It may be that my memory is very
short, but I don't actually remember coming to
the beginning of the last month of the
year in the knowledge of so many people
passing through difficult times of one way, in
one way or another.
Now this may be purely my own experience,
it may not be general, but I have
a fear that it may be general, and
that there are indeed more than we would
care to know who are passing through times
of severe trial of one kind or another.
What has the Word of God to say
to us when we are passing through times
of difficulty?
Has it anything?
The answer to that, of course, is that
it has so many things to say to
us, things that possibly we will never hear
until we get into times of difficulty, because
we are too attuned to other voices.
But when under the burden that may be
oppressing us, or in the face of the
challenge that may be gigantic in proportions, when
facing such issues, we realize that we are
incapable of doing so on our own, and
so we become perhaps a little more sensitive
to the Word of God.
So I am going to this evening to
take a passage which is not an easy
one to hear, and one which I feel
encouraged to speak about, because we are going
to meet at the Lord's table.
And so what I am going to say
needs to be seen under the shadow of
Calvary, as it were.
When God utters these words to us, when
he speaks these words to us through the
mouth of his servant James, he is to
be seen as the God who sent his
Son, as the God who means well, and
who, as Jeremiah puts it, is planning plans
of love and of grace for his people.
The plans that I devise for you are
plans of love, of grace, of kindness, and
so forth.
I am going to ask you to come
look with me at the verses that open
that first chapter in James's great book, looking
particularly at verses two to four.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you
face trials of many kinds, because you know
that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.
Perseverance must finish its work, so that you
may be mature and complete, not lacking in
anything.
What a remarkable word, written by James, the
brother of our Lord, this epistle has not
always been appreciated as as it perhaps should.
It has not been highly appraised even by
some of our great evangelical fathers, such as
Martin Luther, who called it an epistle of
straw for one reason or another.
We won't go after Martin Luther tonight, but
that is what he said.
He can't be right in everything either, though
to be fair we must interject that he
was comparing this letter with the epistle to
the Romans, but even so it is not
for him thus to castigate a section of
the written and inspired word of God, great
man that he was.
Rightly understood, this massive Christological statement that we
have right at the beginning places this book
on a very high level to begin with.
It is not given to many people to
put continents of truth in a sentence.
Most of us take a long time to
say a little.
I'm very conscious that that is my own
fault.
But listen to what James says in just
the compass of a couple of words.
He's introducing himself and he says, James, a
servant of God, or if you prefer, a
slave of God, and.
And?
Of God and?
God and who?
Who else has equal claims upon any man
equal with God?
Well listen, James, a slave of God and
of the Lord, meaning Jehovah, Jesus Christ.
I'm not going to pause with that, but
that is the most gigantic statement, crystallized into
few words, and the whole of this epistle,
I believe, is to be seen under the
canopy of this great Christological statement made by
his brother according to the flesh, who at
one time was no believer, was a skeptic,
was a doubter, but in the process of
time had been brought into that place where
he had to acknowledge, jealous though he may
have been a little earlier on in his
life, that here indeed there had come into
his own family by the interposition of the
Holy Spirit, the very incarnate Lord.
Now, having thus introduced this epistle, how is
James going to begin?
Well, this is what we are going to
meditate upon tonight.
The passage begins with an exhortation.
The second verse, consider it pure joy, my
brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds.
Now, if he said, if he had said,
now you people, there are some trials in
life and you need to sort them out.
They rarely have a potential for bringing blessing
and bringing joy with them.
Well, we wouldn't have been so surprised.
All of us know that there have been
some difficult circumstances in our lives, in the
midst of which, at the very heart of
the storm, we have discovered something, and we
have learned something, and we shall be eternally
the better for what we've discovered and what
we've learned.
That's not what James said.
Consider it pure joy, says James, sheer joy,
whenever you face trials of many kinds.
When you see a host of trials coming
your way, and you can't distinguish the one
from the other, even if you wanted to,
and they're coming like a massive torrent, and
you don't know what to do, consider it
all joy, he says.
Now, look first at the naturally unwelcome experience
which is here contemplated.
It's expressed in those words, trials of many
kinds, trials of many kinds, or according to
the old King James Version, divers or diverse,
I think it's diverse temptations.
Trials are universally unwelcome.
