1 John 5:1-5—Obey God and Experience Faith's Victory
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: 1 John 5:1-5
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Welcome
Welcome
Good morning, church family and guests, both here in person and online! My name is Bill Connors, and I am the senior pastor of the church body here at Eastern Hills. If you are a guest today, I’d like the opportunity to meet you at the close of service, so if you would plan on coming down to the front after our benediction, I’d appreciate that, and I’d like to give you a thank you gift for joining us this morning. Also, if you’re visiting in the room this morning, would you just grab the communication card out of the back of the pew in front of you, and fill it out during my message sometime? Then you can bring that down to me when we meet, so the staff can pray for you and send you a card thanking you for your visit today. If you’d rather complete an online card, just text the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004, and you’ll get a text back with a link to our digital communication card. That works if you’re online as well.
Thank Bible study leaders. Encourage people to participate in a weekly Bible study class.
Announcements
Announcements
AAEO ($15,620.85) today and two more Sundays left.
Miller Hall Remodel: kitchen area unavailable for the next 3 1/2 weeks. Note that this is not a part of Endeavor. We had several people make special donations to fund this change, and we had included some of it in the budgets for Kitchen and Family Services. We believe that everyone is going to really like.
Choir invite: We’d like to have a bunch of voices to sing a great medley on May 21. Commit to 5 practices, one time of singing in service. Then choir will be off for the summer. You might love it!
I’ll be sharing about my recent trip overseas next Sunday night. Again, it will not be streamed or recorded.
Opening
Opening
We are closing in on the end of our study of John’s Letter of Life, Light, and Love to the church. We will finish this look on the last Sunday of this month, and we will also take the Lord’s Supper together that morning, so I hope you’ll plan to be here for that time of worship together. But for this morning, we’re going to follow John’s train of thought to the next station it went to under the inspiration of the Spirit after how he ended what we have as chapter 4 in our Scriptures. Our focal passage this morning is 1 John 5:1-5. Let’s stand as we’re able to in honor of the Word of God as we read this passage this morning:
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father also loves the one born of him. 2 This is how we know that we love God’s children: when we love God and obey his commands. 3 For this is what love for God is: to keep his commands. And his commands are not a burden, 4 because everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. This is the victory that has conquered the world: our faith. 5 Who is the one who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
PRAYER (Mountain Valley Church in Edgewood; Pastor Chris Promersberger, who is starting a four-week series on marriage today. We ask for restoration, healing, blessing, and fruit from that series. We also pray for Mountain Valley’s leadership to be wise and discerning as they start to think about and create global missions alliances.)
I enjoy friendly competition. I like board games and video games. I like playing sports like softball, football, and ultimate frisbee… even sports I’m terrible at like basketball and golf. And while I do truly try to adhere to the old adage of “it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game,” I must confess that I do enjoy winning. Now, I won’t go so far in my enjoyment of winning games to follow another competition adage: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” but generally, I’d rather win than lose. Anyone else with me on this?
There’s something about winning a competition that feels good. We like to win. But the things that I listed have pretty low stakes. Board games and sports? Extremely minor in the overall scheme of life. If something more serious were on the table, like an imminent threat against my family or friends, then I’d change my perspective. Then, it’s war. Winning becomes the only thing. If someone were threatening to harm my wife or my children, I would do whatever it takes to come out of that situation victorious, if at all possible. Again, anyone with me?
Well, one of the things that I think that we forget in modern Western Christianity is that we are in the middle of a war. It’s not just a battle. It’s an ongoing, super-high-stakes, spiritual war. Because of the fallenness of the world into sin, there is no neutral ground. We are in a constant state of battle with “the world:” which we have defined as “the corrupt system that stands in opposition to the truth of God.” This system has its ruler, the devil, who does everything he can to distract, to distort, to dissuade, to destroy those who stand against him.
What we have already seen in this letter is that antichrists are going to deny the truth of the Gospel (2:22), that the child of the devil is the one whose life is defined by sin (3:8, 10), that the world is going to hate us (3:13), and that there are false prophets in the world who speak from a spirit of deception (4:3). We are to be at war against the sin within us, the spirit of the world without us, and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).
So how can we experience victory over the world? John addresses this question in our focal passage with a logical argument that flows from one point to the next.
1) Victory over the world begins with true faith.
1) Victory over the world begins with true faith.
