What We Do and What We Are

Good afternoon, everyone! Hope you're enjoying the nice, at least semi-sunny, Sabbath day. It was actually a beautiful morning with the snow out and the sun coming out. It's good to be with everyone here. Hello to everyone on Zoom. George, Bob, Jean, I can't believe you're wearing that for services. Sorry, couldn't help it. He'll get me back, I'm sure.

So it was interesting hearing the baptism announcements and the dates that different people were baptized. I will have to admit to you that I can't remember the date I was baptized. Now that might sound a little bit weird at first. It's not that it wasn't a meaningful time for me. But in fact, I was baptized on the day of Passover, a few hours before the Passover service. I walked into the Passover service with my hair still a little bit wet.

The story behind it is the minister who baptized me had himself been baptized on Passover and found that to be a very special thing. And because it was on Passover, I can't for the life of me remember what date it was. Because I simply remember the day. In fact, the few times it's come up, I've had to actually use the calendar program and jog back to 1985 and figure out what day Passover was back in 1985 to figure out the date. But in reflecting back and thinking a little bit more, as I think we all do at this time of year as we're approaching the Passover to the time that we were baptized, it does and it should bring back a lot of different thoughts and reflections.

And we've essentially got two different categories of people in the congregation today, I would say. One category that essentially grew up in the church. So it's been doing the same things their whole lives, whether baptized already or not. And others who came into an understanding of God's way at some point in time in their adulthood and made that commitment of baptism.

And just speaking from my own experience, there was a lot that I had to sort through even in the early years after being baptized. And it's caused me to reflect actually for a while and speak on the subject that I'm going to speak on today. And the thing that I struggled with and talking with other people, I was a student at then the church's college, Ambassador College, and speaking with a number of other people who'd grown up in the church and who were there, there was an element of questioning whether I had the Holy Spirit for several years after baptism.

And as I reflected on that and as I thought about it, what it really sources back to was the fact that from a physical perspective, I wasn't really doing anything different the day, the week, the month after I was baptized than I had before. I was studying the Bible, I was keeping the Sabbath, I was trying to be a good person, and all those things. And so from that standpoint, it probably sounds unusual to people who came into the church as adults where everything in your life changes.

It probably seems a little unusual to hear that kind of a viewpoint, but that was my experience. Again, for those who've come in as adults, I've talked to a lot of people over the years, and they talk about the habits they had to give up, the friends they had to give up, challenges that they had with their family. We talked about some of those things last week in the interactive Bible study as well. Impacts on friendships, all of the different elements of life that change.

And so it is a very different experience, depending on which one of those two doorways you come into, essentially, as you get baptized. But as I think about it, whatever the circumstances of our individual coming to an understanding of God, having the sacrifice of Jesus Christ applied to us, being baptized, we all end up in the end at the same place as we move on in our journey of Christian growth. And there is still a call to attention, something that we need to work through as we're doing that, and that's what I'd like to spend a little time talking about today.

And that sort of dichotomy, whatever we want to call it, I'm going to verbalize today as what we do and what we are. What we do and what we are. And I'll use that as my title for today. I won't take time to point out all the different accounts in the Bible, but I think if you take a little bit of time to reflect, you'll find a lot of passages, a lot of examples in the Bible that strike at this.

This contrast, this tension, whatever you want to call it, between what we do and what we are. And I'll just throw one out there for you to think about. That's the often used example of King David. If you looked at the things that King David did in his life, you probably wouldn't let him in the door for services today. And at the same time, in terms of what David was, God saw him as a man after his own heart.

And so I'd like to focus a little more and encourage us to think as we go into the Passover about those two elements of what it is we do and what it is that we are. So let's look at this through a couple of dimensions as we think about that. And first, what we do. What we do does not in and of itself change what we are. It doesn't mean that there aren't things that we should do as Christians, but we have to understand the order that these things come in, the role that they play.

Turn with me, if you will, to Matthew 23. For many of us, this will be a familiar verse. I can remember being in a speech club or two over the course of the years where an instructor would get us to stand outside by a loud fountain so we could scream the woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. To be heard above the fountain. I'm not going to scream today. Promise. But let's read verses 23 through 27 of Matthew 23. Jesus had a very heated conversation with the scribes and the Pharisees in this passage. If we took it apart in modern language, you'd find some pretty cutting things that he was saying to them.

