The suffering and the eventual passing of Terry
Fox has raised in many minds some of
the most basic questions concerning life and death.
Members of the congregation might be amazed at
the number of questions that are being raised
by non-Christian people as well as by
those within the church concerning these very important
issues.
Now, it would be impossible to answer all
the questions that have been raised in one
sermon or even in two.
But I thought it wise this morning, and
we shall follow this on this evening, if
we were to concentrate at least upon one
passage that has much to teach us concerning
death and our eventual resurrection to life in
and through our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is good to see what the New
Testament has to say about these issues.
I trust it will be of comfort and
lead to a renewed hope in every Christian
heart and that should there be among us
those who do not as yet know the
hope which is so evident in this passage
and which is the privilege of every truly
Christian person, I trust that this will be
a day when you will lay hold upon
the hope that is set before you and
that together we may rejoice and be able
to sing from a true heart forever with
the Lord.
Amen.
So let it be.
Life from the dead is in that word.
It is immortality.
May the Lord therefore help us as we
come to meditate this morning upon the first
five verses in 2 Corinthians 5 and we
shall be picking up the thread this evening
perhaps with verse 5 going on to the
end of that section at verse 10.
I'm not going to read all that passage
again, but we shall be reading the verses
as we comment upon them in the body
of our exposition.
It is a very daring thing to mock
death and the grave and to challenge their
capacity to harm us or to triumph over
us.
But you will remember that is precisely what
the Apostle Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15.
Without any sense of shame or weakness or
frailty, he challenges death and the grave.
And what may not be normally appreciated, he
doesn't do so in his own words.
He lays hold of words that come, one
from the prophet Isaiah who had said similar
things before and then from the prophet Hosea.
And he intertwines these words together and he
says, Death has been swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your sting?
O grave, he says, where is your victory?
I'm challenging you.
Then he goes on to explain, the sting
of death is sin.
And the power of sin, that which makes
sin so mighty and so powerful is the
law of God that we heard about on
Wednesday evening last.
The power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God who gives us
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul challenges death and the grave.
And he does so, as we shall see
in a moment, out of an experience of
the glorious certainty that God has given him
to proclaim not only to a few, but
to all who would receive the message.
Now, that is in 1 Corinthians 15.
Here in 2 Corinthians 5, the apostle, generally
speaking, takes up the same theme.
But you will notice that there is a
difference.
In 1 Corinthians 15, he was basically, though
he goes wider than this, but basically, he
was answering the question, how are the dead
raised?
That's how our reading began this morning.
Some will ask, how are the dead raised
and with what bodies do they come?
Paul proceeds to answer that question in 1
Corinthians 15.
Here, however, Paul goes beyond that.
And he comes to deal with the nature
of the resurrection body itself.
In 2 Corinthians 5, he's not saying that
we shall rise from the dead.
He's taking that for granted.
That has been said.
Christ is risen.
We shall rise in Christ.
That's been said in 1 Corinthians 15.
And the reason for our hope has been
there exposed.
If we are in Christ, if we have
received the gospel, if we have died with
Christ, we shall rise again with him.
And the resurrection of the spirit, so that
we are born again, is a foregleam and
a proof of the fact that one day,
the Christians shall physically rise from the grave
and share in the glorious victory of our
Lord and his redemption, which involves, among other
things, the redemption of the body, the reclamation
of the body from all the miseries that
sin has brought upon it, from the fall
of Adam to our own falls and iniquities.
Now, death and the future that lies beyond
its boundaries are too important a subject, therefore,
for us to neglect.
This morning, the main thing I shall want
to be dwelling upon is the aspect of
the Christians' assurance that is particularly enunciated in
these first four or five verses.
Look at the first verse again.
Now we know.
It's not that we guess.
It's not that we hope in the sense
that we normally use the word.
That is, hope for the best.
Even when the New Testament uses the word
hope, it means we are assured of something.
It's never in the sense in which it
is commonly used.
Christian hope is a real hope.
It's a certainty.
It's an assurance.
But here Paul doesn't use the word hope.
We know.
What do we know?
We know, he says, that if our earthly
tent, the earthly tent we live in, is
destroyed, we have a building from God, an
eternal house in heaven, not built by human
hands.
I'm quoting from the New International Version.
Now let's look at some factors included in
this marvelous assurance that God has given to
his people.
