Father, I come before you in the name
of your Son, to whom belongs the throne
and the crown and the scepter, in all
glory, in all honor, in all praise, in
all riches, in all power, in every kingdom,
every knee and every tongue.
To Him and Him alone, Father, be the
glory forever and ever.
The only one worthy to take the book,
the only one worthy to die and to
live again.
Oh, Father, I count it a gracious privilege
to stand before you and to talk about
things I know so little about.
Who are we, God?
But a bucket of dust.
You are so good.
Your mercy endures forever and your loving kindness
upon those who fear you, knowing that they
fear you only because you've taught them to
fear.
What is man that thou shalt take thought
of him, O Lord, or the Son of
man that thou shalt be concerned for him,
but you are.
No, God, what happens here is utterly dependent
upon you.
There is no one here who seeks you.
There is no one here who would ever
open up their heart.
There is no one here who would ever
embrace your love, because we are a rebellious
people.
And so we're so dependent, God, upon your
mercy for you to turn away your justice
from us and to be merciful to those
who deserve only justice.
We are dependent upon you to open up
our eyes.
We are dependent upon you to open up
our hearts.
We're dependent upon you to give us faith
and repentance.
We're dependent upon you, Lord.
So please, Father, as I babble, overcome
human weakness and human sin by your grace
and for your glory.
And again, Father, to him who's on the
throne be for him, by him, and through
him are all things.
In Jesus' name, a name I'm not even
worthy to pronounce.
I'll be reading today from 1 Corinthians chapter
15.
If you have your Bibles, it would be
a good thing to turn there.
1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 1.
And let's stand as we read God's word.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 1.
Now, brothers, I want to remind you of
the gospel I preached to you, which you
received and on which you have taken your
stand.
By this gospel you are saved.
If you hold firmly to the word I
preached to you, otherwise you've believed in vain.
For what I passed on to you as
of first importance, for what I received I
passed on to you as of first importance,
that Christ died for our sins according to
the scriptures, that he was buried, and that
he was raised on the third day according
to the scriptures.
You may have a seat.
Thank you.
Today I want to talk about the gospel
of Jesus Christ.
And you might think that that's kind of
unusual.
After all, this is a Christian school.
After all, most do profess Christ.
And after all, we do live in America,
where one would think that everyone is gospel
-hardened, or that we've heard it so many
times that it really shouldn't have much effect
on us.
But I want to tell you something.
America is not gospel-hardened.
America, and not only America but the Christian
Church in America, has lost the gospel.
What's being preached today is by and large
so far from good news that it is
not good news.
It is man-centered and it is built
around men.
But the gospel I'm going to preach today
is not.
I'm not here to tell you about you
or to tell you about your needs or
to even tell you how to meet your
needs, because the gospel does not center around
you.
It centers around God.
In America today, the Church is basically repeating
one word, man, man, man, man, man.
Everything for man.
How can man have his needs met?
What can God do for man?
But that's not Scripture.
In Scripture, it is God, God, God, God.
Not all things for man, not all things
for you, and not all things for me,
but all things for God, for His glory,
His purpose, and His good.
And this glorious, mighty, majestic God has done
a wonderful thing that men like you and
I, and women like some of you, might
know Him, and might be embraced by Him,
and might be saved.
So I want to talk about the gospel,
the good news of Jesus Christ.
If you're a Christian, I hope that it
will help you reorientate your message.
If you're not a Christian, I hope that
today you'll be born again, that you might
know the pleasure of God.
Let's look at the first verse.
Now, brothers, I want to remind you of
the gospel I preach to you.
The word remind really means I want to
declare to you, I want to make known
to you the gospel.
Paul is talking to Christians, and he realizes
something here.
Christians have a deep need to hear the
gospel preached correctly, to hear it over and
over and over and over again.
The primary motivation of all Christian living, the
primary motivation to come to God is the
gospel of Jesus Christ.
The good news that in Christ, God was
reconciling the world to Himself, and that in
Christ, rebellious men and women like ourselves can
be saved.
Men and women who deserve nothing more than
the justice and condemnation of God can now
be brought into a relationship with God through
faith in Jesus Christ.
And we need to be reminded of that,
and reminded of that, and reminded of that,
and we need the gospel to be made
known to us.