But focusing today on verses 23 through 27, he says to them, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe the mint and anise and cummin, and you've neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and faith. These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. Blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! If you cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they're full of extortion and self-indulgence.

Blind Pharisee first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, who indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so, you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you're full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. So what is it that Jesus Christ is saying here? What is it that he's doing? He's talking to the religious establishment of that time. And the scribes and the Pharisees were those who were incredibly educated in the Scriptures.

Pharisees were people who were even doing a lot of very good works. But he was making a very clear point to them, and the point, as he brings out several times here, talking about cleansing the outside of the cup and dish, but being full of something else inside, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel, was focusing on the fact that the things that they did did not drive a change within them. There was something going on inside of them that was not what God was looking for, despite the things that they did, which outwardly seemed pious, and were certainly even consistent with the way of God and many of the things they did.

And that's why he says, when you talk about paying tithe, the mint and anise, and cummin, I don't know how many of us are familiar with these these days, but, you know, tiny seeds. You think about paying tithes, and you would go down and you'd parse out these tiny little seeds where you'd probably have to set them down on some flat surface and divide out a tenth of those seeds in order to pay the tithe on them.

And very focused, focused on that little gnat, but missing the camel in terms of the bigness, the important elements that we were supposed to learn, that they were supposed to learn and understand through being learned in the law of God. And so what he was pointing out here was that things that they were doing were separate from what they were, and doing certain things were not going to justify them before God, not going to make them righteous. Now, the world of religious belief is full of different beliefs of what we should do, and we've probably seen it in people that we've interfaced with in day-to-day life.

I'm not going to single out any kind of a faith, but just think if you will. There are certain faiths that you can recognize from a long distance by what they wear, because the religious regulations that they adhere to lead them to wear certain types of attire. There are other people—I've worked with a number of people who won't drink, whether it's alcoholic beverages, caffeine, other things—because of their religious belief. And it's something that they clearly believe in, they're convicted of, and because of that religious belief, those are things that they do not do.

And certainly, we can all identify with that as well. We have distinctive beliefs that make us look and seem different from the people around us, don't we? We get in our car, we go to services on Sabbath, we talk to friends, they say, what are you doing on the weekend, or what are you doing tomorrow? Well, I'm going to be in church. Huh? Tomorrow's Saturday, isn't it? So we're in that same boat. We have things that we do because of what we believe. It can be jarring sometimes, though, and I don't know if you've had this experience.

I certainly have, and I've talked with friends who have. Again, a friend of mine who was in a business situation with someone, again, outward appearance, wore the religious garb that matched with the religion that he was a part of, and would walk around the office cussing people out, screaming at people, and verbally abusing them. Now, it's a jarring thing when you see that happen, right? Because you see a person that from an outward appearance looks like they adhere to some type of religious code, but the way that they act, essentially what they express of their being and what they are, is somehow incredibly inconsistent with the look that they put forward.

And it doesn't match up. I've worked with someone else, not as, didn't wear necessarily outward garb, but very much professed strong religious belief, but he had a complete disregard for any commitment he made. As a client, he could sign a contract, he'd come back two or three days later and say, you know what? Not gonna do it. Not gonna pay you. And then he would look at me, or look at whoever he was dealing with, and say, it's not personal, it's just business. And that was his, that was the phrase I knew him by.

It's not personal, it's just business. And again, it didn't match up. It was jarring, because those actions did not match up. The things that he did, what he expressed to himself, as I saw over time, what he was made of, did not match up with the beliefs that he expressed or showed outwardly. So it's as easy as humans to see what we do as our ultimate goal, some of the outward expressions of religiousness, but missing the big picture of what it is that we are inside, and what it is that we're to become. Another story, which we're not going to take the time to turn to, but if you wanted to jot it down, there are two parallel accounts in the Gospels in Matthew 19, starting in verse 16, and also in Mark 17, starting in verse 17.