No normal being will say that he is
fond of being tried or being tested.
You wouldn't say that, would you?
Apart from the grace of God anyway.
And yet James bids Christians positively to consider
it joy, pure joy, sheer joy, when they
encounter various kinds of trials.
He's not saying, of course, that trials are
in and of themselves joyous, intrinsically joyous, that's
not what he's saying.
But he's telling us to consider it joy
that they're coming our way, for some reason
or other.
What does he mean by trials?
Actually, the word used in the King James,
the word temptation is a little bit misleading
in this context, because it suggests seduction to
do wrong.
Usually, when we speak of temptation, we mean
we mean seduction, to do something that is
untoward, that is contrary to the will of
God and to the Word of God.
That's not what James had in mind.
Not when you're tempted to do sin, that's
not what he has in mind.
The word that James used does not mean
that, but rather a trial or a testing,
as when a bird is testing his wings
to see if it can fly.
Its goal is not sin or suffering, but
strength.
Its aim is to prove the genuineness of
something so that it can thereafter be labeled,
attested.
And that's the point.
We are tested in order thereafter to be
known as attested, trustworthy, because we've passed the
test.
I wonder, my friends, how many of us
in the sight of God tonight are labeled
attested?
How many of us have been tried and
found wanting?
How many of us have been tried and
found worthy?
How many of us are attested after the
test?
We are tested, this is the idea here,
we are tested by various trials with a
view to our thereafter being attested, known as
men and women that can be trusted with
whatever God requires of us, difficult, dangerous, though
it may be.
Now the importance of faith, that which is
to be tried, is such that we do
well to welcome such trial or trials.
If our faith is genuine, then we can
only benefit by the assurance that trials will
impart.
If your faith is a genuine faith, reposed
in the true God, then when you and
I come out of our trials, our faith
is confirmed, and it is thereby strengthened.
And so the difficulties of the morrow after,
and every other tomorrow after that, will be
correspondingly smaller and dwarfed.
If our faith has been attested, we shall
know that we can count upon God in
any difficulty thereafter.
But if my faith is not genuine, if
my faith is proved to be wanting in
the trial, that too is a blessing, albeit
in disguise.
If our faith is proved to be wanting,
proved to be other than genuine, then my
dear friends, the sooner the better we know
it.
The sooner the better we know it in
order that we may attend to it.
And so however you look at it from
the vantage point of God and of eternity
and of eternal things, what James is saying
has a very valid basis to it.
The naturally unwelcome experience nevertheless.
But then look at the naturally unexpected command
which we encounter here, when he says, consider
it pure joy, sheer joy.
By his clever use of words, you know,
the apostle implies that we should greet every
trial with the same greeting as he has
used to greet the saints.
Now in verse one he says, James the
servant of God or a slave of God
and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the
twelve tribes scattered among the nations, greetings.
Now you get that, don't you?
Here is a man who is delighted to
be addressing the saints and he says greetings.
He's happy about it.
He wouldn't be writing if he were not
happy.
He's glad.
He thinks about them scattered.
He thinks about their problems.
He has sympathy with them.
He has a fellow feeling with them and
for them.
Now he uses exactly the same root, not
the same form of the word, but the
same root, meaning the same thing, to tell
us that that's the way we should greet
the multitude of our trials.
Moreover such joyous acceptance of trials need to
be wholehearted and not half-hearted.
It must be with all joy or pure
joy.
One has only to say all this in
order to appreciate the totally unnatural expectations of
the New Testament.
The New Testament expects Christian people to behave
differently from the natural and it does that
of course because we have been given a
supernatural birth, a spiritual birth, a new birth
of God.
He has become our Father.
He has given us the Holy Spirit.
He has implanted his word in us, but
because of that he's expecting things of us
he doesn't expect of his creatures generally.
God has not promised to save his people
from trials, from tribulations, but he has covenanted
to be with his people when they pass
through the fire and through the floods and
ultimately Psalm 34 19 even to deliver us
out of our afflictions into the glory that
he has prepared for us.
But in the meantime he has promised to
be with us and to make it possible
for us to welcome the unwelcomed.
Now the next thing I want you to
notice is the accompanying explanation.
And we need an explanation, don't we?
Why should we welcome diverse trials or trials
of many kinds?
Why should we welcome them with pure joy?