Today in America, the gospel has been reduced
down to four tiny little laws or cliches,
and that's wrong.
We have come to believe that doctrine and
theology and Bible study and things such as
that are useless in the Christian life, and
that's why the church is in such a
mess today.
We've heard so much about the dumbing down
of America.
I want to tell you something.
With regard to the gospel, we have the
dumbing down of the church.
Men do not know what really happened on
that tree, and men do not realize the
importance of the resurrection, and men do not
realize that God has done only one thing
in this world whereby men might be saved,
and to reject that one thing is to
be lost, to be lost.
So we're going to study this gospel.
He says, Now, brothers, I want to remind
you of the gospel I preached to you,
which you received and on which you have
taken your stand.
After the message of the gospel is usually
preached in America today, someone is told that
they should receive Jesus, pray a prayer, and
ask Him into their heart, and if they
do that, they're born again.
Well, like so many other cliches in our
Christianity, that's simply not true.
The Bible does not say that.
The Bible says in order to be saved,
a man must repent of his sins, he
must turn from his sins, and he must
place his faith upon Jesus Christ.
But salvation is more than just some little
tiny decision in which you open some magical
door to your heart and graciously ask Jesus
Christ to come in.
That is not salvation.
Salvation is a mighty work of God by
which God Himself, in His own power, turns
a man's heart and changes him, and gives
that man repentance and faith, and that man
believes in Jesus Christ, and on believing he
is saved, and the evidence of his salvation
is not some little prayer.
It's a changed life.
As one old preacher told me, and we
ought to listen a lot more to old
preachers, if your religion hasn't changed you, you'd
better change your religion.
It's worthless.
Paul didn't say just a gospel that you
received, but upon which you had taken your
stand.
In other translations, in which you stand.
A gospel in which you stand.
What does it mean to stand?
It means two things.
First of all, it's more than just some
superficial praying a little prayer and wham, I'm
in.
That's not the gospel.
It is the idea of standing upon something,
to be convicted about something, to hold as
true, to hold as something worthy of risking
your entire life.
A man who has simply opened up some
little door and received some little Savior, is
not saved.
But it is the man who hears the
claims of God in Christ, that Christ died
for our sins, that He rose again from
the dead.
It's that man who believes that, and risks
his entire life upon that.
A faith with conviction.
A faith that obeys.
A faith that transforms.
If you have just got your ticket to
get into heaven, you're not going there.
Also, to stand means to stand in the
presence of God.
And I want you to think about something.
Today we have so watered down the gospel
that God frightens no one.
God is some, this warm and fuzzy little
man that we can do whatever we want
to with.
Or He's some beggar on the street that
no one cares about.
We feel like if we put a little
religious tip in His tin cup, at least
we've done better than everyone else.
You need to realize something, and we're going
to see here in a moment, that God
is God.
And all the nations tremble before Him.
And they're like a drop in the bucket
before Him.
And that heaven and earth will flee away
from Him.
And like the psalmist said, if God counted
our sins, who could stand before Him?
The answer, of course, is no one.
There is only one way to stand before
God.
And it is not a religion.
It is not a denomination.
It is Christ, and Christ alone, who is
not a ticket to heaven.
He's the creator of the universe, and the
glory and splendor of heaven.
He's God.
And if you truly come to know the
gospel, you've taken your stand upon it.
It's the most important thing in your life,
and the thing that directs every other thing
in your life.
The world and the things of the world
mean very little to you, because you have
come to stand upon other ground.
The ground of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
He says, by this gospel, in verse 2,
you are saved if you hold firmly to
the word I preached to you, otherwise you've
believed in vain.
There is a doctrine, and it's called biblical
assurance.
It means that once a man has come
under the power of God and has been
converted, that the same God who transformed him
and saved him is the same God who
will keep him.
That has nothing to do with the false
ideas taught today of eternal security.
Now, what am I saying?
We have developed a new doctrine in America
today, a false eternal security.
It's the idea that if one time in
your life you prayed a prayer, then you're
in.
If one time in your life you walked
down an aisle, then you're saved.
But Paul doesn't teach that.
The evidence of salvation is not praying a
prayer and asking Jesus Christ to come into
your heart.
The evidence of salvation is not writing the
date of your conversion in the back of
your Bible, or driving a stake in the
back of your house with your name on
it.