And it's the story of the rich young ruler. You might remember that story. The young man comes before Jesus Christ, says, what am I to do? I've grown up all my life. I've kept all the commandments. I've done all of these things. And Jesus said to him, what? He said, well, give all the money you have to the poor and come and follow me.

And again, it's easy to read that. In fact, entire religious orders stem from that, among other things, people who take vows of poverty and take that verse to mean, well, again, if there's a single thing I can do, if I can give all of my physical things to God and live a life of poverty, as a result, I will be the person that he wants. Of course, that's not what Jesus Christ was saying, because again, he was trying to get this rich young man to focus on the fact that it wasn't an element of ticking all of these boxes.

There was something that was missing inside of him in his heart, in terms of actually obeying the intent of what it was that all of these things were supposed to be teaching him. And so the man, because he had a lot of wealth, went away sorrowful, because he just could not do what was being asked of him. So what we do cannot of itself change what we are.

The world is full of people who are trying to change things that they do without the more challenging and difficult work that has to happen inside. So secondly, in contrast, there's a second dimension, and that is that what we are will change what we do. What we are will change what we do. And that's a law that absolutely will not be violated. As human beings, we can fake a lot of things. We can fake things for a relatively long period of time, but we can't fake things forever. And ultimately, and we can probably all think of scriptures that bring it out, what we are inside, what we truly are inside, will end up expressing itself in the things that we say and in the things we do.

It's just a matter of how long that time takes. Turn with me, if you will, to Proverbs 4. Very short proverb, just two lines that lays this out for us. Proverbs 4, we'll read verse 23. Here we read, Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.

And what the writer of this proverb is saying is, it's what's inside of you. What you are, all of the things that you do are going to emanate out from that center.

It's only a matter of time. You can fake it for a while, but you can't do it forever. We read you a brief story. It's called The Keeper of the Spring. This is a story that the late Peter Marshall used to like to read, not the game show host Peter Marshall, for those of you who remember him. What game was that? Was it the match game? He used to be a game show host on daytime television when I was a kid. I used to love it when I was sick. I could turn on the TV and watch The Price is Right and some of those other shows.

Peter Marshall was one of the hosts, but it wasn't him. He was actually, for several years, the chaplain of the United States Senate. He liked to tell this story of The Keeper of the Spring. It centers around a quiet forest dweller who lived high above an Austrian village on the eastern slope of the Alps. The old gentlemen had been hired many years earlier by a young town councilman to clear away the debris from the pools of water up in the mountain crevices that fed the lovely spring flowing through their towns. Probably some of you have seen this. Maybe some of you have been to a spot like this. You go up in the mountains, see these beautiful waterfalls, these clear springs that come down from the mountains. They have their source way up there, whether it's a melting snowpack or another body of water that sort of slowly lets that water come down. Usually these mountain streams, they just run crystal clear and cool, and they're fantastic to drink from.

With faithful silent regularity, this man would patrol the hills. He removed the leaves and the branches. He wiped away the silt that would otherwise have choked and contaminated the fresh flow of water. The village soon became a popular attraction for vacationers. Graceful swans floated along the crystal clear spring. The mill wheels of various businesses located near the water turned day and night.

Farmlands were naturally irrigated, and the view from restaurants was picturesque beyond description. Years passed. One evening, the town council met for its semi-annual meeting. As they reviewed the budget, one man's eye caught the salary figure being paid this obscure keeper of the spring. Said the keeper of the purse, who's the old man? Why do we keep him on year after year? No one ever sees him.

For all we know, the strange ranger of the hills is doing us no good. He's not necessary any longer. And by unanimous vote, they dispensed with the old man's services. And for several weeks, nothing changed. By early autumn, the trees began to shed their leaves. Small branches snapped off and fell into the pools, hindering the rushing flow of sparkling water. One afternoon, someone noticed a slight yellowish-brown tint in the spring.

A few days later, the water was much darker. And within another week, a slimy film covered sections of water along the banks, and a foul odor was soon detected. The mill wheels moved more slowly, and some finely ground to a halt. Swans left, as did the tourists, and clammy fingers of disease and sickness reached deeply into the village. Quickly, the embarrassed council called a special meeting.