Paul is here speaking of another body.
Another body.
The apostle affirms that in the possible event
of death, preceding the Lord's return, and thus
causing the dissolution of the bodies that we
now inhabit, then we may rest assured that
we shall not face, what he calls in
this context, a condition of nakedness.
Now you may have often wondered what that
means.
A condition of nakedness.
What the apostle has in mind is this.
If death overtakes us before the coming of
Christ, then the body will be dissolved, will
either be buried at sea, or in the
earth, or in some other way, disposed of
in some other way.
And the spirit will go, and until the
morning of the resurrection, our spirits will go
to an intermediate state, to be with Christ
it is certain.
And yet not into the final enjoyment of
its full salvation, because it is only when
Christ returns that the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed and have
a body like unto his.
So there is an intermediate state, and Paul
speaks of it as a state of nakedness.
We're neither in the old body nor in
the new.
Or to quote what he says here, we
are without a home, we are without a
house.
That is the spirits that we have, our
human spirits, our redeemed spirits, is in this
intermediate state of nakedness, as he calls it.
Now he says, death, when it precedes the
Lord's return, as it does, has for a
multitude of Christians, and may yet do, though
we mustn't take that for granted.
We must remember that, even if it does,
ultimately we have a building of God.
We may be naked for a moment, but
we have a building from God, and that
is a house that has not been touched
by human hands.
Human hands have had nothing to do in
its making.
It is an eternal house, and he's talking
about the body.
It is an eternal house already there awaiting
us, as it were, in heaven.
Heaven is not the house, heaven is the
place where it is kept for God's people.
Now since it will be inevitably asked how
the apostle could be so sure of things
which are not capable of being proven by
human intelligence, it is important to note Paul's
precise language here.
The verb translated, we know, is the key.
Dr. Philip Edgecombe Hughes, in his magnificent commentary
on 2 Corinthians, says this about that verb,
oidomen, in the Greek.
Oidomen, he says, is used here in its
proper sense of to know.
To know as a result of perceiving or
seeing a truth by intuition or revelation.
In contrast to the acquiring of knowledge by
instruction or research, which has an entirely different
verb to know, genoskein.
Now what are we saying?
Paul's assurance and certainty concerning future matters, concerning
the fact that there is a future body
and we shall receive it in due course,
it doesn't come because Paul has researched into
this area.
Now he may have thought a lot about
it, doubtless he had, or he couldn't write
as he does.
But this knowledge did not come by Paul's
ingenuity, by his being able to think clearer
than somebody else.
It isn't the fruit of human research.
How did he get it then?
How does he know it?
Well Paul is able to say, we know
because the knowledge of which he speaks is
the knowledge that comes by revelation from God.
So that you see, if you don't believe
that God is and is capable of communicating,
capable of revealing himself and truth to man,
well now you're in a fog land and
you will find it difficult to accept this.
Paul knew that God lived.
Paul knew that God was real.
Paul knew that God could communicate.
And as one who was involved in the
process of receiving from God his word to
declare to men and women, there was no
doubt in his mind at all.
So he is able to say, we know.
Now there are many things that we Christians
do not know.
I find it is necessary for those of
us who are blessed with certainty concerning eternal
issues to remind ourselves of this from time
to time to keep us humble.
God has privileged us immensely in granting us
an assurance of sins forgiven, an assurance of
peace with himself, an assurance of resurrection from
the dead, an assurance that we have a
new body awaiting us and that it is
like the glorious body of our Lord.
These are glorious certainties given to every man
and woman who really believes in Christ.
But, let us remind ourselves there are a
multitude of things that we simply do not
know for God has not revealed them.
Even the incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus said,
concerning one matter, he said, only the Father
knows.
In my state of humiliation, I have chosen
not to desire to know the day and
the hour when I shall return in glory
to judge the world.
Not anyone, there is no one who knows,
the Father only.
He is the only one who knows.
There are many things we do not know.
But here is something that God has revealed
to his Apostle.
Through his Apostle he has revealed it to
us and therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ,
it is something we may know.
And I want to invite you this morning
to put the arms of faith around what
is said here for your comfort and encouragement
and in order to capacitate you to speak
to every other man and woman in Christ
and to urge others to come in and
enjoy the same certainty as God has made
available for us.