Well says James for this reason, because you
know.
Now you see he's talking to believers here
who are taught in the word of God,
who have the word of God, who have
received it, who believe it.
He's taking it for granted.
Because you know that the testing of your
faith develops perseverance.
Now there is so much wrapped up in
that.
Let's come to grips with it just a
little.
James's exhortation is not unreasonable.
It is based upon something which every true
Christian should know, namely that faith becomes productive
in and through such trials as God permits
for us in this earthly sphere of life.
Not until faith has been tested can it
be attested and can it bring forth the
kind of fruit that it is capable of.
It has to be tested.
Until it is attested, it is not capable
of making us persevere or maintain our Christian
calling with the steadfastness and perseverance which God
requires of us and which honors God in
this world.
We only have the boldness to persevere when
we know the genuineness of our own faith
and when we know that the God in
whom our faith is reposed is a God
who cannot fail us.
And we go forwards in life believing that.
Now mark the implication of that statement as
far as Christian evangelism and follow-up is
concerned.
James takes it for granted that every Christian
is alerted to the fact that saving faith
in Jesus Christ only produces its perfect fruit
facing trials.
Let me repeat that.
James takes it for granted that every Christian
is alerted to the fact that saving faith
in Jesus Christ only produces its perfect fruit
when faced with trials.
Trials are necessary to bring out of faith
what is inherent, what is possible within it,
what God has capacitated it by his grace
to do.
And we need the trials to bring out
what is latent, to express what is involved
in the Christian faith.
Faith in God.
Knowing this, every true Christian should learn to
welcome trials with what James calls this pure
joy.
For someone to rejoice thus in face of
trials was not as monstrous as it might
at first appear.
It is based on knowledge.
Knowledge that should belong to every Christian and
which the verse happily explains in terms of
a three-pointed elaboration.
First of all, Christians should know that the
trials of many kinds, verse two, look at
it, trials of many kinds, they are actually
the testing of your faith, verse three.
Now let me put that in a sentence.
What should Christians know?
What does James take for granted here that
we know?
He takes for granted that we know that
our trials are a testing.
By our trials God is testing us in
this particular sense.
That we have already considered but to which
we may again refer.
The significance of that statement really will become
evident by reference to the precise word employed
for testing in verse three.
It is dochinion.
And the word, it's the word for sterling
coinage.
We sometimes speak of sterling coinage.
Money which is genuine, money which is unalloyed,
money which is real money, it's been tested.
And in the passage it attributes to trials
that God permits or plans a purging, purifying
quality.
That is what they are meant to do.
They are meant to purge us, they are
meant to prune us, they are meant to
cleanse us from things in our lives which
only hinder our perseverance and hinder the full
expression of faith in God.
Now it's remarkable how similar a passage to
this we find in the first epistle of
Peter.
Let me read to you verses six and
seven in chapter one.
And you have the two sets of words
exactly the same as we have in James.
In this salvation, says Peter, you greatly rejoice,
though now for a little while you may
be, sorry, though now for a little while
you may have had to suffer grief in
all kinds of trials, all kinds of trials,
exactly the same as James.
These have come so that your faith of
greater worth than gold which perishes, even though
refined by fire, may be proved genuine.
Now that word genuine is the same word
as we have in James.
Tested, proved genuine, attested, affirmed, authenticated, set
apart as unalloyed and genuine silver or gold.
Trials then are a testing and a purging
of our faith.
We need to know that as we daily
face the problems of life, if we are
to have this joy and welcome our trials
as God expects us and has grace for
us to do.
We need to know that for one thing.
Secondly, the trials which are a testing of
our faith do not only purge and purify
faith itself, but they produce something beyond faith.
Now our trials would be well worth bearing
if they only purified our faith, purged our
faith.
But, says James, they do something more than
that.
Look at verse 3.
You know, he says, that the testing of
your faith, and the word in the version
that I'm using, the NIV tonight, is develops,
and it's a very suggestive one.
The testing of your faith develops something.
Well, what does it develop?
It develops perseverance.
The one of the versions says, produces steadfastness.
Well, all right.
The word produce is like producing fruit or
working something out.
You've started with the ingredients and you're going
to cook a cake, and you're bringing it
into existence.
You're going through the process.
You're producing something.