Realizing their gross error and judgment, they rehired the old keeper of the spring. And within a few weeks, the veritable river of life began to clear up. The wheels started to turn, and new life returned to the hamlet in the Alps. That's a made-up story, but I think the point is clear. And that element, when you think about that, and you think of that source of that spring of what's inside of us, our hearts, and what flows from it.

And this story is just another way of illustrating what we were talking about a moment ago, and the fact that what we do, the things that we do, the things that we say, ultimately flow, not necessarily immediately, just like in this story. It took a few weeks for things to get gummed up again, and get nasty and brown and slimy. But eventually, you can't help it, that if the spring is not tended, if the source is not tended, everything that comes downstream will be impacted. And that's exactly how our lives are. Again, as we think about what we do and what we are, what we are, our hearts, what we are inside, is going to come out and express itself ultimately in what we do. Let's look at this scripturally. Turn with me, if you will, to Luke 6. We'll read verses 43 through 45 of Luke 6.

Here, Jesus Christ uses a slightly different analogy as he's speaking. He talks about a tree and fruit that grows from the tree. Luke 6, starting in verse 43.

This is Jesus Christ saying exactly the same thing in a different set of words. Whatever it is that we are inside our hearts and what is in them is what ultimately comes out. And the challenging thing, we see that only a good tree can bring forth good fruit. We can look, and again, people can put things on. You probably all worked with someone, had a neighbor, had another acquaintance that really wanted something.

Whether it was a promotion, whether it was to buy a piece of land from the person next to them. And so for a certain period of time, they'll befriend somebody, or they'll do these incredible things to make themselves look like the greatest employee in the world in order to get a promotion. I knew people back when I lived in another city, and you'd work with people, and you saw them cycle through jobs. They'd last about a year and a half in every job. We had one guy we would joke, you know, he must really interview well. Because every year and a half or so, he'd end up in a new job, and everybody loved him.

And about a year, a year and a half later, things were just not going well, and he was off to another job. And it was because what he was would come out. During an interview, he could do a great job. During interactions over a short period of time, everything was great. But after a few months' time, what he was in terms of work ethic, in terms of skills, in terms of the things that he was doing, all of that showed what he actually was as a person.

He couldn't last in a job more than a short period of time. So, over time, it doesn't usually take that long, what a person really is will come out. And while God knows the heart, as humans, it takes us time to fully understand what another person is about. And if we're honest about it, what even what we ourselves are about, we can deceive ourselves.

In fact, this whole idea of knowing yourself is probably the most difficult thing, at least speaking for myself. Understanding, really, myself is probably the most challenging thing. Because there's so many filters that we put on as we look at ourselves and try to sort out what we're really about. Another scripture, if you wanted to jot it down and look at it later, Psalm 139, verse 23.

David famously asks God to search his heart. What David is saying is probably the same thing that we've all experienced in our own lives. We try to sort out what in the world makes us do certain things. What it is that hides inside of us in the way that it expresses itself in strange and sometimes unexpected ways.

And David brought that before God. He said, God, help me to understand myself. Help me to know what's inside of me and purge out the things that are not of you. That's what David brought before God. Those are the things that we need to think of as well. Because again, it's what's inside.

It's what's in our hearts. That's ultimately going to work itself out in the things that we do, the way we relate with other people, all of those outcomes in our lives. And this really is what lies at the core of Christianity. So given those elements, the fact that what we do cannot, in the end, change what we are, and the fact that what we are will ultimately drive what we do, how is it that we go about changing our hearts? How do we go about changing our hearts? Well, the fact is, we can't.

And that's the end of my sermon for today. But the fact is, we can't. We cannot change our hearts. And that's why we have this time of year. That's why we have the Passover. That's why we have a sacrifice for our sins in Jesus Christ. Because it is impossible for man, for woman, to change the heart. Something only God can do. And it's something we need to be reminded of from time to time, as we're thinking through our own lives.

One of the phrases that you might have heard before that always sticks with me, thinking about baptism and the commitment we make to God, is we do not repent of what we do, we repent of what we are. Again, going to this idea of what we do and what we are, we repent of the fact, well, I committed this sin and this sin and this sin. We don't make a list of the sins that we committed.