The evidence of salvation is that you continue
on in the gospel, you continue believing the
gospel, and you continue obeying the gospel.
If you do not live that way, you
can have no assurance whatsoever that you've ever
been born again.
Paul said you are saved and you'll be
able to know it if you continue in
your salvation.
That's what we need to understand, and that
is what was taught before, when doctrine was
important, when the Bible was more important than
cliches.
If you're not acting as a Christian should
act, you can have no security that you
are one.
I am not teaching that you can lose
your salvation.
I'm teaching you you've never had it, because
Paul says you will continue on.
Otherwise, you've believed in vain.
There are many people who profess a faith
in Christ, and yet it's a vain faith.
As the book of James tells us, faith
without works is dead.
He's not combining faith and works together as
a means of salvation there.
No, what he's teaching you is this.
If your faith does not produce a Christian
life, it is not faith.
You have not come to know God in
Christ.
That's Paul's introduction to the gospel.
Now, let's get to verse three.
He says, for what I received, I passed
on to you as of first importance.
Will you listen to that?
Christianity in America today is a circus, and
I don't know where it's running, but I
see a lot of clowns leading it.
And I want to tell you something about
it.
You know why it's a circus?
Because the gospel doesn't have priority.
It is a little thing.
I was reading through a book when I
was in Peru about spiritual warfare that someone
had written and someone else had given it
to me to check it out.
And it was basically Eastern mysticism in which
there were about 13 levels of knowledge.
And do you know what the most basic
childlike knowledge in this type of Christian faith
was?
The first childlike thing that you could come
to understand was repentance and faith and the
gospel.
And then after that, there was all kinds
of new knowledge that people had received from
new revelations, and it can't be found in
the Bible.
We have become a circus because we don't
realize what is the priority.
The priority in Scripture is the gospel.
The book of Revelation is not the deepest
thing God has ever written.
Possibly the first three chapters of Ephesians are,
because there we hear about the gospel and
the glory and the majesty and the power
and the working and the design of God.
Spiritual warfare is not important.
As a matter of fact, spiritual warfare that's
being taught today is not even what the
Bible teaches.
Spiritual warfare is not you yelling at the
devil.
It's you living a godly life so that
even though he has you martyred, you will
not blemish the name of Christ.
What we need to understand is that the
most important thing today and forever is Scripture,
and Scripture teaches us that the thing of
first importance is what God has done for
you in Christ.
Let me share something with you, and let
me finish it before you throw a stone.
Your testimony is not that important.
Do you want to know what's important?
God's testimony about Jesus Christ.
And since so many of us know so
little about what God has said about His
Son, our own testimonies don't do very well
in carrying the gospel to others.
We are so self-absorbed today.
What God has done for me, what God
has done for me, what God has done
for me.
But the priority in Scripture is what God
has done in Christ.
When you open your mouth as a Christian,
you shouldn't be able just to tell some
experience you've had.
You should be able to tell people what
God has done in Jesus Christ.
If you're going to follow Christ, you need
to know what the gospel is, and you
need to know what Scripture says about the
gospel.
You need to dedicate yourself to a life
of discovering and chasing after God.
Before I was a Christian, I chased after
so many things, and all of them were
empty, and all of them were just a
step to chasing after something else, until one
day God revealed Himself.
And when God reveals Himself, all chasing after
other things becomes stupidity, because God is the
only One whom you can seek out and
chase after that has no end.
Do you think, actually think, that heaven is
heaven because of some puny little streets of
gold?
Or that it won't be boring because God
is going to have a lot of entertainment
up there?
Heaven is heaven because God cannot be exhausted,
because His glory is so infinite, His beauty
is so great, that every day, if one
could say such a thing, of eternity, will
simply be discovering more of God.
And if you're not excited about knowing God,
I've got news for you, you're not going
to heaven, because heaven is the purpose.
No, because God is the purpose of heaven.
Now, what is this gospel that's so important?
That Christ died for our sins according to
the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that
He was raised on the third day according
to the Scriptures.
So simple, isn't it?
Three little things, but so misunderstood, so misunderstood.
We're going to take a look at this
gospel and try to see something maybe we
haven't seen before, so that our apathy will
be scalded away by the flame of God's
truth, and so that we'll never sit in
another chapel and apathetically mouth words of praise.