But now, notice, let's move from that.
Whereas Paul here stresses the newness and the
distinction or the difference between the new body
that awakes the redeemed and that which is
our present habitat, this must not be taken
out of context.
Paul wrote two letters to the Corinthians as
we have already implied.
He did more than two actually.
He speaks of one, of a third one,
another one that must have got to them
but it has not been preserved for us.
But in the first, he stressed that there
is a certain continuity between the body that
now is, the one in which you are
living this morning, the tent in which you
are living, there is a continuity between the
body that we now have and the body
that we shall ultimately have.
Now, in 1 Corinthians, that is basically the
stress.
Now, he stresses the other side too but
fundamentally it is that.
And he does it in this way.
When you sow, he says, you do not
plant the body that will be but just
a seed, perhaps of wheat or something else.
But God gives it a body as he
has determined.
And to each kind of seed, he gives
its own body.
So will it be with the resurrection of
the dead.
The body that is sown is perishable, it
is raised, it is raised imperishable.
Now, the words I want you to notice
is this.
It is raised.
And it runs through the whole passage.
But this will suffice for us to get
the point.
The body that we sow into the ground,
the body that falls into the ground or
into the fire, that body, it is raised.
Death is not the annihilation of the body.
Death does not leave the body forever dismembered
or decomposed.
That is Paul's statement.
It is raised.
There is a resurrection of the body that
is buried.
Now, the stress there is upon the continuity
of the old in the new.
He puts it elsewhere in this language.
The seed is sown and it continues and
expresses itself in the fruit.
You sow a seed, it becomes a grain
of corn.
You sow a seed, it becomes a flower
or whatever.
But there is continuity there between the seed
that is sown and the flower that emerges
from it.
The old is in the new.
Paul has exactly the same thought in Philippians
3, verses 20 and 21.
There he says this.
Our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly
await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus
Christ, who, by the power that enables Him
to bring everything under His control, will transform
our lowly bodies so that they will be
like His glorious body.
Now, do you see the point?
He will transform our lowly bodies.
He takes the material, whatever there remains.
He takes the material of the decomposed physical
body and He transforms it.
He uses it to transform it and make
it anew after the pattern of His own
glorious body.
But there is continuity.
Now, there may be very little left of
your body as it is today.
You may be buried at sea.
You may have been cremated.
You may have been buried in the ground.
But what there is, the Almighty Creator will
take of it and He will use it
and employ it and out of it.
He will refashion a body like unto the
glorious body of our Lord.
The concept there, let me stress, is of
the ultimate transformation of our present body so
that it resembles the glorious and glorified body
of Jesus.
And that again implies continuity of the old
in the new.
The new is not entirely new.
And yet it is very new.
That's what Paul is stressing in 2 Corinthians
5.
It is new.
Have you noticed how he does that?
He's got a beautiful image here.
And in the context, to the first readers
of the New Testament, I'm quite sure it
would have had a very real significance.
We are unfortunately superficial in our reading of
the Bible all too often.
Taking up the new body will be, says
Paul, like moving from a tent into a
temple.
Now that's the language he uses.
From a temporary canvas dwelling into a permanent
body fitted for another sphere that human hands
have had nothing to do in the making
of it.
And it is eternal.
You can say about the new body, it's
not just for a moment.
Here in the body pent absent from him
I roam.
But one day we shall pitch the tent
for the last night.
We shall go to sleep for the last
night or wake up for the last day.
And the tent will decompose.
It will run away.
And somebody will put it in the ground.
And some minister will say ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, and so forth.
But concerning the body that is to be,
it is a temple.
It is a, in comparison, more permanent building
fitted for a permanent habitation which is heaven.
And that spells discontinuity between the old and
the new.
It spells a veritable distinction.
There is a world of difference between the
new body and the old body.
But we must hold these two concepts in
balance.
Not forget the one and simply stress the
other.
There is continuity but there is discontinuity.
And the Apostle Paul is here stressing that
the new body will be something that eye
has not seen.
No ear has heard a full description of
it other than what God has revealed concerning
it.
Another body.
But now Paul has more to say about
its texture.
I've referred to it but I want to
just disentangle the thoughts a little.
He says that the new body is a
building from God, an eternal house in heaven,
not made with hand.
The Apostle has just referred to our present
bodies as tents.
