An acre of dirt, trees, and rock is being lifted over a California freeway on seventy-five girders—the largest wildlife bridge on earth, twenty years in the making, priced near a hundred million dollars. We tend to go for the grand, but the Apostle James suggests that being grand isn’t what matters most.
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We tend to like things that are grand, and even if we can do something in a way that is less than grand that would work, it’s so much more exciting if we can do it in a way that is grand. I was reminded of that as I was reading about, maybe some of you have read about the wildlife bridge they are building in California. I don’t know much about wildlife bridges. Anyone know about wildlife bridges? So my dad does. So now all of you will know about wildlife bridges because apparently the theory, what they’ve noticed is that you build interstate highways and you have whole populations of different wild animals that end up on one side of the road and not the other. So they wanted to fix that so that the migration paths and so on could work.
For example, I had no idea that this was so common, but in Utah there are 50 wildlife bridges, so that different species can get across the interstate highway. They make these big paths with dirt and trees and rocks and things that look very natural. They put fencing up to herd everybody into this area so they go across. For example, in Colorado, I believe it was, where they have a large one, they’ve reduced animals being killed on the roadsides by I think like 95%. Kind of interesting.
So anyway, California does everything bigger, right? So even though Utah has built a bunch in Colorado and Texas, California decided to build one. And this is the world’s largest wildlife bridge. And before it overran cost, it was going to cost almost $100 million. It’s about an acre wide and is just utterly massive, obviously. Has I think 75 bridge girders underneath it. I mean, just this massive construction, it was supposed to take two years to build, it’s now on year four and a half, I think, so they think they’re going to finish it by the end of the year.
And I thought about that, and I’m sure it’s a really great bridge. It looks really interesting, but I thought, well, if these other bridges reduced the problem by 95% of animals trying to cross the road and being killed, and it worked, and it didn’t have massive overruns of tens of millions of dollars, and it didn’t take twice as long to build as expected and so on, maybe it actually would even do more good because you could build more of them, and they’d actually be working. And yet, as people were planning this, they didn’t just plan a bridge, they took 20 years to plan the best wildlife bridge.
And we can laugh at those kinds of things, right? We laugh when these giant mega projects happen and they don’t quite come through. And yet, I thought, you know, part of what’s telling about it is, I didn’t even know that Utah had 50 of them, because we don’t talk about it. It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t grand. And it wasn’t overrunning costs, so people didn’t talk about it.
We think, well, I guess I need to do something audacious in life, something really impressive, because it won’t matter otherwise. People need to know I’m doing something impressive. It would be better if I overrun the budget or maybe never even finish the project, but it was big and grand and everyone thought it was amazing, than if I did something that’s quiet and unimpressive, but actually is finished.
That’s our inclination, but it’s not God’s inclination. He doesn’t call us to be grand and audacious, he calls us to faithfulness. And as we wrap up our series on being fishers of men and women tonight, we’re going to turn to the book of James.
The book of James is really a fascinating book for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them is that our best understanding, and there have been discussions on who this particular James is, because there are several Jameses in the Bible, but most commentators believe this is James, the half-brother of Jesus. And so if you think about that, here is a man who has an impressive, impressive position. Can you imagine saying, yeah, I’m the brother of Jesus. We grew up together. Peter, can you say that? Paul, can you say that? All you other people out there, can you say that? But me? I’m a big deal.
We’re going to see that’s not how James writes his letter, and not how James thinks. And it’s so important for us, if we’re going to be faithful to the calling that God has for us, to see exactly what we find here in the book of James. So let’s pray that God would help us to hear what he has for us here in his word.
Father, thank you for your evening, thank you for this word, your word that you give us. Lord, would you help us to turn our hearts towards you and to hear your word and have it apply to our hearts. Help us to understand what it is that you actually call us to, what you desire from us, we pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, if you’d like, go ahead and turn in your Bible to James chapter 1, verse 1. And here is what we read there: James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes in the dispersion. Greetings.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet various trials of different kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
There’s some striking things right up front here. And if you think about, if you’re going to write somebody and they may or may not know who you are, how are you going to write them? How do you want them to come to know you? And for example, if you have an important position, would you be tempted to write it on the letterhead of that position, right? If you have like the really fine linen paper and it has the gold seal on it of the organization you’re on or the governmental agency you’re in or whatever it might be, wouldn’t you be tempted to use that? Because then people will know that you are important.