But that we'll give ourself to it like
it was our very life.
Now, when we talk about the gospel, what
do we have to deal with?
I'll tell you what we have to deal
with.
A holy God.
Holy beyond all other things, and in a
few days we're going to be talking about
the holiness of God.
But in talking about the holiness of God,
and just mentioning that God is holy, something
clicks in our heart, and you know what
it is.
Upon hearing that God is holy, the thing
that clicks in our heart is that we're
not.
We have come to a point in Christianity
in which we have toned down the attributes
of God.
We don't even know what they are.
And we have so exalted man.
As a matter of fact, I spent a
great deal of my time wasting my time
studying neo-orthodoxy, and I was basically told
this, you be careful of preaching a God
that's so big and so glorious and so
holy that man cannot attain Him.
Well, I want to tell you something.
After several years of study in the jungle,
I learned better.
My job as a preacher is to preach
God as He is, so holy, so great,
so magnificent that He is unattainable, and I
am to preach man in such a fashion
as so low and so despicable that even
carnal Christians will be offended at my sermons.
And only then does Christ become so necessary
that a man would be a fool to
turn from Him.
You see, when we talk about the gospel,
we have to deal with our sin, and
that's what I want to do.
I want us to look at a few
passages that talk about you.
Turn with me to Genesis.
Let's go to chapter 6, verse 5.
The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on
the earth had become, and that every inclination
of the thoughts of his heart was only
evil all the time.
You should know this well, because it's a
good description of you and of me.
One time I was speaking, and a man
told me, that's not so.
And I said, well, if I could put
the thoughts of your heart on a video
projector, and I could show the thoughts of
your heart to everyone in this village, you
would run out of this village and you
would never return because you thought things so
evil that you could not even tell your
best friend, even up to this moment, sitting
there in the pew.
And you're the same way.
You see, we are not sinners because we
sin.
We sin because we're sinners.
And no outward form of change is going
to do us any good.
You are corrupt.
You were born in sin and depraved of
anything that could ever please God.
You have no handle upon God because you're
not holy.
You see, He's no man's debtor, and even
if He was, man couldn't offer anything to
win His favor.
You and I are depraved.
And your own heart knows that.
Your own mind understands that.
That there is a darkness in us that
we cannot control.
And that it's not just some little social
error that someone can take care of from
the very roots of our being.
The purest thoughts we have are an abomination
before God.
And all of it one day will be
exposed before Him.
Every thought of your heart will be exposed
before God.
Now look at Genesis chapter 8, verse 21.
The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said
in his heart, Never again will I curse
the ground because of man, even though every
inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.
Very famous Presbyterian theologian that I'm kind of
fond of was going to a baptism one
day.
He was asked to go to an infant
baptism, and he was there, and they were
bringing the babies to him.
And he was an old grouchy man, so
he could say whatever he wanted to.
And he looked around as they brought him
the babies, and he saw all these little
pretty white roses all over the baptismal area.
And he said, well, he picked one up
and he said, What are these flowers for,
these white roses?
And some lady in the church stood up
and said, Well, that represents the purity of
the child.
And he said, Well, then what's the baptism
for?
You see, a child is not pure.
You don't have to teach a child how
to lie.
You have to teach him how not to
lie.
You don't have to teach him how to
manipulate.
He knows that from the very first day.
Once I was walking through the Amazon, and
I came around this village, and there were
two children playing in a stream.
And I thought, Well, how pretty they were.
They were just building something there.
And I thought, How innocent and unsoiled they
are.
I walked for a few minutes down the
river, and I came back, and I found
that they were literally beating one another's faces
against the sand.
And I thought to myself, Well, goodbye, paradise.
Hello, Cain and Abel.
And God seemed to speak to my heart
and said, Yes, the purity of man, even
when he's in a perfect environment, no television,
no corruption, no anything.
His heart is an abomination to me.
It's wicked beyond knowledge, beyond understanding.
Now, let's go for a moment to the
book of Isaiah, chapter 64.
All of us have become like one who
is unclean, and all our righteous acts are
like filthy rags.
So many people think that God has a
balance somewhere in heaven, a scale, and that
if we've done more good things than bad
things, we somehow get in.
It's simply not true.
Let's say that my body was covered with
sores and oozing pus.
