The classic paradigm is the relationship of the
Father to the Son at the cross.
And once we understand and have appropriated that,
we have a foundation and a place for
the consideration of our own issues.
Having this foundation, seeing how the Father related
to the Son, for the issue of his
own holiness, that jealousy for his holiness will
affect all of our own personal and subsequent
considerations.
So that's why I'm insistent on coming back
to that, if you'll allow me, where the
author speaks about that his own holiness amounted
to his affection for his Son, as we've
already discussed.
But more than that, that Jesus himself as
the Son valued that holiness above his own
person, since he submitted himself to the reproaches
of men, to clear this perfection of the
divine nature and make it illustrious in the
eyes of the world.
Not only did the Father exalt the issue
of his holiness over the issue of the
Son, the Son himself exalted the issue of
holiness over himself.
The Father and the Son were in agreement
that the cost was not excessive in seeing
how important it is that the holiness of
God be honored by the sacrifice of the
Son.
Both Father and Son were in agreement.
So great is the issue of holiness that
neither one flinched.
So he requires mortification called crucifying, whereby a
man would strike as full of deadly a
blow at his lust, as was struck at
Christ upon the cross, and make them as
certainly die as the Redeemer did.
Our own righteousness must be condemned by us,
impure and imperfect.
We must disown everything that is our own
as to righteousness in reverence to the holiness
of God and the value of the righteousness
of Christ.
He will not have men brought only to
a relative state of happiness by justification, without
a real state of grace by sanctification.
There is no admittance into heaven but of
a persevering holiness.
This is the foundation for all consideration of
what is holy is what the Father and
Son acknowledged as needful to requite the issue
of the Father's name as holy against the
world that has transgressed in sin against him.
And turning now to the end of the
chapter, all sin is against the attribute of
God's holiness.
All sin aims in general at the being
of God, but in particular at the holiness
of his being.
All sin is a violence to this perfection.
There is not an iniquity in the world,
but directs its venomous sting against the divine
purity.
An interesting observation, whether men of the world
are conscious of it, all of their vile
conduct is in the last analysis addressed at
countermending and contradicting the holiness of God, as
if that holiness is an ultimate offense, and
if they could only assail it and bring
it down, all agree together in that enmity
against this, which is the peculiar glory of
the deity of God.
There is an assault against the holiness of
God.
The world despises what would have it removed
as a standard.
Holiness is the life of God.
It endures as long as his life.
He must be eternally averse from sin.
He can no longer than he lives in
the hatred and loathing of it.
If he should but for one instance cease
to hate it, he would cease to live.
If God is not holy, he is not
God, and his holiness requires to detest what
is contrary to himself, which is sin.
He cannot look on sin without loathing.
He cannot look on sin, but his heart
rises against it.
It must needs be most odious to him,
as that which is against the glory of
his nature and directly opposite to that which
is the lustre and varnish of all other
perfections.
It is the abominable thing which his soul
hates.
And on what basis should we hate it?
Exactly the same basis.
We do not hate iniquity until we hate
it as the antithesis of the holiness of
God.
He loathes sin.
He loathes evil.
He loathes iniquity because it is contrary to
and an assault upon his holiness.
And we ourselves must detest it for the
same reason, or else we will be inclined
to submit to it, and to compromise and
condescend to sin.
We need to hate it because it is
an affront to the holiness of God.
That is the reason he hates it.
The son that was distinguished by his love
of righteousness and his hatred of iniquity.
This detestation of sin must be manifested.
How should we certainly know his loathing of
it if he did not manifest by some
act how ungrateful it is to him?
As his love to righteousness would not appear
without rewarding it, so his hatred of iniquity
would be as little evidence without punishing it.
His justice is the great witness to his
purity.
The punishment therefore inflicted on the wicked shall
be in some respect as great as the
rewards bestowed upon the righteous.
The judgments of God that are even now
in the earth are the statement of his
holiness.
But how many are rightly interpreting those natural
so-called phenomena, floods and tsunamis and earthquakes
and other colossal disasters, as being the judgment
already of a preliminary kind that issues out
of God's love for his own righteousness and
his own holiness, and is already being expressed
as warning to the unwary.
These are not accidents of nature.
God established the tectonic plates beneath the sea
and he knows when to move them.
And so we are seeing an increase of
devastation and calamities in the world.