But there’s two things that we can learn from the way that James begins his letter by identifying himself as James the servant, or better translated, the slave of Jesus. First, he doesn’t have to give a whole lot of explanation of whom he is. So people have said, rightly I believe, that James is James the brother of Jesus because he was the best known James. In fact, James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And so if you got a letter from James and it seems to come by a seemingly authentic route, this is the James whom you’d presume it would be in the early church.
But he doesn’t say James the brother of Jesus. He doesn’t say the apostle James the brother of Jesus. He doesn’t say any of that. And you might say, well, that’s because he maybe wasn’t an apostle. He was only the brother of Jesus. He didn’t get the title. Maybe Jesus gave more authority to those who weren’t his family. But that’s actually not the case.
If we look at Galatians 1, verse 19, Paul talks of James the brother of Jesus, and he says, I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother. So James was recognized by the church as an apostle. He was viewed as having that authority that he really was a leader of the church. So he really was someone who could speak for the work of the gospel, for Jesus’s mission in the world.
And yet despite being well known and recognized by other apostles as an apostle, how does James choose to identify himself? As a slave. And it really is sort of unfortunate that our translations often translate this servant. That isn’t an inaccurate translation, but it doesn’t get the full force of what James seems to be trying to say here. James is trying to say, I am actually bound to Jesus. It’s not just that I choose to serve Jesus. I am his slave.
And so if you think about how we do introduce ourselves, for James, the most exalted title he can think of, the most impressive thing he can think of to say, the only thing that actually speaks of whom he is and what meaning he has, is I’m a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
James doesn’t see his dignity in how many titles he can play out. And we saw that a little bit. We’ve been looking at 2 Corinthians on Monday nights, and Paul very carefully, even though he establishes his authority as an apostle, says he doesn’t want to lord it over them. He doesn’t see himself as important over them. Well, James is even going a step further here. He’s not even going to use the titles he could use. He just simply is James.
Reminds me of my mentor, Pastor Dan Perrin, whom some of you were here when he came and preached earlier this year. What a joy that was. And I remember years ago while I was still in seminary, he was telling me he had completed all the classwork for a doctor of ministry degree, and then he quit. And at the time I thought, that’s really strange. And he said, well, I learned all the things I was supposed to learn in the program. That’s why I went. What I didn’t need is for people to call me Dr. Perrin. I’m Dan. It’s not about the title that people will call me and how impressive I am.
That really stuck with me, because he was a man who certainly deserved the title. He was a man, he is a man, I shouldn’t use past tense, he’s alive and well, thankfully. But a man of great wisdom, certainly taught me an awful lot, but he didn’t need the title. And that’s the kind of attitude we’re called to have. Titles aren’t what we strive for, even when they exist.
There was a legitimate reason to call James an apostle. There were going to be people who were pretenders. There were going to be people who tried to take over the church and taught things incorrectly and wanted power. And to know, well, here are those who have been called as apostles by the Lord. These are the ones who actually can convey accurately what Jesus has taught, was incredibly useful for protecting the early church. It wasn’t without use.
But as James writes the people, he doesn’t need to say the Apostle James, exalted brother of your Lord, who knew him even when he was young, and knew him longer than anyone else on this earth that’s alive to speak of it, and is affirmed by all the churches as the Apostle of Jerusalem, the one known as the Just One, James, to the tribes. There’s James, a slave.
And he carries that out, then, as he writes to the people.
We desperately want to belong to something. And he writes to them as belonging to something, and presumably is strongly believed, and I think this would be true just because of what we know of the early church. When James is writing, he is inevitably writing to both Jews and Gentiles. He refers to them as the 12 tribes in the dispersion, because the early church understood the Gentiles that were coming into the church were being adopted into the people of God, so that would include them as well. It’s not an exclusion of them.