You might recall that a couple of week ago, when I spoke on the first part of chapter 4 of this letter, I mentioned something about a literary device called an “inclusion.” It’s a place where the author sort of “bookends” an argument with similar (sometimes even exact) statements at the beginning and end. Just like in chapter 4, we find an inclusion here at the beginning of chapter 5, where John frames his discussion within the bookends of true faith:
1 John 5:1a (CSB)
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
5 Who is the one who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
Throughout this letter, John has kind of used the terms “Christ” or “Messiah” and “Son of God” as meaning about the same thing, something that he will continue to do a few more times before the letter is finished. I won’t quote all of those, but if you’re interested, you can go back and look at 1:3, 1:7, 2:22, 3:8, 3:23, 4:9-10, and 4:14 for the ones we’ve already covered. We’ll look at the rest of them as we complete the series.
And this use of these terms almost interchangeably isn’t all that strange. In fact, one of the earliest declarations of Jesus’ identity as both Son of God and Messiah came from the apostle Peter, in response to Jesus asking them: “But you… who do you say that I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus didn’t tell him he was wrong. In fact, he completely agreed with his answer and even told him where that answer had come from: God the Father.
17 Jesus responded, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven.
So the intricate connection of these two identifiers of Jesus: that He is the Messiah and that He is the Son of God, means that when you speak of one, you are speaking of the other as well. The Messiah had to be human, or He could not take the place of humanity’s sinfulness. The Bible says in Isaiah 53:6 that “We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.” A human Messiah had to pay the debt for humanity. But no ordinary human was going to be able to fill that role. This is why the Messiah also had to be divine, the Son of God. Because of His sinless perfection, He was able to live the guiltless life that we need to live in order to deserve eternal life. So Jesus is both fully man and fully God: the God-man. And only He deserves to live forever.
But the beauty and wonder of the Gospel is that the only man who deserves to live willingly chose to die for those who deserve only death: each of us. You and me. No one is exempt, because we have all sinned and fall short of God’s glorious perfection according to Romans 3:23. But because Jesus is divine, by the power of the Spirit of God, He didn’t stay dead. He overcame the grave that would consume all of us, and made a way for us to live forever with God.
And the one who will experience victory over the world is the one who believes that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. To believe is to surrender to in complete trust—that you agree with and trust in Jesus as your Savior and as Lord of your life. I like to picture it as giving up your forever to Jesus because you have come to trust that He is the only One who can fix your relationship with God so that you can be forgiven and live forever with Him. It’s not something we earn or do. It’s something that we surrender to: the truth that Jesus, and only Jesus, is the way to God. This is what true faith is: it’s more than giving mental assent to what the Bible says about Jesus. It’s laying your eternity on the line for it because you believe it’s true. And then God does the work of saving us through that faith, giving us new life.
The Bible has another term for this new life: it’s called being born of God or born again. The first half of verse 1 says that “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God...” When we believe in Jesus Christ, God does a work in us that changes us from being children of the world, and under the control of that corrupt system, to being children of God, following Him: with not just a new future, but with a new set of priorities, new allegiances, and a new perspective. We do not perform the work of being born of God. It’s Him who does that work:
12 But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, 13 who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.
A couple of chapters later in John’s Gospel, we find Jesus using this terminology of being “born again” as He was speaking with a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus in the dead of night:
2 This man came to him at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform these signs you do unless God were with him.” 3 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 “How can anyone be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked him. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again.
God is the one who gives us this new birth by His Spirit, and it is only through that rebirth in the Spirit through faith in Christ that we have eternal life. “There is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved,” according to Peter in Acts 4. Believe in Jesus as your Savior and Lord this morning, even right now where you are in this room or online. Surrender to Him, turning from your sins, and receive the forgiveness of God and eternal life now and forever.
You might be one that kind of thinks that “all roads lead to God,” or that “all that’s necessary is some kind of faith, as long as it’s sincere.” This simply isn’t true. You can have sincere faith in the wrong object, and thus be sincerely wrong. Only Jesus saves. We’ve already seen in this letter in the last chapter that there is a clear distinction: those who believe rightly about Jesus are from God, and those who don’t aren’t from God.
2 This is how you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
14 And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his Son as the world’s Savior. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God—God remains in him and he in God.
So what John is reaffirming here in 1 John 5 is that the evidence of someone’s salvation is that they have true faith in the only true object of saving faith—that only the one who believes in Jesus has been born of God and overcomes the world by faith, because it’s only Jesus who overcomes or conquers the world!