And they need to be rightly interpreted as
in the first instance already as preliminary judgment
to bring mankind to an awareness that the
holiness of God is being offended against and
must require his justice.
And that he's waiting for men even now
to turn and to be saved from ultimate
judgment in which there's no remedy.
And that it's not extravagant now to bring
even disasters of this kind.
But where's a church that will have the
courage to acknowledge that as true and to
communicate that as true to a world that
only sees it as a Time Magazine Newsweek
natural phenomenon and not at all the hand
of God.
We have got to see that in nature
and in the devastations, the judgments of God
already in defense of his holiness.
But I say as a rule of thumb,
a first consideration for any mishap, any calamity
is to ask in what way is this
a judgment for something that God wants to
bring to my attention.
Having put that before the Lord and examined
that, if God does not indicate that, then
you're free to give another construction to what
you're suffering as not being the statement of
judgment.
But the first examination and the first interpretation
will not err by asking if it is
not already a judgment that God is bringing
to our consideration.
And we're not only talking about natural catastrophes
or tsunamis in the world, but instances in
our own life.
A sickness that has befallen us, the marriage
that has gone awry, the son who is
out of the faith, the fellowship that is
being shaken.
In the first analysis, we have to ask,
Lord, what are you saying through this?
Are you indicating that you're allowing this, that
there's something that we need to recognize that
we have not seen in which we have
been in error or in sin or neglect
and that already that this is your patient
indication that something needs radical correction and we
receive it as judgment.
So the church itself needs to come into
a fresh respect for the issue of judgment
as not being contrary to God, but in
the very essence of his holy nature and
that it's a mercy for judgment, especially of
a preliminary kind that will save us if
we will be turned by it from eternal
judgments in which there's no remedy.
So God cannot be holy and therefore cannot
be just because injustice is a part of
unholiness.
God's holiness and hatred of sin necessarily infer
the punishment of it.
Judgment is intrinsic to the issue of the
holiness of God.
The author takes up a new issue at
this point in his article that the issue
of God's holiness is the issue of our
trust.
We can trust God and believe God and
honor God for his word and for his
promises because he is holy.
And so our reservation, our doubt, our lack
of security, our unwillingness to commit is a
statement that we have not really understood God
as holy.
If we had, if we had that his
promises are airtight, if you seek me with
all your heart and all your soul, you
shall be found on me.
If you ask your father, natural father of
bread, for bread will he give you a
stone?
How much more than will your heavenly father
give the gift of the Holy Spirit to
them that ask him?
There's much reservation, particularly in the realm of
trusting God for the Holy Spirit by those
who do not have an absolute confidence in
his promise.
They're afraid that they'll get a stone rather
than bread.
Even though God said he'll give a gift
to them who ask him.
So the issue of holiness and the recognition
of the holiness of God is the basis
for trust and confidence in the God who
speaks and the God who promises.
So I just want to read this here.
This attribute renders God a fit object for
trust and dependence.
The notion of an unholy and unrighteous God
is an uncomfortable idea of him and beats
off our hands from laying any hold of
him.
It is upon this attribute the reputation and
honor of God in the world is built.
What encouragement can we have to believe him?
What incentives could we have to serve him
without the luster of this in his nature?
The very thought of an unrighteous God is
enough to drive men at the greatest distance
from him.
As the honesty of a man gives a
reputation to his word, so does the holiness
of God give credit to his promises.
The issue of God's holiness is the issue
of his word.
The confidence we can have in his promises
because he who speaks is holy.
I wrote at the bottom of the page.
Can it be that the frequent failure to
ask and receive the gift of the Spirit
is to be attributed to a lack of
the knowledge of God's holiness?
All those denominational people who have found a
way to gainsay and put aside the issue
of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as
that which is perfect has already come, there's
no need for it, or that we already
have it in our new birth, because there's
a nervousness, there's a fear, I believe, to
trust God and to believe for a phenomenon
that has got to come out of your
own mouth.
So not to be tested in an area
of which they are insecure in faith, they
put aside the question entirely as being a
non-question.
Are you following me?
In my debates over the years with mainline
fundamentalists who negate the baptism of the Holy
Spirit, it's always on some specious denominational doctrinal
ground that it's not a valid and present
experience to be obtained now.
And what I suspect is that they elaborate
all kinds of doctrinal reasons to save themselves
from a test of faith that they do
not believe they will pass.