But while we may not think much of it, to the 12 tribes in the dispersion, that’s not something you would want to celebrate. The dispersion, or the diaspora, was the spreading out of the Jews around the world, not being able to call their home their home any longer, and of course that gets worse by 70 A.D. when the temple’s destroyed. But it wasn’t what you wanted.
If you wanted to belong to something, you wanted to be a part of something, you wanted to be a part of something, you wanted to be a part of something, you wanted to be a part of something, if you wanted to belong to something, you wanted to be one of the 12 tribes located where the 12 tribes have always been, in the promised land, in the authority. And James, even as he addresses them, says, I’m writing you and I know that you’re dispersed all over. You are a people without a homeland.
But you have an identity as part of God’s people. The important thing wasn’t that they could say Israelite, or Roman, or Corinthian, or any other title they could lay upon themselves, some location they could invest themselves in. The important thing was they were a part of God’s people. That was the part, wherever they were, they were a part of God’s people, and that still is the part that matters.
It’s why the best thing we can answer if someone asks, what do you believe, isn’t trying to get into some kind of theological distinction in what type of Christian we are, but simply we’re Christians. And those of you that know me know I’m not by any means anti-denominational in any way, but even when I belong to a denomination, I’m not a denominator, I’m not a denominator in any way. But even when I belong to a denomination, if people ask me who it was, what did I believe, I didn’t go into that. I simply said I was a Christian.
That’s the best thing we can say, because it’s not about what little association we can join. It’s about being His, serving Him, a Christ follower. That’s whom it is that we are. That’s what gives us value. There’s value in it, and we can spend a lot of time talking about that. But as far as our identity, whom it is we are, there’s nothing else that can add more value than that we are slaves of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
James knows that. And so you can write a people that in part at least is broken, a people that is broken because they have lost the worldly identity they’d like to hold on to. And it’s only going to get worse. You can write them. And for James, I believe, just as he sees himself being a slave as the most exalted title, being someone who’s cast around the world but is one of God’s people is as exalted as you can get, because the part that actually matters is still with you.
You need to get to the heart, not to the pump. It’s the very thing that God instructed in the selection of King David. 1 Samuel 16, verse 7: But the Lord said to Samuel, Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.
There’s real value and hope when we realize that our hope and our value are in Him. And certainly, the people would have a lot of reasons that would start to etch away at that and make them wonder. Verse 2: Count all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
When we face trials, that’s not what we’re thinking of. When we face trials, we think, what’s going on? I’m supposed to be one of God’s people. I’m supposed to be loved by God. I thought things were going to be easy. And James says, no, that’s not how you know of God. That’s not how you know if God loves you. And that’s not how you know if you’re a member of God’s people. What you can testify to and what matters is that God’s going to produce steadfastness in you. He’s going to strengthen you as you go through difficult times.
Facing trials, which is affirmed even in that very first set of phrases. You’re not 12 tribes in dispersion unless you face trials. But facing trials, if you understand who Jesus is, well, that’s actually him affirming that he’s with you because he’s going to walk through them with you.
It reminds me a lot of what I heard as a constant theme throughout our devotionals during the prayer walk this week. And we talked a little bit about that in our Signal chat, talking about some of the things that came up. And I love watching how God works through that because we’ll start with sort of a core topic, but then how God weaves it through and takes it.
And one of the things that was remarkable, we were talking about being thankful to God, but consistently we came to being thankful to God even when it’s hard, even when it’s really painful. And I could hear that in some of your voices, even as you shared some of those things. We can say the truth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t feel the pain. It’s still there. But James, reflecting on his life and reflecting on God’s faithfulness, can look, and he can speak of this as a good thing, not a bad, because he has seen over and over again how God has been faithful, even in the midst of it.
And in fact, if we want to become mature Christians, if we want to actually be the men and women that God has called us to be, we have no choice but to do this. We have no choice but to do this, because maturity as faithful believers, those who can fulfill what God has called us to do, comes through going into all those hard times and walking through them with our God, with us.
One of the fascinating things, and you can probably talk to, you could talk to people in all kinds of fields where they’ve run into this, but it’s certainly something that you run into if you do sense a call to ministry and you go to seminary, is usually what that means, typically, is that you’re in a church and people start to say, well, would you like to do a scripture reading? Would you like to maybe preach a little devotional? You volunteer in different spots, and people start to view you as someone who maybe is showing promise to become a pastor. This might be something.