Even if I put on the most beautiful
garment of white, in just a few moments,
that garment would be stained with me.
Well, that's the same way about our works
and about our nature.
We are a fountain that corrupts every stream
it touches.
In us, we have no good thing before
God, and therefore the works that we try
to produce before Him amount to nothing.
You see, my good friend, we're told today
so many things about man, even in the
church.
And I don't hear people preaching the reality
of Scripture that we are totally, totally depraved
and totally in need of the mercy of
Almighty God.
If you're sitting there today breathing, you are
in dire need of the mercy of God.
If you are a Christian, you are in
dire need of the mercy of God that
it might continue in your life.
If you are a lost man, you are
in dire need of the mercy of God,
because apart from the mercy of God, you
will continue in your path and you will
go on to destruction.
We're not here today so that I can
soup you up with some message so that
you'll get inspired somehow and make a few
superficial carnal decisions.
I am preaching only in hopes that the
mercy of Almighty God might be manifest and
your hearts might be opened by His power
and you might know Him in a way
that you've never known Him.
And so my preaching has underwritten on top
of it, around it, begging prayers to God
that He might show divine favor and mercy
upon you and upon me.
Let's go to Romans chapter 3, verse
10.
As it is written, there is no one
righteous, not even one.
There is no one who understands, no one
who seeks God.
I don't know if some of you ministerial
students, I just want to throw this in
for you.
This idea of seeker-friendly churches, it's really
kind of silly.
Do you want to know why?
There's only one who seeks and it's not
men.
It's God.
And if you want to be friendly to
someone and you want to adapt your services
to please someone, then adapt it not to
men, but to God.
Men do not seek God.
I hear so many men stand up and
give their testimony and talk about how they
were wandering and wandering until finally they found
God.
And I realize either they're lying or they
don't know what they're saying because no one
seeks after God.
It is God who seeks after man.
And the only hope that you ever might
have is that God comes and seeks after
you.
If He leaves you alone to do what
you want to do, you'll perish forever.
The first prayer that ought to ever come
out of any man's mouth is, oh God,
have mercy on me, a sinner.
Come after me because I will not come
after you.
No one who seeks God, all have turned
away and they have all together become worthless.
There is no one who does good, not
even one.
Look at the word worthless there.
Do you know one of the chief attributes
of a lost man is that he is
of no service to God.
We go into churches today in America and
we could run through this campus today and
we could ask ourselves how many of the
student body are being used of God to
fulfill his purpose.
If you are not actively participating in God's
work and you are not serving God, then
you carry about yourself the chief attribute of
a man who is lost.
God is not using you.
You've become worthless to him.
Now what do we say about all this?
But all these hard things that this man
is saying.
What's to become of people like us?
Well, let me tell you what should become
of people like us.
The wrath of Almighty God.
Yes, wrath.
Do you know what wrath is?
The holy, just, merciless, violent anger of God
against the sin of men and against the
men who commit that sin.
Have you ever heard the saying, God loves
the sinner and hates the sin?
It's a wonderful thing.
The problem is it's false.
Psalms chapter five.
Read it well.
Read it several times when you leave here.
God hates all those who do iniquity.
You see, we've so made God into cliches
and so protected man from God.
I mean, God can take care of himself.
Someone's got to protect man from God.
But it says that God hates all those
who do iniquity.
You and I do iniquity.
How can we be saved?
Only that He not come to us in
justice, but He come to us in mercy.
You see, you need to realize something.
The condemnation of God abides on those who
reject His Son.
And the only way to escape the justice
that you and I deserve is to run
to the Son of God.
He is the city of refuge.
There is no other escape.
If men who rejected the law of Moses
suffered punishment, how much more those who trample
upon the Son of God and reject the
salvation that He purchased on Calvary.
You see, there is consequences to sin.
And one of them is the wrath of
God.
The other is spiritual death.
You see, you are dead if you are
outside of Christ.
You are spiritually dead and there is nothing
you can do to stop being dead.
I could preach to you all day and
you cannot respond, as though I was teaching
a dead man to do jumping jacks.
He couldn't get up and do them.
In the same way, when I preach, if
you're there and you're troubled about your heart,
you have to cry out to God.
God, give me mercy that I might understand.
God, show me the way.
Apart from you, I'm lost.