Because you could believe for many things, but
to believe to receive the promise of the
baptism of the Holy Spirit requires an evidence
that issues out of your own mouth by
faith.
And so I'm saying the real problem is
this.
They have not believed God as holy.
The lack of the acknowledgement and knowledge of
God as holy and whose promise is true
is reflected in the fear of believing for
that promise.
Whereas if they had a full confidence that
he who speaks is holy and will not
contradict himself, then they will have an abandon
and a yieldedness in faith by which they
enter the precious dimension.
And by the way, the baptism of the
Holy Spirit is a precious, necessary dimension.
To forsake that is to live a stunted
and inadequate Christian life all the days of
your life.
You're shorting yourself from such an intention of
benefit that God would not allow the church
to proceed in its fulfillment until it had
waited and tarried in Jerusalem until it would
be endued with power from on high.
The church is as much under obligation now
for that enduement, for the fulfillment of what
was begun then as it was in its
inception.
To live a fundamentalist, correct, technical life independent
of the reality of that baptism by which
when you speak with tongues, you edify yourself
and you're built up in the inner man,
how can you afford not to be?
When Paul says I speak with tongues more
than you all, he's not at all making
a single reference to any public statement in
tongues in church situations that needed to be
interpreted.
He's speaking exclusively of his personal, private, devotional
life.
And I want to say that if he
had not spoken in tongues more than his
soul, he would not be Paul.
His power publicly and what he performs and
expresses as benefits the church and the epistles
he writes is the result of the luxuriating
of his soul in the realm of being
bathed in spirit by praying in the spirit
in tongues more than us all.
To avoid that dimension is to remove from
the believer the most essential gift of God
for the overcoming life.
And yet there are millions in that fundamentalist
mentality that have put it aside, I believe,
out of fear of an insecurity of an
inadequate faith that can appropriate, because they do
not trust God for his promise as holy
that if you ask your Heavenly Father, he'll
give you the gift of the Holy Spirit
more than your natural Father will give you
bread and not a stone.
To believe God as holy is to believe
God who speaks, is to believe God who
promises, and to receive what he promises, because
you can have an uttermost confidence because he's
holy, holy, holy, and he's not a man
that he should lie.
I've never before considered that the issue of
the knowledge of God as holy is the
issue of trust for us and confidence in
his word and in his promise.
And that where we are weak in that
regard, we're weak in the knowledge of his
holiness, so that if the promises are to
be restored and act upon, it will be
in proportion as we've come to a fresh
acknowledgement of God as holy and that he's
not a man that he should lie.
For if you who are unholy, having so
much corruption to render you cruel, can bestow
upon your children the good things they want,
how much more shall God, who is holy
and hath nothing in him to check his
mercifulness to his creatures, grant the petition of
his supplicants?
So I'm grateful that the author takes up
this issue, that we should have a confidence
because God's holiness is engaged in his inviolable
covenant.
So the whole issue of covenant and his
promise and faithfulness rest upon the holiness of
God who has made it.
And so in the midst of despair and
in things that seem terribly out of sort,
broken situations, the thing to which Zika is
returning with his wife now who has flipped
out our sister with her situation with her
husband in Hong Kong, whatever situation we're facing,
however despairing, we have an ultimate confidence in
the covenant-keeping God, that as we will
honor and keep covenant, he will honor that
honoring and be the third fold cold cord
that will not be broken and see us
through what seemingly otherwise would be a hopeless
situation and bring it through, not just to
a resolution by which domestic harmony is obtained,
but his glory forever, that in fact he's
allowed the crisis for the revelation of his
greater glory, that there's more at stake here
than the issue of personal happiness.
It's the glory of God forever who allows
something to be broken in order to be
restored to the everlasting praise of his glory.
Let us get and preserve right and strong
apprehensions of this divine perfection.
Without a due sense of it, we can
never exalt God in our hearts.
And the more distinct conceptions we have of
this and the rest of his attributes, the
more we glorify him.
So we can almost say that the want
of worship, true worship, the want of real
exaltation of God, the want of adoration is
also the issue of holiness.
That there's something wanting in the way in
which we have perceived God that does not
release us into an ultimate dimension of the
kind of worship and praise which is his
due.
That adoration is an ultimate statement, but it
only comes to those who know him as
holy, holy, holy.