And so when you get to the first week of seminary, what you do is you have a whole bunch of people who have come from their different home churches, and all those home churches said, we think that you could do this. You should go off to seminary and get prepared, get trained to go do this, because you can go and teach God’s Word. And so you go into it as someone that maybe people will occasionally ask what the Bible has to say about something, or at least they want to hear you present what God has to say about something, and you arrive at seminary and you realize, at best, you are completely average, because that’s the exact story of everybody else there, too.
That’s now who am I? And then it gets worse, because, and I think this is pretty common at most seminaries, certainly in my seminary, what they intended to do then is, if you had any notion still that you had something special to give, they wanted to disabuse you of that. You were not God’s special, unique gift to the church. You might be God’s, God may have gifted you to bless the church in some way, to serve in some way, but they wanted to make sure that all of us knew that we had a lot to learn.
And so the first few weeks were explicitly designed to show you how much you didn’t know, and to make it actually downright painful. And it was painful, and it felt a little, maybe even a little cruel. But what they had realized is that people come feeling like they know lots, because you, if you go to seminary, you’ve probably read some books, and you’ve read the Bible, and you’ve taught some things, and you kind of feel like you know it, and it has to be broken down so you actually will listen and learn.
Are we humble enough to listen and learn? Are we able to do that? And here’s the second part, to do that and remain hopeful. Because this was the thing I saw some of my classmates say, they were just so despondent after the first few weeks. Because they had been really talented at their church. It was a little church, we were a little church, but they were really talented at their church. They had been really talented at their church. It was a little church where they actually did do some preaching, or did a lot of different things, and they really had felt like they had something, and all of a sudden, there’s all this stuff being thrown at them.
It’s a fire hose, it’s confusing, they suddenly are very average around everybody else, and then the professors are drilling on them. And the key thing was, can you remain hopeful in that? And that’s not something unique to being a seminary student. Because here’s the thing, God is preparing each and every one of us, and he continues to prepare each and every one of us. And sometimes he’s going to allow those trials, those difficult places, and we can think, you know, I’ve finally grown as a Christian, I finally have things down, I’ve read God’s word, I’m trying to do it, and then it just feels like go right back into the grinder and it’s painful.
And the key thing, and this is the hard thing, and I wish I could say I’ve figured this out, but I haven’t, I still struggle with it, is when you hit those points, can I remain hopeful?
James here is hopeful, not because it’s easy, but because he knows that God is faithful. Not because he knows everything’s going to be comfortable, but because he knows that God’s waiting for him. Are we able to be both humble and led in hope in whatever God has us in right now? That’s the challenge.
And if you felt despondent, don’t beat yourself up more for that. But the key thing is to hear that God is faithful. Verse four, let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
James says, keep trusting that God is doing this. He’s working in you. They have a purpose for you.
Even if we try in theory to stay hopeful, though, one of the challenges in these situations is we go from, okay, I’ve been beaten down, I’ve realized I’m not so great. God is the one who’s great, and I realize he’s going to be faithful, but maybe that means I should just sit down and back off and be quiet because it seems like I try to do something and it’s difficult and it’s painful.
Maybe I should just stop. Indeed, there are times where we should be quiet, but the key thing here, and we can see that as we go through this first chapter of James’s letter, it’s not that we should be passive. It’s not that we should just quit doing things and realize, okay, God’s great, I’m not, so therefore I have nothing to give.
No, the point is, God’s great, I’m not, but God works through me and he’s calling me to something. He wants me to actually hear what he’s calling me to do.
We can see that if we just jump to the later part of the chapter, verse 22. James says, but be doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he looks like, what he was like.
If we’re actually going to receive, if that process of being humbled and then moving from humble, from being humbled to hopeful stops there, that’s not enough. It’s like looking in the mirror and walking away. James says, what you need to do is recognize that and then with that, move forward in doing what God has called you to do.
We receive and then we act.
There’s a bit of irony here today as we come to the book of James on Reformation Sunday, because if you happen to know what Martin Luther said about the epistle of James, it might seem a little odd, because does anyone know what he called the epistle of James? Epistle of Straw. This was not Martin Luther’s favorite book of the Bible.