Now the notion of a tent is quite
obvious.
It's simple, it's universal.
But especially was it so in New Testament
times and it would have a very real
significance for the first readers.
What's the difference between a tent and a
temple?
Well, a tent is a thin canvas that
you put up when you're hiking, when you're
on pilgrimage generally.
You don't normally live in a tent.
But you pitch a tent in the morning
and you dismantle or in the evening and
you dismantle it next day and you move
on.
When the tent has been under the weather
of heat and cold and rain, you will
soon find that it shows that it is
suffering from wear and tear.
The tent pegs begin to rot after a
few years and sooner or later the tent
will gradually wear out and the rain will
come through and it will totter and it
will fall and it will be just a
crumbled thing.
But the temple, the house in heaven of
which Paul speaks, doesn't share in that kind
of characteristic.
By sheer contradistinction it is entirely different.
It is eternal.
It continues.
It abides.
Time has nothing to do with it.
There are no ravages of time that cause
it to decompose and to wear away or
to wear out.
None whatsoever.
Now, it is more than probable that if
Paul were writing this letter to Jews, he
would have made explicit something that is evidently
implicit in his thought.
Because it is more than probable that the
image in Paul's mind is that of the
difference between the tent of meeting, the tabernacle,
in which God met with the Israelites under
the old dispensation, and the temple in Jerusalem
of later times.
He uses words here that specifically, I would
say, refer to the real distinction between these
two.
Now, you know the tent of meeting.
Well, they took it down one day and
they went so far and they pitched the
tent of meeting again.
And gradually it wore out.
And ultimately there came a time in God's
providence and in God's will when there was
no need for it and no place for
it.
And it was put on one side and
it was folded, put on one side forevermore.
But then there's the tabernacle.
Then there is the temple in Jerusalem, an
altogether different entity.
It is solid.
It is lasting.
Now, as history shows us, it has not
lasted either.
So even this is not a perfect illustration.
But the image is there and the contrast
is there.
But as far as God's house in heaven,
the body, the new body that God has
for his people, it is, unlike even the
temple in Jerusalem, it is eternal.
An eternal house in heaven.
The contrast is glaring.
Now, in order to stress the contrast between
the old and the new, Paul is not
even content to say what I have referred
to now.
He goes one step further.
And I think we ought just to make
mention of it in passing on.
He adds these words, that the body in
heaven is eternal, not made with hands.
Now, when you read those words, you may
be tempted to ask, well, is the present
body made with hands?
Surely the present body is God's creation.
I would answer, Paul is not denying that
at all.
Not at all.
He agrees with that.
Everything was created by our Lord.
Nothing that has been created was not created
by him.
Your body is his, he says, elsewhere.
He made it.
It's his.
But now, you see, it is possible that
some husband and wife might turn around and
say, well, I do have a share, we
do have a share, in the creation of
the bodies of our children.
By the process of procreation, it is we
who bring a child into the world.
Maybe God has given us the capacity, maybe
God has given us the gift for doing
that.
It is we who do it.
We are involved.
Lest somebody should say that, Paul says, as
far as the new body is concerned, you've
got absolutely nothing to do with it.
Not a thing.
If you do not believe, therefore, in a
God who is almighty and all-gracious, omnipotently
powerful to save and to keep his promises,
then you cannot accept this.
The acceptance of this presupposes that you not
only know that God is omnipotent and almighty
as well as all-gracious, but that you
accept it for yourself, and he is able.
By sheer contrast, no human hand will have
any role to play in the formation of
our new bodies.
Now, these are some features included in the
Christian's assurance.
They are among the things that are divinely
revealed and therefore unquestionably true.
Scripture says elsewhere, and I would relate to
it now, and I would hold to it
in my heart, the secret things belong to
the Lord our God.
There are certain things which are secret, and
we shouldn't try to delve into them.
They belong to God almighty.
But the things that are revealed belong to
us and to our children forever.
What God has revealed, what God has disclosed,
what God has said, you and I should
read, you and I should believe, you and
I should trust.
The secret things belong to him.
Don't enter into that territory where you don't
belong.
But trust and receive what God has revealed.
He wants you to have the assurance and
the joy of believing.
The other thing that I want to mention
this morning is this.
I just want to say one or two
things about that which is inspired by the
possession of such assurance.