And therefore when they open and lift their
voices in praise, something rings, something registers out
of a depth of that knowledge that transfigures
the whole act of worship and makes it
more than just the issue of music or
song.
So we need to strive for the greater
knowledge.
Our reference to God will arrive in a
greater degree if every act of duty be
ushered in and seasoned with the thoughts of
God as sitting upon a throne of holiness.
We shall have a more becoming sense of
our own vileness, a greater honor to his
service, a deeper respect in his presence if
our understanding be more cleared and possessed with
notions of this perfection.
Thus, before a view of God in this
part of his glory, before you fall down
before the throne and assure yourselves you will
find your hearts and services quickened with a
new and lively spirit.
This knowledge of God as holy is not
automatic.
It needs to be sought, needs to be
cultivated, needs to be nurtured, needs to be
increased, needs to be deepened.
And with it will come a consequent benefit
for every aspect of the believing life.
Worship, service, prayer, devotion, it will save us
from being merely mechanical in our morning devotional
times.
We'll come to it with a greater eagerness
and a greater delight.
Everything rests on the knowledge of God as
holy, and yet everything contends against that knowledge.
The world wants to block that out or
disparage the holiness of God.
So it needs to be contended for.
To contend for the faith once and for
all, given the saints, as I've said innumerable
times, is much more than the issues of
the sum of its doctrines.
To contend for the faith is to contend
for God as God.
It's to contend for God as holy, because
everything seems to militate against it.
To reduce him, to make him a commonplace,
a Johnny-come-lately, one who's doing your
errands.
There's something about the nature of things that
contends against the issue of the holiness of
God that needs to be pursued with an
intention.
And you can believe that it will be
resisted.
The enemy does not want us to grow
in this knowledge, because this knowledge affects everything.
It affects our worship, it affects our service,
it affects our relationship, it affects our willingness
to bear through present struggle, because what is
at stake is his name, his honor, his
glory.
So strive to come to an increased and
deepened knowledge, because as I come to the
end now of this chapter, the author says,
holiness is our life.
The life of the soul consists not of
its being or spiritual substance, the excellency of
its faculties of understanding, but in the moral
and becoming operations of them.
The spirit is only life because of righteousness.
I have to confess, he's over my head.
I don't know what he's saying, but I
like it.
The spirit is life because of righteousness.
The issue of holiness is the issue of
life, because the issue of holiness is the
genius of what is moral.
And if you take from man the moral
quotient, you reduce man, you make of him
an animal.
The moral thing is the distinctive, and it's
rooted in the issue of what is holy.
The fact that God is holy means that
he's given us conscience, and that he's given
us a moral root of being, that there's
something more to life than just feeding your
face, washing your clothes, going through motions.
If you are not distinctly a moral being,
you have lost the uniqueness of your identity
as a human being.
And the enemy is bent upon ruining and
removing this moral consciousness from man, deadening the
conscience.
But he is saying that this moral quotient
that reflects and is given by the God
who is holy is the very issue of
our humanity.
Jesus said I've come to bring you life
and that more abundantly.
Paul was a full-armed man.
He wasn't the little paper cutout walking on
eggshells in a kind of pseudo-spirituality.
He was a mensch.
He was a man.
He knew the poetry of the Greeks, he
said, as even your own poets have written.
He was diverse.
He was broad in his understanding.
He could relate to Jews.
He could relate to pagans.
He was the man of God.
He was the man of the spirit.
He was a man of deep feelings who
knew the sorrow and grief by which he
would wish himself a curse for his brethren's
sake, and then two, three chapters later, his
exalting God, oh the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.
Paul could not be that man without the
moral dimension that comes in the knowledge of
the holy.
That needs to come into our consciousness.
So my first address to teachers in Albania,
out of an 80-year history of atheism,
who are now supported by a German mission,
is that I speak to the faculty, these
teachers, our children attending their school, and the
Lord gave me a message that I'd never
before spoken, moral, the word moral.
What is moral?
I said, what is your teaching profession if
it does not have its end in your
consciousness, moral intention?
What is your subject matter if it is
not a vehicle for the bringing up of
moral consideration?
What is moral but the considering of what
is right or just or good or bad
in the situations by which we live?
How can you be a teacher and not
bring these considerations before your students?
And unless you yourself are considering them, how
shall you bring them?
And when you begin to weigh moral issues,
you find a kind of exhaustion, a drain,
a demand upon your inner man that was
not there.