33 I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world.”
According to John, this is where victory over the world begins: with true faith in the only worthy object of faith that saves: the Lord Jesus Christ. We experience victory over the world because Jesus has overcome, and if we are in Christ, we are given the victory through Him, as Paul expressed in 1 Corinthians 15:
57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
So overcoming, conquering, or being victorious over the world only comes through faith in Christ. But how does that true faith express itself? It expresses itself in true love for both God and His children.
2) True faith expresses true love for God & His children.
2) True faith expresses true love for God & His children.
One of the major themes of this letter is that the clearest evidence of salvation in the life of someone who claims to be a Christian is that they express God’s kind of love, both by loving God and by loving other Christians: their brothers and sisters. As we saw last week, God has revealed what His love looks like through giving His Son for us. Our response to that revelation of love is to love others as God has loved us, especially those who are in the church. John builds on that in the last part of verse 1:
1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father also loves the one born of him.
If we don’t actually love God, then it’s an indicator that we don’t believe (more on that in a moment). And if we say that we love God, then we also will love those born of Him—His children…those who believe that Jesus is the Christ.
Now, because John wrote this in the singular (“the one born of him”), some might think that this is speaking about Jesus, and not other believers. But it can’t be talking about Jesus, because of the first part of the verse: the one born of God (1a) is part of the “everyone” who would believe that Jesus is the Christ. The “born of Him” in view in the second part of this sentence must have the same object: those who believe that Jesus is the Christ.
So it’s simple: If you say that you love God through faith in Christ, then that faith will express itself in loving the Father and by loving everyone else who believes in Jesus. Peter made the same connection in his first epistle:
22 Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other, from a pure heart love one another constantly, 23 because you have been born again—not of perishable seed but of imperishable—through the living and enduring word of God.
Because you have been “born again,” then you show sincere love for each other, and you should both want to and choose to do so more and more.
You might completely agree with me. “OK, so we are supposed to show love for one another. But what does that look like?” Well, the first aspect of loving each other is putting others first. So often, we are all about reciprocating love: we decide to love because we’ve been loved. So, “When so-and-so in the church shows that they love me, I’ll show that I love them.” This is the wrong perspective. Yes, love is reciprocal. But the initial loving has already been completed in Christ!
When Jesus was on the cross, right before He died, He said, “It is finished.” (John 19:30) What was finished on the cross was multifacted: the wrath of God against sin had been poured out; the means of relating to God through the sacrificial Law and the human priesthood was done; the mission that Jesus came to complete was finished. And what else was finished was that God had decisively declared and demonstrated His love for mankind:
10 Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
So the loving first has already been done. We have no excuse but to love one another as God has loved us already in Christ. This is why Paul wrote:
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. 4 Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.
So loving others should be our default stance: never waiting to be loved, because we already have been loved. And then, it comes down to seeing everyone else in the family of God as more important than ourselves.
It means valuing everyone else in the church as God does.
It means coming alongside a brother or sister going through a difficult time.
It means encouraging a brother who is battling against sin.
It means lovingly rebuking a sister who is headed down a path away from God.
It means being quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry at one another.
It means being constantly ready to forgive, and always seeking peace with one another if at all possible.
It means being willing to pray with and for one another, and always seeking to be a blessing to those in the family of the church.
It means using your resources as available and prompted by the Lord to meet the physical needs of others in the body of Christ.
It means celebrating with a sister who has success, not seeing their success as somehow your failure.
It means having your heart break when your brother’s heart is broken, because you know that when one part of the church suffers, every other part suffers as well.
Each of these things is biblical. This is what loving each other well looks like. And loving God looks like obedience to His Word, which is what our next point brings us to:
3) True love for God & His children is revealed in our obedience to God.
3) True love for God & His children is revealed in our obedience to God.
Whenever I’m studying my Bible, whether it’s reading for my quiet time or doing more strenuous study, when I come across a passage that confuses me or makes me ask a question, I highlight it in orange and put a question mark by it. Then in my journal, I write down what my question is and why I have it. Then, when I come back to it some other time, I might be in a better position to answer the question. Because this is the Bible we’re talking about, I always assume that there is a good answer to every question I ask, even if I don’t know the answer just yet.