I want to focus attention upon the action
of the verb develops, or produces, or, King
James, worketh for us certain things.
Two typical illustrations of its usage may help
to bring out its meaning.
Let me refer you to 2 Corinthians chapter
4 and verse 17.
Again in the NIV.
Paul there says this.
He says, our light and momentary troubles are
achieving for us an eternal glory that far
outweighs them all.
Now you've heard that many, many times before.
Maybe not in this version, but here it
is, and I think it brings out the
truth very well.
Our light and momentary troubles, these trials that
we're having, what do they do?
Well, says Paul in 2 Corinthians 4 17,
they are achieving for us something well beyond
themselves.
What are they achieving?
An eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
Now it's exactly the same word.
They are achieving.
They are producing.
The point made is, of course, that our
light momentary affliction is in the hand of
Almighty God, producing something and achieving something outside
and beyond the pain and the anguish of
the moment.
We tend to think there's nothing to our
trials other than the pain, other than the
anguish, other than the difficulty, and we see
ourselves hedged in as in a prison.
No, no, says Paul.
No, no, says James.
There's something going on.
God is producing something.
You're in his hands.
You may be in the fire.
You may be in the fire and in
the flame, but you're in his hands, in
the fire, in the flame.
It is not a meaningless experience through which
we pass.
It is productive of something that is infinitely
precious.
You have the same word again in 2
Corinthians 7 and verse 10.
Godly sorrow brings, that's the word translated here,
brings repentance.
That leads to salvation and leaves no regret.
But worldly sorrow brings death.
Now the idea is of bringing forth or
again of producing.
It's the same word, you see.
The same word, and it's talking of the
same kind of thing, producing something.
Repentance may be the gift of the ascended
Lord according to Acts 5.31 or of
God the Father according to Acts 11.18,
but this is how it is actually developed
in terms of our experience, says the apostle.
It is produced by godly sorrow.
So do the problems of life, says Peter
and Paul in unison.
So do the problems of life which God
uses for the trial, for the testing and
thus the attesting of the saints.
These testings of ours, these trials of ours,
need not be in vain.
They may be fruitful and profitable if, in
the words of Hebrews 12.11, we are
trained by them or, according to the King
James, exercised thereby.
If we go through the exercise they call
upon us to go through, then we can
be the better on account of them.
They produce something beyond and outside of themselves,
even the glory of which the apostle Paul
speaks.
Then thirdly, that which such trials as God
uses to test our faith ultimately produces, is
here described as perseverance or steadfastness.
Paul speaks of glory, the glory at the
end, the glory that will be ours when
our Lord Jesus returns.
James speaks of the perseverance that brings us
to that point of glory, the capacity to
carry on, the determination to move with God,
the setting of the heart on the doing
of the will of God as our Lord
Jesus himself had done when he said, my
meat is to do the will of him
that sent me and to finish his work.
This is something vitally important to understand.
Saving faith sets us out, it gets us
going.
That same faith, when it has been tested
and purged, produces steadfastness, it produces perseverance.
Faith, albeit as minuscule as a grain of
mustard seed, is saving if it is reposed
in God as he is revealed in Jesus
Christ.
You don't need a great faith to be
saved, but you need a great God to
trust.
And the one true great God has come
to us in the Lord Jesus Christ, and
however weak your faith, if you come to
him and you rest on him and trust
in him, he'll save you with a very
little faith.
As a grain of mustard seed, you rest
in him, but you look to him, and
that's the point.
You trust in him, that's the point, and
out of his grace he saves you.
Saving faith becomes daily and hourly relevant and
fruitful, however, only insofar as its genuineness has
been proved and its faults corrected.
Insofar as the trials of life result in
an attested faith, an accredited faith, then our
life can begin to assume the character of
fortitude.
Men whose faith has been thus strengthened are
men that can look into the face of
demons and devils and trust God.
They can look into the face of life
and of death and carry on with God's
business.
See, like the growing child, when once a
man discovers, or let me let me refer
to the child first, when once a child
discovers that its legs can hold it up
and carry it along, the kid's not going
to crawl anymore.
The kid starts crawling, of course, and he's
going on crawling, but one day he's going
to make the big discovery that these two
prongs going down here, call them legs, whatever
you like, he can stand on them, he
can jump on them, he can walk on
them, he can run on them.