And in fact, the demand is so great
that you cannot consider moral things independent of
God.
You need his energy even to consider the
things that are ultimate, that are moral and
holy.
So in the last analysis, the moral concern
drives you to God, because in the last
analysis, the issue of what is moral is
God.
P.T. Forsythe, one of my favorite authors,
speaks of love as holy love.
And if you omit the holy, then the
love becomes something less sentimental.
What distinguishes the love of God, it is
a holy love.
And so even that love permits terror, permits
fear, permits the knowledge of God that makes
us to quake and to tremble.
Paul says, knowing the terror of God, I
persuade men.
There's something to be said for the fear
of God, as a grace to give him
the proper reverence and due that he deserves.
All of these are the expressions of his
holiness.
So every person is morally dead while he
lives an unholy life.
It is only holiness that fits us for
communion with God, because it brings a greater
nearness and partakes more fully of the fountain
of life.
Communion with God is proportionate to our ability
to approach a God who is holy and
to dwell in the presence and so obtain
the remarkable benevolences that issue from his life
as we can approach a God who is
holy.
With what communion can an excellent God have
with deformed creatures, a living God with the
dead?
Without holiness, none shall see God.
The creature must be stripped of his unrighteousness
or God of his purity before they can
come together.
Likeness is the ground of communion and of
delight in it.
The opposition between God and unholy souls is
as great as that between light and darkness.
Divine fruition is not so much by a
union of presence as a union of nature.
Be holy as I am holy is not
just an abstract command, it is God's inducement
that we can come into his presence, that
he might receive us being holy and in
that receiving communicate and mediate to us those
things that issue out from his own holy
life.
Because he cannot have communion with that which
is contrary to himself.
So be holy as I am holy and
giving us every grace to be that and
to esteem that and to seek that for
that communion.
So the author writes, let us by be
often reviewing and ruminating on the holiness of
God especially as discovered in Christ.
The excellent idea of the holiness of God
in Christ perfects our understanding and awakens all
the powers of our soul to be formed
to be actions worthy of him.
How can we arise to conformity to God
in Christ whose most holy nature we seldom
glance upon and more rarely sink our souls
into the depths of it by meditation?
Be frequent in the meditation of the holiness
of God.
Think upon it, contemplate it, read men who
have like this gone off into deep waters
to try and express and define the issues
that pertain to his holiness.
Sit down yourself and write.
What is the holiness of God?
What is righteousness?
Try and define, try and articulate, make it
your own.
We mustn't be lazy and slothful here because
the more that we grapple with, wrestle with,
love, seek to know and to appropriate, the
more we attain the reality itself.
How would we become holy as he is
holy?
By the contemplation of what is holiness, by
the meditation upon it, particularly as it is
revealed in his son.
Be frequent in the meditation of the holiness
of God.
Let us make God our end.
Every man's mind forms itself to a likeness
to that which makes it its chief end.
What is your chief end?
What is the object of your contemplation?
To what do you give your thought and
consideration?
We have to shift from other and lesser
subjects to the subject of the holiness of
God, if we ourselves to come into increasingly
that reality through meditation.
When God and his glory are made our
end, we shall find a silent likeness passed
in upon us and the beauty of God
will by degrees enter upon our souls.
In every deliberate action, let us reflect upon
the divine purity as a pattern.
Let us examine whether anything we are prompted
to bear an impression of God upon it,
whether it looks like a thing that God
himself would do.
See whether it has the sense of God
upon it, how in keeping it is with
his nature, whether and in what manner the
holiness of God can be glorified thereby.
Be still and know that I am God.
Shut off the clamor, shut off the distraction,
pull the plug on the TV, the various
things that drain time, attention and energy in
the quest for news.
But what is the news in the last
analysis?
Nothing new at all.
And the curiosity for the news is sometimes
with believers is almost perverse.
They have to have the news when nothing
in fact is really new.
It's deadly.
So we need to make room for, be
critical of, eliminate distraction, seek the knowledge of
the holy, deliberate upon it, dwell upon it
and become it.
Because as he says, holiness is our life.
Let us address for holiness to God the
fountain of it as he is the author
of bodily life, so is he the author
of his own life, the life of God
in the soul.
By his holiness he makes men holy as
the sun by his light enlightens the air.