But notably, we often kind of overplay that. Luther, who was more than willing to say even overly frank things, even about God’s word, never advocated that we should get rid of the book of James. He just feared how people read it.
Because if you read the book of James and you don’t read the overall context of the New Testament, you might think, well, it just means I need to do a lot of good works. And that was the very thing that was happening in the church is that people had come to the conclusion, if I just do enough good works, I can earn God’s favor. It’s not what they should have been being taught, it’s not what historically the church believed or what we believe today, but it had gone that way.
And Luther saw James as a hindrance to that because James is saying we need to act. But at the same time, interestingly enough, Luther on multiple occasions preached from the book of James because he recognized, just like we do, we do need to act. It’s only that we understand we’re not great, God is great, his grace is working in us, therefore we act not because we’re now earning his grace, but rather because we have his grace.
That’s something that’s in the book of James and woven throughout all of scripture.
James isn’t changing the message. James is conveying something that oftentimes we overcorrect too far the other way. Well, I’m just going to receive, I don’t need to do anything. But it was Jesus’ very call that has been the touchstone for this whole series that we’ve been looking at, Matthew 4:19. He said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. He didn’t say, listen to me and I’ll make you fishers of men. He didn’t say, say you love me and I’ll make you fishers of men. He said, follow me and I will make you fishers of men.
Jesus does indeed save us. We can’t do anything to save ourselves, but Jesus saves us and then calls us. He gives us purpose. This isn’t all about just kind of making it through. He actually has a mission for us. He looks at you and says, I have a purpose for you. You have people you can minister to that you can bless and you can come to those people and be my hands and feet in this world.
And that’s what Jesus was talking about when he called them to be fishers of men. He wasn’t saying, you motley crew of 12 disciples that can never seem to keep focused on where you’re supposed to be going, you’re going to save people. And he was saying, I’m going to use you. I’m going to be the one that saves people, but I’m going to send you out to convey my love, convey my gospel to the world.
It’s not just hearing, it’s becoming a disciple. Jesus wants us to be his disciples.
I think it’s a good question to ask ourselves, do we look like we’re faithful to him? Do we look faithful? Because when people see us speak of Jesus, but we don’t act and look faithful, what do we convey? Well, we might be conveying that we’re sinners, but we’re not conveying that it means very much to us that Jesus loves us.
And that’s the heart of what James is getting to, that we should act as those who recognize the wonder of God’s grace, that we look in the mirror and we see ourselves and we see what God has done for us. And there’s no way we can just turn away and go back to the way we were because, wow, look at what Jesus has done for us.
And if we understand that and live in that, that’s how we actually go fishing, how we help other people to know him.
Because as much as none of us like to admit it, and at times we might even fool ourselves, I think all of us look in the mirror at times and see our real selves and say, there’s no way that God could love me. There’s no way I can be lovable at all. There’s no way that the world can even put up with me in the long run because I’m just a mess.
And the key thing is we look in the mirror and we see God’s grace being poured on us and we say, but God loves me. And that’s what I’m being sent to convey.
Part of Luther’s sensitivity to James is really his whole life story. Luther had spent his life feeling unworthy, feeling the weight of his own sin, driving those whom he confessed to sin too crazy because he couldn’t stop confessing sin because he was so acutely, profoundly aware of the fact that he fell short.
It was with that that his spiritual guide in the monastery, Johann von Staupitz, told him that he should start teaching the New Testament because Staupitz realized that Luther, if you’ll pardon the pun, could not stop it. He kept going back to sin. And what Staupitz realized is that Luther needed to actually just soak in God’s word. Just soak in God’s word. He needed to soak it in so much that only would happen if he was teaching it, where he had to know every word and he needed to know how to present it to students because then as he soaked it in, he’d finally hear God’s grace.
And so it was, that was what led Luther to write and to teach on the Book of Romans and what led him in 1517 to nail the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church. Our door right here, Castle Church Wittenberg.