You think he's going to crawl anymore?
Not when he can stand and leap on
his two legs.
Men and women, when you have found your
spiritual legs, you and I'll begin to run
How do we find our spiritual legs?
In the trials of faith, when we put
faith to the test and let God purge
it and purify it, and when we come
out from the struggle, we look back upon
it and we see, my, that was not
me, that was God.
He gave me strength for the hour.
I can look into the face of the
next problem before it arrives, and if it
comes in his goodwill, my God is able.
Thus, the exhortation to face all kinds of
trials with joy or with pure joy is
not as irrational or meaningless as it may
have appeared at first.
A false faith will only flourish, as the
gospel says, until tribulation and persecution arises because
of the Word.
Now, did you notice that?
That's Mark 4, 16.
A false faith, it's not a genuine faith,
it seems to grow like the seed sown,
it'll grow until, until tribulations and persecution arises,
but it'll kill it, that'll kill it, because
it's not genuine.
But the real faith, true faith, becomes stronger
in the face of persecution and is purified
in the fire and in the flame to
face further trials, and thus to glorify God
as it moves from strength to strength, by
grace upon grace, and moves from faith to
faith.
That's the progress of the spiritual man in
Scripture.
An exhortation, an explanation, one other word.
The kind of expectation which those who obey
this exhortation should always entertain.
Verse 4, perseverance must finish its work, so
that you may be mature and complete, not
lacking anything, not lacking anything.
Now, really, in principle, what James is telling
us there is this, this is the way
God is going to finish the work in
you, in all of us.
This is the school.
We shall become complete, we shall become whole,
we shall enter into the wholeness of our
salvation, into the fullness of our salvation.
Along this route, we too shall be perfected
through sufferings.
Just two things I want to say about
it.
First of all, the condition that is held
out here is an attractive prospect.
Look at the trials of our faith with
all joy.
Why should we?
First of all, because such trials accepted in
that spirit hold out the prospect of maturity
and completeness, lacking in nothing.
Let me just spell those three things out
very briefly.
Maturity, that you may be mature.
Sometimes the word is translated perfect.
Well, in a sense, that is helpful.
In a sense, it isn't.
It's helpful in this sense.
The moment you see that perfection is used
in different senses in Scripture, it's helpful.
For example, there is a perfection of God,
which is absolute perfection.
Well, we'll know nothing of that until we
come to the end of our day, and
we shall be conformed into his image.
But there is a perfection that is relative.
For example, the perfection of a child a
few days born may be said to be
perfect.
But of course, the child two days old
is only perfect as a child.
He's not perfect as a youth, see?
And he's certainly not perfect as a middle
-aged man or woman.
His perfection is the perfection of a child.
But when that child grows out to be
a boy of twelve, he may conceivably be
physically perfect at that age too.
That's a different kind of perfection from the
perfection of a two-year-old.
His muscles are beginning to develop and so
forth.
I don't need to bore you with this.
But then as he becomes a young man
of twenty-one or whatever, or a young
woman, if he or she is perfect at
that stage, that's something different again, you see.
Now, what James is saying here is this,
that if we walk this way, we can
be, in one sense, perfect at every stage.
We can be what God expects of us
to be.
As a two-day-old child, somebody said
to me this morning, I said, are you
trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ as your
Savior?
She said, yes.
Well, I said, how did it happen?
She said, words to this effect, I'm not
good at literally reproducing.
I'm four days old or something, she said.
Well, all right, that's lovely, isn't it?
A four-day-old child can be perfect
at that level.
But the point here is this.
God can enable us to be what he
requires of us to be, not only as
a four-day-old, but as a four
-year-old and a 40-year-old, and
if you're going to live 400 years, at
that stage too.
And this is the way towards maturity at
every stage.
It is by facing the trials that God
sends us in this way.
And then he adds to that word maturity.
He wants to cover every possible exigency here,
any question that may come, complete, holo-kleros.
This word especially describes in the Old Testament
the unblemished animal that was brought for the
sacrifice.
You remember how when someone brought a sacrifice
in the Old Testament, there were specialists among
the priests to discover blemishes, because animals were
not allowed to be brought blemished.
You must not present a blemished animal as
a sacrifice to the Lord your God.