Verse 2 was one of those verses, and this message forced me to think more deeply about it. At first blush, it seems out of order:
1 John 5:2–3a (CSB)
2 This is how we know that we love God’s children: when we love God and obey his commands. 3 For this is what love for God is: to keep his commands.
“This is how we know that we love God’s children?” I mean, shouldn’t he be saying that this is how we know that we love God: because we love His children? This would be in line with other things that he’s said in this letter. My assumption was that this was on purpose, and I just was not seeing the reason at the time I marked it as a question.
I believe that the answer here is found in the Great Commandment, which we looked at from the Gospel of Matthew last week. This morning, we will look at it in Mark:
28 One of the scribes approached. When he heard them debating and saw that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, “Which command is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”
Jesus linked love for God with love for neighbor. He was asked which is the most important command of all, and His answer was two of them: that there is no command greater than these. If God is my first love, then I will keep His commands. And if I keep His commands, I will necessarily love others, particularly His sons and daughters as we’ve already seen.
So I can know that I am loving God’s children when I am rightly loving God and obeying His commands. And if either of those is missing, I can know that I’m not doing either of them well, because verse 3 tells us what love for God is: keeping His commands.
Jesus said this plainly in a couple of places in John 14. We’ll just look at verse 15:
15 “If you love me, you will keep my commands.
In the Old Testament, love for God was always connected with obedience. To claim that you loved God was to declare that your life was defined by obedience to Him. You could obey Him without loving Him out of fear, but you could not love Him without obeying Him, because love for God would necessarily present itself in the form of obeying His commands. This was nothing like modern “spiritual” sentiment, where we can claim to be in a loving relationship with God but never follow in obedience. The two were inextricably linked together in several passages, such as Deuteronomy 10:12 and 11:1, and then Joshua instructed the Israelites in chapter 22, verse 5:
5 Only carefully obey the command and instruction that Moses the Lord’s servant gave you: to love the Lord your God, walk in all his ways, keep his commands, be loyal to him, and serve him with all your heart and all your soul.”
John has also linked these two clearly in what we looked at last Sunday morning, and that bears repeating for this morning’s purposes:
20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.
I think that we make a lot of excuses when it comes to this connection between love and obedience. I’ll use myself as an example. I’m going to confess to my brothers and sisters that for the past couple of weeks I’ve been angry at some people, and I’m not going to tell you who it is because it’s some people who aren’t even members of this church family. And the reality is that while I might have valid reasons to be angry at them, that’s not what I’m called to in Christ. But deep down, I’ve nursed a grudge against them. And both God and my loving wife would point out to me that forgiveness is commanded of me in Colossians 3:13: “Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive.” So I would “forgive” them, and then very quickly “unforgive” them on the inside. And I discovered just on Friday that I was still not only holding onto my anger, but I was justifying it with excuses to both God and Melanie. I knew the excuses didn’t negate the command of God for me to forgive as He has forgiven me. But I had somehow managed to talk myself into my “right” to stay angry. I had to confess my sin, repent of it, and choose to forgive again… and mean it this time. No excuses. I needed to obey.
If I hadn’t gotten those things right with God, I would have remained on a path that God didn’t want me on—one where I would be giving the devil an “opportunity,” according to Ephesians 4:27. You see, our final point is that it’s obedience to God through faith that allows us to experience true victory over the world:
4) Those who obey God through faith experience true victory over the world.
4) Those who obey God through faith experience true victory over the world.
We spoke about conquering and victory back when we looked at chapter 2, verses 12-14, in the fourth message of this series. Now this theme of victory comes back up near the end of the letter, as John connects the love that we have for God with actually enjoying obeying Him, because that obedience brings about victory:
1 John 5:3b–4 (CSB)
3 And his commands are not a burden, 4 because everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. This is the victory that has conquered the world: our faith.
First, let’s address what John meant when he said that God’s commands are “not a burden.” When we read this, do we believe it? Or do we scoff at it? The reality is that when our hearts are rightly tuned to loving God and loving others, we should find that this is the case: His commands are not a burden, because we actually delight in loving God through our obedience. Jesus spoke of His care for us in our burdens in Matthew 11:
28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Take up His yoke…that’s to do the things that He does in the way that He does them: lowly, and humbly. That part is critical. If we don’t follow Jesus with lowliness and humility, we find that His yoke isn’t easy and His burden isn’t light. Jesus is the example not just what to do, but how to do it—the attitude and perspective that we bring to our obedience.