Why did he do that? Because as he encountered God’s word, he realized that all this time he’d been completely burdened and broken down by the fact that he was unworthy of God’s care, that he was constantly waiting for God to finally call all his debts. And he realized that God was actually paying all of his debts.
But I think the reason why, even though Luther at times became annoyed at the Epistle of James, why he didn’t throw it out is he also realized that it wasn’t enough for him to simply recognize that. That if he recognized that and actually meant anything to him, he was going to do something about it. He was going to help other people who were feeling the same burden.
If we feel God’s grace and comfort and we do nothing with it, have we actually understood God’s grace and comfort? Because how can we take something so precious and so beautiful and so full of life and say, well, you know, it’s nice I have it now? Unless we also say, but other people need it too.
And if you think of that iconic moment in the story of Martin Luther, is he’s at the Diet of Worms and he says, here I stand, I can do no other. What is that really him saying? It’s saying, yes, I’m speaking of God’s grace and I can’t stop speaking about God’s grace. I can’t stop speaking about God’s grace. And I can’t stop speaking about God’s grace. I can’t help. I can’t stop fishing for men and women who feel desperately mired in a swamp and need the fresh water of God’s grace.
We recognize what we aren’t and we recognize the value of what God is. We do have a calling. That’s what we see woven throughout scripture.
God over and over again says he’s the one that’s going to do the saving. He’s the one that’s going to do the restoring. But then he calls us to follow him. Because it’s so wonderful what he does for us. And so that’s what we see in the story of the faithful heroes of the faith throughout scripture.
If you think about Peter that we looked at a few weeks ago, what does he do? He keeps messing up. He knows acutely he’s a sinner, but despite all his foibles, he goes and he declares God’s goodness because he can point to his foibles and say, here I am. Here’s what I am, but here’s what he is.
We think about Paul and his past. It would have been so easy for him to just go and hide in a corner and say, yeah, I murdered the church and now I realize I was actually a murderer. I actually killed people for believing in Jesus. I know Jesus is the Lord now. I’m just going to try to pretend that I didn’t even exist and hope people forget about me.
But he realized if God was going to take the time to know him, that the last thing he could do was that.
John, in all of his wonder, encountering the Lord and his love, he couldn’t just hold that in or just really be all excited if someone said hi to him. He couldn’t do that. He had to actually write people and encourage people and say, do you realize what we’ve seen and what we’ve heard and what God has done? Do you realize that?
And James, for having the distinction of being the Lord’s brother, of having that incredible, incredible, unique, privileged position, he couldn’t go around touting that. He had to go and serve. He felt the call that Jesus was his true Lord, not just his brother. That he was a slave to him to go do what he’d been called to do. He was called to face trials, but to testify to the gospel in the midst of that.
We’re going to go fishing. The key thing is that we understand his value, what he’s done for us. And then we go and respond to it. We look at ourselves in that mirror and we say, I have to go. I have to go serve. I have to go serve in whatever way God has called me to.
And again, as we’ve talked about before, that doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. James isn’t saying here, you need to come to Jerusalem and serve in the church at Jerusalem, nor does he say you need to leave Jerusalem and disperse yourself to some far off place that you didn’t know. Where are we? God has placed you where you are. And how can you reflect the wonder of what God’s done for you in that place? That’s what it looks like to go fishing.
Because really in the end, we tend to think of ourselves as the fishers, but Jesus is the one who’s fishing. He’s given us a wonderful and amazing and celebration worthy honor of being those who get to pull in the net and celebrate as we see what God has done.
And when he sends us off to be fishers of men and women, what he’s saying is go and do that. Remember that I love you and that I am with you. And when you’re looking at me, remember, I see you as mine, as someone I value and gave my life for, not as someone who has all the stains and marks and failings upon him or herself.
When we see that, go and pull in that net. Because there are other people that need to know that too.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that you would guide us today. As we come before you in your word, we are reminded that you are the God who loves us and who is with us. Would you help us never to lose the wonder of that? Would you help us to remember in our faults and foibles that you can work through those even? That when we’ve done horrible things, that you can redeem us still, that we are beyond your reach. And that when all that is true and we find ourselves serving you, that it never, ever becomes that we’re so great. We pray that you’d help us to hold on to that hope and that calling each and every day. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
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