And they had special eyes, and they knew
exactly where to look, and they knew the
symptoms, and they knew all about these animals,
the sheep and the goats and the cattle,
whatever they were.
Oh, how they found out the flaws.
But this word means without a flaw.
You know, does God really mean this?
My friend, God means much more for you
and for me than we've ever dreamt.
Lacking nothing.
This completeness is not merely apparent but actual,
not artificial but real.
The simple fact is that God-sent trials
rob us of nothing that is valuable, but
they can supply the most precious things for
time and eternity.
That's what he's saying.
Oh, gracious prospect, so much for that.
And then the last thought, the action that
guarantees all this.
Perseverance must finish its work, so that you
may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
This kind of perfection and completeness is not
the work of a day, it's the work
of a lifetime.
And God knows how long you and I
need for this task.
It is the fruit of prolonged perseverance, of
a settled way of life and living, of
steadfastness.
The condition of achieving the perfection held before
us here is that we let such continued
perseverance work itself through, give it time.
And as we give God his time with
us, and respond in terms of an ever
-developing faith in him, and learn to persevere,
then we shall discover that God is working
in us, that which Paul speaks of as
glory, but which James speaks of as the
capacity to move all the way into glory.
Don't therefore doubt God's goodness or wisdom when
he puts you in the fire of testing.
My good people, I'm saying this to you,
and I know myself, though I've not been
greatly harassed or tested or tried, but I
do know how difficult it is.
But this is the word of God that
we must live by.
This is the word of God by which
we must live by, for this is the
word of life.
We must trust him, and we must learn
increasingly.
We must encourage one another to welcome these
many, these multitudinous trials that come our way,
seeing beyond the superficial that which God says
is possible through them.
And we must treat God as one who
is truthful and whose veracity is unquestioned, and
move forward.
And it's a wonderful discovery.
Have you made it?
Are you making it?
Deep in unfathomable minds of never-failing skill,
he treasures up his bright designs and works
his sovereign will.
He fearful saints, says William Cowper, fresh courage
take.
The clouds you so much dread are big
with mercy, but we can only see clouds.
That's true of us, you know.
Our eyes are not wide open yet.
How big with mercy, says the man of
faith, and shall break in blessings on your
head.
His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour.
The bud may have a bitter taste, but
sweet will be the flower.
Oh men and women of faith, I know
you have tried.
We're all tried.
So was our blessed Lord.
But who, for the joy that was set
before him, endured the cross, despising the shame,
and is set down at the right hand
of the Father upon the high.
That's the principle he lived and died by.
And he tells you and tells me, practice
the same.
I want you to see the joy beyond
the sorrow.
I want you to see the Easter morning
beyond the Good Friday.
I want you to see the eternal glory
beyond the temporal, ephemeral, passing sorrows of the
hour.
Oh I of faith, learn to look at
the unseen.
A man of the world can't do that.
And Solzhenitsyn found in prison that this is
the way to beat the most militant atheist
into his corner.
Be sure of the eternities.
Be sure of the unseen.
Be firm in your assurance of God and
of his grace and of eternity and of
heaven.
And if you're ready to die with God,
the sting is taken out of life and
of death.
It is the way to live.
It is the way to die.
Let's pray for one another.
I don't know what hearts may be aching
in our service tonight.
I don't know.
But I'm sure this is a day when
we should be thinking more of one another
in these terms than ever before, even from
my knowledge of what's going on.
And my knowledge is very fallible and perhaps
inadequate.
And I suggest to you that we should
pray more for those living in our districts,
in our areas.
Look over the list of members, starting with
the same letter of the alphabet as your
own.
Pray for them every week.
Then move into another area.
Let's pray for one another.
Let's encourage one another.
Let's be at the throne of grace and
bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the
laws of Christ and pray that as we
all face our triumphs, faith may be purged
and perseverance be manifest, and one day glory
will crown our pilgrim perseverance.
Let us pray.
O Lord, our God, in these moments ere
we move from the word you have spoken
to the table you have spread, please confirm
within us the impressions you desire us to
have.
Write deeply into our spirits the message you
would have us believe and act upon, and
may it be further inscribed upon our souls
as we handle the broken bread of Christ
and drink of the cup of blessing, remembering
the broken body and shared blood of our
Lord.
We ask it in his holy name.
Amen.