let he that is without sin among you
cast the first stone at her.' And they
began, after standing around embarrassingly for a few
minutes, they began at the oldest and cleared
down to the least, and one by one
they filed out and left Jesus and the
woman standing alone.
What was it?
The Lord didn't say to them, "'You've been
guilty of this, too.' He simply said, "'You
that haven't been, you cast the first stone,'
and their conscience took care of the rest.
And they knew in their hearts that they
were guilty also, and they simply turned and
walked away.
So that conscience is a faithful witness in
the heart, and faith and conscience never preaches
to more than one.
And conscience is always on God's side, and
it judges conduct by moral law, and it
excuses or accuses according as the right is.
Now, that's what the scripture teaches about it.
Now, I'd like to point out to you
that every one of us listening here tonight,
every one of us here tonight has felt
that strange, mysterious pull, that tug of the
heart toward God and toward righteousness.
We've all felt it, and yet there are
some who excuse themselves.
They say, if I could hear or have
heard Finney, if I could have heard Dr.
Simpson, if I could have heard Dale Moody,
it might be different.
But I hold that excuse to be hypocritical,
because everybody that says that has already heard
the only voice that made their voice any
good.
They have heard the voice of God speaking
to them in a hundred ways from a
hundred directions.
One of them is that I have mentioned
here tonight.
Now, let's look a little bit at what
people do to their consciences.
First Timothy 1 tells us that the word
of God was given that there might be
love and a good conscience and sincere faith,
or faith unfeigned.
The love of love and a good conscience
and faith unfeigned, and from which some had
turned aside, and their religion had become vain
jangling.
I suppose there never was a time when
there was more talk about religion than there
is now.
And there never was, at least in my
lifetime, a time when religion meant so very
little to more people than it does now.
I read down in Chicago Friday or Saturday
a booklet written by somebody who was trying
to persuade people they ought to enter the
ministry.
He should have been doing something else, but
he wrote the booklet, and he said it
was, I think, I've forgotten, I always forget
statistics, but a very high percentage of Americans
now belong to church, or as they say,
church or synagogue.
They belong to one or the other.
But I don't think there ever was a
time when the spiritual condition and the moral
level of things down there were as low
as they are now, and yet more people
belong to church.
They have turned aside and they've turned away
from a good conscience and from sincere faith
and from love, and their religion has simply
become talk.
It seems to me that that which is
the most real to us is that about
which we talk less.
Now let me explain that.
For if we talk about it more, we
talk about it reverently and in a more
hushed tone.
Do you remember what Shakespeare said about a
woman who was telling how much she loved
her husband?
He said, I think the lady doth protest
too much.
He didn't believe her, she talked too much.
And the very fact that there is so
much religion now, so much religious talk now,
and so little morality, leaves the impression with
me that we tend to be more reverently
quiet about that which comes the closest to
us.
When in public a man is prepared to
call his wife too many sweet names, I'm
wondering what he says to her at home.
And when the patriot wraps himself in a
flag and puts on a lot of show
about his patriotism, I just wonder where he's
got his hand in what trough.
There are some things you don't say too
much about, brethren.
I don't even like the fellow that'll grab
thee above the hand and roar into your
ear, praise the Lord, and ring it off.
There's something very wonderfully sweet and quiet and
tender about some things, and one of them
is our attitude toward God and Christ.
Now we should witness, we must witness.
I believe in testimonies, I believe in songs,
and I even believe in people saying amen
occasionally.
So it won't bother me at all if
you want to say amen.
But I'm talking about what they call religious
logaria, running off at the mouth, and there's
too much of it.
They live that vain jangling.
They're careless living Christians, and remember there's a
penalty, always there's a penalty.
The word of God was given that we
might have love and sincere faith and a
good conscience, and if you won't listen to
the voice of God and the voice of
the word and the silent voice within you
that urges you to be right and to
move toward God, if you begin to argue
with it and compromise with it and debate
it, pretty soon you'll become a vain jangler
and enter into the modern religious conversation.