What is it that is inspired?
Now let me read to you these words
from three versions, three translations.
I'll quote the King James Version first.
In this we groan, earnestly desiring to be
clothed upon with our house which is from
heaven.
That's the King James.
The RSV puts it like this.
Here indeed we groan and long to put
on our heavenly dwelling.
And the New International Version puts it in
this way.
Meanwhile we groan longing to be clothed with
our heavenly dwelling.
Longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.
Now what we're focusing upon is this.
That which is inspired by the possession of
the kind of assurance that Paul had concerning
the body that is to be.
Now there's a small technical point.
I have to mention it because it doesn't
really come through in any of those translations
though the most astute commentators will refer to
it.
It's a technical point.
There are two little words in the Greek
that underlie the first part of that verse.
There are two simple little words.
Entuto.
And these two words elsewhere in the New
Testament without exception have the force of the
phrase on this account.
Or if you like, for this reason.
On this account.
On account of what?
Well on account of what the Apostle has
already said.
We know that if our earthly house the
earthly tent we live in is destroyed we
have a building from God an eternal house
in heaven not built by human hands.
For this reason not meanwhile as the NIV
puts it but for the very reason that
we know these things because these things are
true God has revealed them and we know
them on the basis of what God has
revealed for this very reason because of the
revelation that has granted us the knowledge we
have what?
Well, we groan.
Longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling
because when we are clothed we will not
be found naked and so forth.
Now without delving further into this technical point
I want to stress that I think it
ought to be translated in that way here
too.
It should be that translation for the very
reason specified in verse 1 that is why
Paul says here We groan longing to be
clothed upon by our house which is from
heaven.
The late Dr. James Demme who has got
a very erudite commentary on 2 Corinthians puts
it in this way If Paul had no
hope he would not sigh for the future
but the very longing which pressed the sighs
from his bosom became itself witness to the
glory which awaited him.
Paul was sighing, Paul was longing Why?
Because of the thing for which he hoped.
You say, is that important?
What's the point of stressing this?
Well, I'll tell you.
The point is this There are those who
would say that we groan Paul means that
we groan in this present body because of
its weakness because of sicknesses because of weariness,
tiredness and the kind of things that can
afflict our bodies.
Now, Paul would not want to deny that
that in and of itself is true Neither
would I want to deny that that in
and of itself is true You're sick, you
have a fever and you're a little bit
weary and perhaps at that time of your
fever or your sickness you have a deeper,
greater yearning for the body that is to
come OK, alright, granted but that's not what
Paul is saying here What he's saying here
is this If we really know anything about
the body that is to come we groan
longing Notice, groan longing For what?
For the body of which we're certain We
groan longing to be made like our Lord
not only in our spirits He will come
back to that later on when he urges
us to perfect holiness in the fear of
the Lord but we yearn longing also to
have a body like unto His so that
in our purified spirits and in our new
bodies we shall dwell the new sphere and
serve Him acceptably in a sphere into which
sin does not enter where sickness and sorrow
and suffering and separation are all alike unknown
in the glory of His presence I don't
know whether I dare try to illustrate that
There is no ultimate illustration of this but
I was reminded as I was meditating and
trying to prepare for this morning I was
reminded of an incident I won't tell you
where It was a wedding The
young bride was going to live with her
husband in the apartment where he had lived
as a single man and she was very
pleased with it quite pleased but they were
not going there for long The bridegroom's husband
was a builder and the father had promised
that when he was able he would build
them a house and so of course they
were going to this apartment only in the
interval She was thrilled with it It was
such a nice compact apartment as she said
But then a number of things happened You
may guess there was a builder's strike somewhere
there That was the first thing and it
was a prolonged one A second thing that
happened was this that her husband was taken
ill and she had to nurse him in
the apartment and she found that really the
facilities that would have been all right for
them whilst everything was well were not quite
so good when she had to nurse him
But then there came this last link in
the chain The house was ready and she
was taken to see it Her husband was
still in bed at home in the apartment
but she went to see the house completed
and she was utterly thrilled with it Everything
was just it, just perfect and all the
gadgets you can possibly think of you can
possibly think of Now when she went back
to the little apartment to nurse her husband
you know she had become almost intolerant with
the crampness the confined characteristic of the little
place where she had been quite happy earlier
on And she became just eager, yearning, impatient
to possess the new house Brothers and sisters
in Christ that's the kind of thing we
have here Don't press the analogy too far
But when once you and I know You
see when you have real Christian assurance We
use the word assurance rather flippantly When we
have the real biblically based Christian assurance And
it relates even to this The house that
is to come When we know that When
we believe that When this assurance is deep
in our souls and masters us Then we
begin to yearn forever with the Lord Amen
So let it be Why does a man
yearn for the body that is to come?