And at baptism, okay, take that list with me, stamp them all forgiven, and we move on. It's something much deeper, because what we're doing is we're recognizing the fact that what we are as human beings, that inability through our human hearts and our human ways to be in conformity with God and to please Him. And that needs to change.

The only way it changes is through God's Holy Spirit coming and leading us forward and replacing what we are as human beings. Turn with me, if you will, to 1 Corinthians 5. This entire idea is intrinsic in the Passover. 1 Corinthians 5, verse 6. Hear Paul writing to the Corinthians says, Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you are truly unleavened.

For indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Now there's a lot here that we don't necessarily see as 21st century individuals looking at it. And I've talked a little bit about this before, so I'm not going to belabor it. But did you know that yeast was only discovered as a fungus in the mid-1800s?

So at the time when this was written, there was no such thing as a jar of yeast sitting on your shelf. So how in the world did the idea of leaven ever come about? Because people were making beer back thousands of years BC and baking bread. Well, it's exactly what we did on the frontier in the old days, and that is through a ball of sourdough. You leave that dough out in the air, there are yeast spores in the air, as some level of decomposition happens in that ball of flour and water, it starts to ferment. That fermentation is the leavening that happens. And exactly as is written here, a little leaven leavens the whole lump. How was it in those days that you would cause bread to rise? You'd take your sourdough starter, you'd take a pinch off of that sourdough starter, and you would drop it into the dough for a batch of bread.

And you'd give it a bit of time, and that dough would start to rise, because of the chemical reaction that happened, because you took a little leaven off of that old lump, and you dropped it into that piece of bread.

There was only one way to get rid of the leavening. Imagine sitting down with a loaf of bread that's been baked, and trying to de-leaven that bread. How would you go about doing that? The yeast has permeated the entire bread. Even if you just sort of pick at the crust and try to just eat the crust, the fact is, if you analyze that chemically, and that's the entire point, the leaven is permeating that entire loaf.

The only way you could de-leaven in those days was to take your sourdough starter and toss it. And you'd have to start all over again after the days of unleavened bread. The reason I bring that out is, I think that sometimes the way that we, for good reasons and proper reasons, keep the days of unleavened bread today, leads us to a bit of a wrong analogy in the way that we think of ourselves, and the way that we process the lesson.

Because nowadays, we go around our house, we look for bread, we throw it away, we look for our jars of yeast, we look for our jars of baking soda, we look for the stray crumbs that are there, and we throw them away. And we can buy new ones later. And sometimes we tend to equate this, and I've used this term myself, you know, the days of unleavened bread is about examining our lives, finding the sin in our lives and throwing it away.

But that's a focus on what we do. It's not a focus on what we are. We think about that sourdough starter, and the fact that there's nothing about that thing that you can do other than throw it away.

That's the lesson that was being taught as de-leavening was first instituted, as these people kept it. And they would understand, because they didn't have to run through their whole house, they might have had a loaf or two of bread before refrigeration, that had to be thrown away. But they knew there was a single source where all of their leavening came from.

It was that sourdough starter. And they had to take that, and they had to throw it away, and they would start exactly like we see here, with a new lump, after the days of unleavened bread were over. A completely fresh and different start. No vestiges of this thing that's been bubbling and fermenting away over the course of time, and there are people who have sourdough starters that they say are century old, because you can just keep adding fuel to it, and keep letting it bubble away. So Passover and the days of unleavened bread is not about looking at our lives and picking out the bad things from our lives and keeping the rest.

It's not like dropping a piece of food on the floor and picking the cat hairs out of it, and then eating the cookie anyways, right? That was a good one? Okay. I see visuals happening out there. That's good. It's a reminder, a reminder that we're committed to discarding completely the old life that we lived. When we came before God to be baptized, we made a commitment to get completely rid of the old life and to commit to Jesus Christ and a fully new life in Him. Let's read through just a sampling of passages in the Bible that indicates exactly this. We'll start in the Old Testament. And actually, as I'll suggest when we wrap up today, if you look at the word heart used all through the Old Testament, you'll be amazed how many times in the Old Testament, long before Jesus Christ ever showed up on the earth, God was talking to the children of Israel and to others about the heart, and that He wanted them to be converted in the heart.