I smile to myself rather sourly when I
read in the newspaper somewhere that some religious
people are having conversations about something.
You'd think it was a peace conference.
Well, we Christians aren't supposed to be out
having conversations with the devil or having conversations
with people who don't believe the truth.
We are supposed to be listening to the
voice of God and reading the word and
reverently speaking to each other.
They that love the Lord speak often one
to another.
But it wasn't the vain jangling, it wasn't
the careless rattling of voices, it was the
reverent speech of those who walk with God
and live within the presence of God.
Well, then I read in 1 Timothy 4,
1 and 2, maybe I'd just better read
it here so that we'll get it.
It says in 1 Timothy, or is it
4, 1 and 2?
Yes, 4, 1 and 2.
It says, Now the Spirit speaketh expressly that
in the latter times some shall depart from
the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and
doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having
their conscience seared with a hot iron.
Now, the searing of the conscience with a
hot iron, what does that mean?
Well, you know that if you handle hot
things, your hand will slowly become callous.
Seared, they call it there.
And pretty soon you can pick up things
so hot that another person, if they tried
to pick it up, would let out a
scream.
Men who work in factories where the material
is very hot and they learn to pick
it up, they learn to do it without
a glove, because their hands get seared.
So they don't know how hot a thing
is because there are crust forms, callous forms
over the sensitive nerve ends, and pretty soon
they can handle hot things without being bothered.
It's possible to deal with your conscience like
that, my friends.
It's possible to argue with your conscience, or
to violate it, or to do what you
know the Spirit is leading you not to
do, or to refuse to do what you
know the Spirit is leading you to do,
and pretty soon get peace about it.
I get lots of letters from people who
say to me, they're in some jam or
other, but they'll say, My conscience is clear,
Mr. Totion, I have peace about it.
And I'm not at all sure, but sometimes
a clear conscience isn't simply another way of
saying a seared conscience.
The conscience that has been calloused over, we
haven't done the will of God as we've
understood it, and so little by little the
Lord has taken away from us his voice.
I think that's very plain in the scriptures,
where it tells us that if we don't
walk in the light that we have, that
light will become darkness to us.
And yet that man who hasn't walked in
the light and isn't walking in the light,
he will say, But I'm feeling restful about
it.
I have no bad feeling about it now,
my heart's at peace.
Did he ever stop to think it may
be that he stopped hearing from God about
it?
If a woman wants something bad enough, or
a man, they want something bad enough, and
they'll argue about it, and they'll go from
one preacher to another about it.
And finally, after a while they manage to
tell themselves, This is all right, and I've
been a big fool for worrying about it.
Then they get what they call peace concerning
it.
But let me tell you that if you
have peace about something that's wrong, that peace
is not from God.
If you have a feeling of peace concerning
something that at one time bothered you, you'd
better go to the scriptures and ask God
to help you, and you'd better break up
your fallowed ground, for it's possible, and even
more than possible, that what you have is
a seared conscience.
In Titus 1, 15 and 16, another passage
which I've marked here for tonight, it says
that we are not to give heed to
Jewish fables and commandments of men that are
turned from the truth, because unto the pure
all things are pure.
But unto them that are defiled and unbelieving
is nothing pure, but even their minds and
conscience is defiled.
And they profess that they know God, but
in works they deny him being abominable and
disobedient, and unto every good work reprobates.
Now, there is what you call a defiled
conscience.
I was in the church one time.
I stepped in the church building, and I
saw a sign in one room, No Smoking,
and I wondered about that.
It's a No Smoking sign in a church.
I suppose that particular room was set aside
for the non-smokers, but the impression I
got was that you could run around puffing
through the rest of the church but that
particular one.
Now, maybe I don't know.
I know it doesn't stay in the Bible,
Thou shalt not puff yourself with cancer.