Salvation is from the beginning to the end,
God.
And unless God moves on your behalf, you're
in trouble.
We're so haughty and arrogant today about the
gospel, to decide when and to decide not
when to trust Christ.
But you need to realize that you're in
a precarious situation.
Jonathan Edwards described it like this.
Imagine a man pulling back a bow and
he's got the arrow pointed right at your
heart.
And his hand begins to tremble.
The mercy of God is what holds that
hand back.
But there will come a time when the
time of salvation comes to an end.
You see, God is sovereign.
And he taught Nebuchadnezzar that and he would
do well to teach us that.
That he is sovereign, my friend.
Salvation is open.
Come and be saved.
But there will come a time when the
doors of salvation will close.
God can lift up his hand and no
man can bring it down.
God can set his hand down on the
table and no man can pry it up,
no matter how sincere or how much he
manipulates.
You and I need to realize something, dear
friend, that we need God and we need
his mercy.
And he is not little something that we
can tag on to our life.
He is life.
And apart from him, there is absolutely nothing.
What is it with you?
How are you now?
Do you know God?
Let me phrase that a different way.
Does God know you?
Does he?
Is there evidence of it in your life?
Or do you have a real tidy, neat,
harmless, 20th century Christianity that will tell you,
you're in.
My friend, you're probably not in, if that's
the way you look at things.
We are so full of sin and we
are so in need of God.
And do you know what's going to be
so troubling?
Not that I've preached this way, but that
when a great deal of you leave this
morning, you're going to be saying, my, that
young man is so unbalanced.
He talks so hard against us when actually
we're not that bad.
Oh, you're far worse than even I can
describe.
And so am I.
And that is why there is such need
to take our position, bowing before God and
asking not for justice, my friend.
You do not want justice.
Don't you ever cry out that God gives
you justice.
Because justice will get you hell.
Cry out for mercy.
If you've sat through this and you've only
talked to your friend and you've thought, my,
this man preaches too long.
You don't realize this.
You're lucky you're not in Peru because I
just got through my first point.
But if you're sitting there today and you're
saying, my, we just got to get to
class.
Or if you're kind of bothered about what
I'm saying and not taking much interest in
it.
It doesn't appeal to you much.
As a matter of fact, there's no seriousness
about you at all right now.
Just a little snicker in your heart here
and there.
You ought to be very afraid.
And do you want to know why?
Because you can't be saved.
My gosh, who in the world have they
brought to this campus?
You know why you can't?
Because apart from repentance that brings a seriousness
before God and a hunger in your heart
and a sorrow for sin, apart from that,
you can't be born again.
I'm not going to fool you.
And if you walk out like that today,
then I'll tell you something.
Go out in a field somewhere or a
barn or go back to your room and
cry out to God, have mercy on me.
Take away this attitude of mine that treats
my sin as something almost like a joke.
Teach me about your holiness.
Show me your son.
Help me save me, oh God.
I love you and I desperately desire the
best for you.
But it begins here in this dungeon.
Tonight I'm going to preach about Christ and
what God has done for you and him.
But I had to preach this way this
morning.
Do you want to know why?
The gospel has no power today because we
don't tell men the predicament that he's in
before God.
You see, I don't hear joy in my
heart when I hear keys ringing.
Do you want to know why?
I'm not in a cell.
You put a man in a cell and
allow him to hear the jailer come with
the keys ringing and his heart will leap
for joy.
Many people today in America disdain the gospel
because they don't realize the predicament they're in
before a holy God.
I pray it's not that way with you.
There'll be no invitation.
There's no invitation needed.
An invitation is not what you need.
You need God and you need to get
alone with God.
One time I did this and the minister
said, how could you let him go?
And I said, if I can't let him
alone to God, who can I trust him
with?
So you go to your class or you
go home and you go wherever you need
to do, wherever you need to go, and
you get before God and you ask him
to reveal your heart to you to know
whether it's well with you.
And please come back tonight.
Why?
Because I've been terribly hard this morning and
after maybe a morning and an afternoon of
sorrow, tonight we truly will hear some good
news.
Let's go to the Lord in prayer.
Father, oh Lord, reveal
to us who you are, but Father, in
a real way, that we might know what
we are so that we might discover the
glories of Christ after this season of darkness.
In Jesus name.