29 The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what pleases him.”
And throughout the Psalms, we find passage after passage about the one who delights in doing the will of God, especially in Psalm 119:
1 How happy is the one who does not walk in the advice of the wicked or stand in the pathway with sinners or sit in the company of mockers! 2 Instead, his delight is in the Lord’s instruction, and he meditates on it day and night.
16 I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.
174 I long for your salvation, Lord, and your instruction is my delight.
Do we delight in the Lord’s instruction, in His statutes, and approach the life that He’s called us to in Christ with the lowliness and humility that characterizes Jesus? We should if we are truly born again.
When we surrender to Christ in faith, we are born again, born of God. When we are born of God, we are given a new nature by God. That nature will include new affections, passions, treasures, and values. And those changes will shift how we see God and our obedience to Him, as Daniel Akin wrote in one of his commentaries on 1 John:
“Because I now love God instead of hating Him, I treasure and value Him above everyone and everything else. And because I treasure and value Him above everyone and everything else, I delight in obeying Him. Now I find His commands not to be a burden, but a blessing. They are not drudgery, they are a delight.”
—Daniel Akin, Exalting Jesus in 1, 2, 3, John
God’s commands are not a burden to those in Christ because we have overcome the world. We no longer need to be driven by what the world says should drive us. Joe preached on 1 John 2:15-17 earlier in our series, but I want us to remember the “trifecta” of things that the world focuses on from verse 16:
16 For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s possessions—is not from the Father, but is from the world.
When we take delight in God and see His commands as a blessing instead of a burden, then the desires of the flesh start to diminish in strength (either that, or we grow in strength to overcome them through faith). My anger, that I mentioned a moment ago, was a lust of the flesh. That came from the world, and I listened to it for a time. I use that as an example. Other things, such as the lust of the eyes—deeply desiring something that we can see, but which God has not seen as fit for us to have; and the pride in our possessions—seeing what we own as both our security and our identity; these things make us think that lasting fulfillment or satisfaction can be found somewhere other than Christ. But this is a horrible trade.
In Matthew 16:26, Jesus asked the question:
26 For what will it benefit someone if he gains the whole world yet loses his life? Or what will anyone give in exchange for his life?
The assumed answer to this question proposed by Jesus is that it will benefit a man nothing if he gains the world at the cost of his life, and that our lives are worth everything. But this is not how the world sees things, as Robert Yarbrough wrote in his commentary on this verse 4:
“While Jesus asked, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”, those outside the church essentially turn the question around: What good is eternal redemption if it costs you temporal benefit?”
—Robert W. Yarbrough, 1-3 John, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament
This should either break our hearts for this perspective in ourselves, or should break our hearts for the lost around us who would rather trade eternal life for momentary pleasure and the illusion of joy that never lasts. Instead of overcoming, they are overcome. Instead of conquering, the world conquers.
But John here in verse 4 uses the Greek term for conquering and victory, nike, in a kind of wordplay that we miss in English translation. All three “conquer/victory” words in this verse are various forms of that same word. So you could translate verse 4 as: “Everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. This is the conquering that has conquered the world: our faith.” We are conquerors through faith in Jesus.
But how does obedience through faith allow us to conquer? We conquer when we are obedient because we aren’t trapped by the world’s schemes. We aren’t overcome by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. We aren’t riddled with the flaming arrows of the devil, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:
16 In every situation take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.
In reality, it is Jesus who has already conquered, and continues to conquer the wiles of the world in us. He already walked the path of this earthly life and came out on the other side having never failed to honor God in His thought, word, or action, having never failed to do exactly what the Father wanted Him to do. Through His obedience, He has conquered and continues to conquer the world. And through faith in Him, we are more than conquerors as well.
Closing
Closing
This brings us full circle. John Stott wrote a helpful summary of this passage in his commentary. He wrote:
“Christian believers are God’s children, born from above. God’s children are loved by all who love God. Those who love God also keep his commands. They keep his commands because they overcome the world, and they overcome the world because they are Christian believers, born from above.”
—John Stott, Letters of John
Are you born from above? Have you surrendered your life to Jesus Christ, believing that He died on the cross for your forgiveness and rose from the grave for your eternal salvation? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. And we would love to celebrate that fact with you. Come and let us know. If you’re online, let me know by email.
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Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Bible reading (Jer 39)
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Benediction
Benediction
24 Now to him who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, without blemish and with great joy, 25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.
All praise to God for the gift of His grace!