Ezekiel 36, verse 26 and 27. This is a prophecy given to Israel. Ezekiel 36, 26.

He didn't say I'm going to modify the heart that you have. He said I'm going to remove it and I'm going to give you a new one. I'll put my spirit within you in verse 27 and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will keep my judgments and you'll do them. And you'll see if you look up any other areas as well, whether in the Old Testament or the New, that same sentiment. It's not about picking the little bits that don't quite work and moving forward. It's about a complete replacement. Let's turn to Romans 6. Romans 6. Paul uses a little bit stronger, more stark language with the Romans, referring here to the crucifixion, the death of Jesus Christ.

Romans 6, starting in verse 6. Paul writes to the Romans, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, referring to Jesus Christ, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Talking symbolically here about that our old life died at the point that we were baptized and made a commitment to God. Verse 8, even more specifically, if we died with Christ, we believe we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him.

So again, a complete change of what's going on inside of us, a change of our hearts. Read one last scripture, just to belabor the point a little bit. Galatians 2, verse 20. Again, Paul, this time writing to the Galatians, makes a similar statement. Galatians 2, verse 20.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. And this is just a handful of passages, a couple from the New Testament, one from the Old Testament, that talks about the heart, the complete change, the symbolic death of the old man, the burial through baptism, and an entirely new life starting. And that's really the core lesson of this Passover season, is that our repentance and baptism, when we did those things, we signed up for a complete renunciation of what we were. We didn't agree to pick through our lives, to keep the good things and throw out the bad. We agreed to symbolically put the entire old man, the old woman, to death, and to live an entirely new life, to have our inner thoughts and intents of the heart replaced from what they were before, through Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. So as we conclude and wrap up a few more thoughts, regardless of our background before baptism, whether we grew up in this way of life or not, our Christian lives inevitably come to the point of confronting this concept. Who we are, what we are, versus what we do. And it's easy to think of these days as reorienting the things that we do. But these days of Unleavened Bread, the Passover, is so much more than that. It's not like going through the house to find the crumbs and throw them away and keep everything else. It's not the cookie that fell on the floor where we pick off the bad stuff and eat the cookie anyways. God told us to throw all of that away. We completely renounce what we were, and we dedicate a new life to living in Him. Think about throwing away that sourdough starter, or if it's easier, think about that loaf of baked bread that you might buy at the store, and how completely futile it would be to try to pick up that loaf of bread and take the leavening out of it, because it's so thoroughly permeated. Through our repentance, we come to realize we didn't come to God to offer Him the good things in our lives and ourselves. Rather, He called us, by His grace, to be new creatures, solely through the power of His Spirit.

So as we look forward to this next week, and start looking towards the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread, just a couple of suggestions if you're looking for some additional thoughts to reflect on and things to read about this concept. The first one I'll leave for you to think about is use a concordance or an internet search, and just look at all of the scriptures across the Bible that address the heart. Again, I think you'll be surprised, maybe, interested in how often the heart is referred to, even in the Old Testament, prophetically, as it was looking forward to Jesus Christ, mournfully sometimes, and looking at Israel, and how they just couldn't get it right, because they didn't have that heart in them. But you'll see these themes on display. The second thing that I think could be useful if you're interested in it is to read and study the Beatitudes.

So Matthew 5, verses 3 through 10 is the Beatitudes. There's a parallel as well in one of the other Gospels. I think it's in Luke. They speak to core conditions of the heart. Jesus Christ doesn't lay out in the Beatitudes, you know, do this, do this, do this. But it talks about matters of the heart, and it starts with, blessed are the poor in spirit. He's not talking about people who are financially poor. Being poor in spirit is, again, that recognition that in ourselves, there's nothing that's useful to God. And the way that we have a spirit that is pleasing to him is through him, through the conversion, through the replacement, or a human heart. I think reading and looking and studying at the Beatitudes and seeing the conditions of heart that they show can also be a very meaningful thing to do at this time of year. Sorting through the differences between what we do and what we are is a complex, and I'll even say a lifelong, process. I hope you find great meaning in these upcoming weeks as we sort through those things and recommitting to the journey that we started with Jesus Christ.