I know it says that.
But I also know that the conscience of
evangelical people is pretty universal on that, and
it's possible to get our conscience defiled and
say, It's all right, my conscience doesn't bother
me about it.
They're corrupt inwardly, so our thoughts get impure
and our language often gets soiled, and we
end up reprobates.
I would say to you, brethren, that if
you're worried about whether you're too extreme in
your Christian life, better be extreme one way
or the other.
But if you're going to be extreme, be
extreme on the side of righteousness.
If you're dubious about anything being right or
wrong, you'd better take the side where you're
right and you know you're right, rather than
go the other direction.
For too many of the Lord's people have
learned to live with a careless conscience, and
the result is that they have become hardened
and corrupt.
And then there is that fatal silence, that
fatal silence of the inward voice.
The man has a reason to lie, and
maybe it'll mean money to him if he
lies, maybe it'll mean getting out of a
jam if he lies.
He's bothered about it at first because he
knows what the scripture says about the liar,
but he reasons with himself, maybe even goes
and seeks counsel and finds out what other
people think about it.
And somebody says to him, Well, I think
lying in a certain circumstance is all right.
And so he goes out feeling better about
it, and pretty soon he's reasoned himself into
a belief that lying is all right, and
he becomes a liar.
Or if it's a question of dishonesty, the
man asks himself, Now, would this be all
right, you suppose?
Could I do this honestly?
And he goes and asks advice, and by
a lot of reasoning and vein-jangling and
religious conversations and dialogues, he manages finally to
arrive at a place where he says to
himself, Well, it's all right.
This is considered dishonest by certain people who
are tight-laced, but as for me, I
think I can do it all right.
And he does it.
And strange silence falls on his heart, and
he doesn't notice it.
He doesn't notice that the voice of God
is not warmly speaking within him anymore.
He doesn't notice that when he reads the
scripture that it doesn't speak back to him
as it used to.
He has allowed dishonesty to sear his heart
and defile it.
Then there's such a thing as grudges.
It might have been the day when that
Christian brother there, if he got in bad
with anybody or spoke harshly to anybody or
said anything that he felt he should ask
forgiveness for, he did it immediately.
Then slowly he got so that now he
can bear grudges, not mind it.
And he says, My conscience doesn't bother me.
It's because he has bothered his conscience too
long and has turned on him.
Well, then there's another thing about conscience that
I want to speak about, and that's Hebrews
10, 19-22.
It says there about our conscience, having therefore,
brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by
the blood of Jesus, by a new and
living way which he hath consecrated for us,
through the veil, that is to say, his
flesh.
And having a high priest over the house
of God, let us draw near with a
true heart and full assurance of faith, having
our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and
our bodies washed with pure water.
There is such a thing as a sprinkled
conscience.
That is, when we come to the Lord
Jesus Christ, our conscience may be diseased, it
may be smarting and protesting, it may be
a defiled conscience or an evil conscience, but
it can be healed, and it can be
cleansed and can be relieved and put to
rest, not by hardening it, but by bringing
it to the precious blood of Jesus Christ
and having our spirits and souls washed from
all sin.
And when God speaks to a man inside
and tells him, he's right through the word
of the living God, and his mind knows
his sins are gone, he knows they're forgiven.
Something wonderfully healing and hopeful and helpful and
marvelous about all this, and we know the
difference.
We know the difference.
When David was forgiven of his sin, it
was quite a vastly different thing than when
Saul had hardened his conscience and gone to
the witch of Endor.
Quite a different thing.
Quite a different thing when Peter looked up
at his master and wept.
Quite different from Demas, who loved this present
world and went back from following the Lord.
There's a difference between getting my conscience quiet
by choking it down, by being careless.
Quite a difference, I say, in having it
washed by the precious blood of Jesus and
made clean because it's forgiven.
I have been dishonest, all right.