For this reason Only because he knows of
its glory And however great it is in
this present body However much we think of
this present body Unfortunately we think far too
much about it in one sense I do
not want to suggest that either Paul or
any other Christian should think lightly of this
body It is the creation of God And
we should look after it for God And
we are answerable for what we do to
it as well as in it But after
all God only meant this as a tent
overnight On pilgrimage for a couple of years
Thereafter to be dismantled and left behind And
he will continue the grains from it in
his organizing of the new entity that awaits
us in the hell Now my friends I
conclude I come back to the point where
we started Do you know anything of the
revelation that God has given ministering comfort to
your hearts That you can begin to hope
for things that are not seen At the
end of chapter 4 Paul has said that
one of the characteristics of a Christian is
this We live for And we anticipate We
are not so concerned with the things that
we can see Because the things that are
seen are temporal But we are concerned and
we anticipate things unseen And they the unseen
things are eternal My question is this Have
you received the revelation that God has given
in his son And in his word through
his apostles To the point that having believed
them you have begun to hope Now this
is what it means to be a true
believer Let us forget the shallow nuances that
we hear of from time to time This
is what it means This is part of
what it means An important part To be
a genuine believer We do not simply take
the apostles doctrine And say yes it is
that, yes it is that As if we
were professors sitting in a chair And weighing
things objectively Putting the odd pieces together No,
no, no, no, no Belief is something that
has an impact upon the soul The truth
touches us It moves us It creates It
genders hope It is a very disturbing thing
to find Christians That know nothing of the
heart strings Pulling them toward the land unseen
And the Jerusalem that is above Unless, unless
we can say with the apostle Paul We
know this Then we are probably confined to
Interests that surround our bodies The physical bodies
we have now And this is true of
course If you and I were to examine
ourselves this morning I'm afraid we would have
to say that Eighty, ninety percent of our
time is taken up with Things that relate
to the physical body The tent that is
wearing out And whether you realize it or
not It's wearing out right now as you
sit in the pew And as I stand
in the pulpit here It's a tent of
clay Paul calls it an earthen vessel in
chapter four Here it's a tent of canvas
not clay That wears out It's in the
process of wearing out If we are really
believing the revelation that God has given That
in turn should gender the beginnings of hope
And we look forward to it And we
anticipate it As the apostle says elsewhere Having
a desire to depart To be with Christ
which is far better That does not mean
that he did not appreciate life No, the
apostle was willing to live And he was
willing to suffer anywhere and anytime If the
will of God required it But in the
depth of his heart There was always a
yearning for home I am a stranger here
he would say Within a foreign land My
home is far away upon a golden strand
And he always knew The homing instinct To
dwell in the house that God had prepared
Do you know anything of that?
Let us pray as we conclude then That
the Lord will grant us An ever deepening
confidence in the word he has given In
the work he has wrought And will yet
work on behalf of his people To bring
them into the full possession Of the purchased
possession Let us pray Heavenly Father We
would magnify your holy name for the gospel
We crave your mercy oh Lord That all
too often we have thought of your redemption
As relating only to our souls We thank
you that when Christ died He redeemed the
souls of men And that those who trust
in him Are redeemed Justified Freely from all
things Pardoned But we bless your holy name
That that same redemption purchased for us A
new habitat A house that human hands have
had nothing to do in the making of
it Eternal Glorious Like the resurrection body of
our Lord himself And we pray that you
will give to us The corresponding hope that
should be in our hearts Even as we
enjoy the privileges of this present life Or
otherwise As we bear with the problems And
the sufferings And the sorrows of this life
Grant that in and through all these things
There may be an undercurrent of yearning And
of hoping That corresponds to assurance In order
that out of a sense of peace and
prospect We may be witnesses to yourself In
a world that is lost And undone And
these things we ask in Jesus name Amen