He is not only the holy one, but
our holy one, the Lord that sanctifies us
as he has mercy to pardon us, so
has he holiness to purify us, the excellency
of being a sun to comfort us, a
shield to protect us, giving grace and glory.
He only can mold us into a divine
frame.
The great original can only derive the excellency
of his own nature to us.
We are too low, too lame to lift
up ourselves, too much in love with our
own deformity to admit of this beauty without
a heavenly power inclining our desires for it,
our affections to it, our willingness to be
partakers of it.
God himself in the last analysis is the
author, the purveyor, the communicator, the giver of
his own holy nature.
And this is God's object, that we should
be holy as he is holy and have
eternal communion with him on that basis.
And that he provides the expression of his
own nature that we might obtain it.
Isn't that remarkable?
We earthly things that were taken off of
dump heaps are being fitted to an eternal
relationship with God in holiness, in union with
him, in his own nature.
What greater gift than the giving of himself
in his essential attribute, holiness.
And that that process is now, is going
on now.
And as we cannot attain to it, so
we cannot maintain it without him.
God gave Adam and he lost it, and
God gives it us, we shall lose it
without his influencing and preserving grace.
The channel will be without a stream if
the fountain do not bubble it forth, and
the streams will vanish if the fountain does
not constantly supply them.
Let us apply ourselves to him for holiness
as he is a God glorious in holiness,
and by this we honor God and advantage
ourselves.
So seek him for this expressed thing, his
nature, his holiness, that we might be like
him.
Not to be embarrassed by it or think
that somehow it's unbecoming to aspire to the
holiness of God.
After all, we're only men.
It's God's intention, his provisions, the whole end
of our salvation, our redemption, that we should
be like him, holy as he is holy.
So let's make it a petition.
Let's ask and keep on asking and receive
the means by which he's communicating his nature,
dealing with us in the areas of struggle,
disappointment, life situations, that we wonder how come
that we're in such an impasse, such a
struggle, because by it uniquely we're being fitted
for it.
It's the means by which his nature is
being communicated, and he's identifying lesser things that
would have been acceptable in our sight, but
are contrary to his holiness, that now need
to be identified and dealt with, put away,
that we might come into the ultimate condition
that he himself abides.
And nothing less evidently would have obtained this,
and that it's worth it.
We will say later it was worth it
all.
It was painful.
It was agonizing.
What a struggle.
It tore my guts out.
I spit my guts out.
What poor Zika is going back to is
going to be a struggle of an ultimate
kind.
It will be stupefying.
It'll be madness.
He'll see unfaithfulness.
He'll see desertion.
He'll see betrayal.
He'll catch his wife in bed with another
man, maybe more than once or whatever is
comparable, that rips the very soul out of
a man.
Whatever is needful, the end there will be
a holy man serving the purposes of God
in his own nature.
And somehow it could not have been attained
without that struggle.
So when you ask, Lord, that I might
be holy as you are holy, and whatever
it takes to obtain it, you're asking much.
And when his answer comes as trial, as
suffering, don't be surprised by the unusual trial
as if it's a shock, as if it
were not intended, but say, this is the
very answer to the prayer that I've asked.
To be perfected in the holiness of God
by necessity requires a trial, requires demand, requires
dealings of a kind that we would otherwise
have avoided if we would have been satisfied
for less.
If we would have been satisfied with being
nice guys who also believed, we would not
have had to face it.
But if we got to be holy as
he is holy, there's no shortcut except through
the provision of sacrifice of trial of dealings,
the cross.
So Lord, grant to us ultimate desire to
obtain every day more the measure of your
holiness.
It's simply not enough to be a nice
guy who believes.
The world is not going to be saved
by nice guys.
The world has a much deeper need than
a band-aid, a little amelioration, a little
pat on the back.
It needs a reality of an ultimate kind,
which is God, by those who can mediate
that reality because they abide and dwell in
it, because they know they're God.
So Lord, help us from being sissies that
want to be spared.
Grant us a jealousy for this knowledge of
your ultimate nature, Lord, that does not come
cheap, not just to meditate it, to dwell
upon what it is, but to obtain it
by union with you in the fellowship of
your sufferings.
So we thank you, my God, that you
shall have a people for your name.
They shall be the very thing in themselves.
Thank you, Lord.
Precious God, your intention for us is ultimate,
and we bless you.
Help us with a little help, we pray,
to bear all that we must that we
might be like you, for Jesus' sake.