I go to God and I tell him
so in plain language, and I offer to
straighten that out all I can and do
everything humanly possible to bring my life into
line with the moral standards of the scriptures.
God forgives my sin and purges me and
washes me so completely that I feel rested
and healed because God has given me a
sprinkle conscience.
And so with every other sin that we
may have committed, may God grant that we
Christians do not live with a bad conscience.
For the voice of the human heart, the
voice of conscience, not me by nature, but
that light that lighted every man that disturbs
and troubles my heart, that voice of God
is on the side of righteousness, and the
gospel, and truth, and righteousness, living and holy
living.
So I can say to you tonight that
everywhere the voices are sounding.
The voice of God's love sounding and saying,
Come unto me all ye that labor and
are heavy laden.
The voice of Jesus' blood speaking better things
than that of Abel.
The voice of God saying, Come now and
let us reason together.
And the voice of the human conscience crying
out within us, disturbed and needled by the
voice of the Holy Ghost.
And it's on God's side, too.
It's on the side of righteousness.
Dear man and woman, there isn't a good
thing in the world that isn't on the
side of your being a Christian, and there
isn't in the word of God or in
the human heart touched, disturbed, and troubled by
the word of God.
There isn't anything that in any way can
justify my failure to come to God and
live right before God in Christ.
And if I'm a Christian, every good thing
says I ought to be a better Christian.
The voice of the blood of the Lamb,
the voice of moral reason, the voice of
God's love, and the voice of my own
heart.
Disturbed, I repeat, by the word of God,
for without the word of God the human
heart is deceitful and above all things indesperately
wicked.
But disturbed and troubled by the light that
lighted every man that cometh into the world,
and bothered and worried by the word of
God, the human heart then is on the
side of reason and righteousness.
So I say, dear people, all that God
has to say in whatever medium of communication
he may use, it is that if you're
not a Christian, you become a Christian.
And it is if you're a Christian, you
become right away a better Christian.
Begin now to do something about it so
your life will be a better life.
Let's pray.
Now, dear Lord, we pray tonight for hearts
that are gentle and humble and docile and
manageable, so that thou canst lead us not
with a bit and a bridle as a
stubborn horse, but by the sound of thy
voice as a tractable sheep, ready to come
home and follow the shepherd and do the
shepherd's bidding quietly and without making a big
scene.
But do what's right and do it because
it's in the book and because it's the
substance of the Holy Ghost's witness to our
hearts.
We pray thy blessing upon these friends who
are here this evening.
O God, thou knowest the old world out
there isn't a friend of grace.
It isn't a friend of grace to lead
us on to thee.
We thank thee we have more than enough.
We have the word of God, we have
the Spirit of the living God, and we
have our two knees, and we have an
entrance into the Holy of Holies by the
blood of Jesus.
We have thy promises firm and sure, and
he that is for us is more than
all they that can be against us.
So we believe that it's possible to live
for thee, possible to live right in the
wrong world, and to live good in the
bad world, and to be upright in a
crooked world.
We believe it's entirely possible.
Our Father, wilt thou graciously bless this company.
It's hot, it's noisy, but O Lord, thou
hast been with us.
We've talked together and mused over these holy
things.
Help us to hear thee speak to us
when thou dost say, if today you will
hear his voice harder not, your heart is
in the day of the provocation.
For the word is nigh thee even in
thy mouth, and in thy heart even the
word of faith which we preach.
Thou shalt believe in thy heart and confess
with thy mouth thou shalt be saved, for
with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and
with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
Now we're trusting thee, Lord Jesus.
Thou bless all the churches as at about
this time they're drawing their services to a
close.
We pray that every gospel message might be
confirmed by the Spirit tonight.
We pray that every preacher may have the
anointing of the Spirit upon him.
We pray that thou will rescue from Satan's
grasp numbers tonight in the various churches.
It will come out of darkness into light,
serve the living God, and wait for his
Son from heaven.
In Christ's name, Amen.