Signs and Seals

As we come to our Scripture text from the book of Romans, let’s pray one more time.

Gracious heavenly Father, we ask truly from our hearts, knowing how dependent we are upon your kindness and goodness, that you would give us ears to hear, that we may hear not just a man or a preacher or a sermon, but we would hear your very voice through your Word speaking to us. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Romans chapter 4:9-12. Continuing our series we began in January. Romans chapter 4, this paragraph, verses 9-2. Follow along as I read.

“Is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised, who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.”

We sang these words a few minutes ago: “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing, were not the right man on our side, the man of God’s own choosing. Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is he. Lord Sabbaoth (that means Lord of hosts, Lord of armies) his name. From age to age the same, and he must win the battle.” Yesterday, All Hallows’ Eve in a traditional church calendar; November 1st being Saints’ Day, All Saints’ Day. And so, the day before was All Hallows’ Eve, which has now come down to us and become Halloween, which has become something quite different.

But we also recall on October 31st the start of the Reformation. Of course, there was no official “now we’re starting the Reformation,” but it was that day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses. At the heart of the Reformation was the theological declaration found in Luther’s hymn that we sang, Ein Feste Burg: if we confide in our own strength, even a speck of it, as it relates to our justification then our striving would be losing. That is what is at stake in the Reformation and in this doctrine we have been doing so much to study for months: justification by faith alone. Who made the first choice in your salvation? God, not you. Who did the work – all of the work – in your regeneration? God, not you. Who kept the law as the ground of your justification? God, not you. Who paid the penalty of sin and paid it in full? God, not you. Who provided the righteousness which faith alone receives and apprehends? God did, not you. Who in fact enabled the gift of faith itself, that we might believe? God, not you. That’s what the Reformation is about. It means – here’s all sorts of good news – that the one ultimately responsible for your final glorification and preservation is God, not you. The one who can give you confidence in your salvation now and to eternity is God, not you, and the one, therefore, who ought to be praised and glorified is God, not you. That’s what Paul has been talking about from the end of chapter 3 here into Romans chapter 4. That theme continues as he continues to talk about justification. If you think to yourself, I’m tired of hearing about justification by faith, well, your beef is not with me, but with the Apostle Paul and with the Holy Spirit who inspired him. I suppose you could have a beef with the pace of the one preaching it, but ultimately that’s on you.

My outline is very simple for this text. First, we will trace the logic of Paul’s argument. That will take most of our time. We’ll have a short parenthesis along the way to think about the sacraments, and then we will finish with three lessons from this paragraph about justification. So, very simple. Logic of Paul’s argument, and then we’ll finish with three lessons, which will lead us to the table.

So, let’s think about the logic of Paul’s argument. Hope you have your Bible open, and you look at verse 9, he presents the issue. All the way in verse 1 he had already asked a question – a related but different question. Verse 1, “What then shall we say was gained by Abraham our forefather according to the flesh?” So, in chapter 3 he talked about justification by faith alone. And now in chapter 4, he’s going to anchor this mainly in one example, Abraham, and we also saw a corroborating example from David. But he’s asking the question in chapter 4, how did this work? How was Abraham justified? And quoting from Genesis 15:6, he makes very clear that Abraham is an example not of a good person being justified, not of a godly, law-keeping person being justified, but how God justifies the ungodly. His faith was counted to him. The righteousness was imputed, was reckoned to his account. That’s what he’s established about Abraham, that justification is by faith, not according to works.

And you might say, well, what is there left to say? Well, verse 9, Paul is asking a related question. While having established that this blessing comes through faith, might it be possible then that this blessing of justification by faith alone only comes to a certain kind of person? Perhaps (agreeing with everything that he’s already laid out), perhaps there’s some kind of prerequisite. Maybe you have to be a certain family. You have to belong to a certain ethnicity. That’s what he’s arguing. Look at the word blessing in verse 9, and you can see he’s immediately tying this to verse 7 and 8. David’s Psalm 32, “Blessed are those whose deeds are forgiven. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.” And then verse 9, he asks, okay, let’s think about this blessing, this blessing of justification by faith, this blessing of forgiveness, this blessing of having the righteousness of Christ counted to us and our sins not counted to us – do you have to be a Jew to receive this blessing? That’s what he’s asking. When he says circumcision, that’s what he means. That’s sort of shorthand for the Jewish people, the sign that was to differentiate the Jew from the Gentile. Okay, this is how justification works. Do you have to be a Jew for God to justify you by faith? Do you have to be a Jew first? And then verse 10 – so, verse 9, he establishes the issue – and verse 10, his argument is as simple as it is effective. We can all follow this. It’s a very simple, straightforward argument. He says in verse 10, let’s simply remember the order in which this happened. We would say, just remember that Genesis 15 comes before Genesis 17. If you hold your finger in Romans 4 for a moment, turn back to the very first book in the Bible. You can see this. Genesis 15. So, Genesis 12, God in a way announces the covenant. And then Genesis 15, he does more to establish the covenant. And then Genesis 17, he gives the sign of the covenant. But here, Genesis 15:6, after God promises, “Look up at the stars; so shall your offspring be” – he’s already an old man, no kids, and he looks up at those stars, and he says, “I trust you, God.” And God says, “That faith I will credit to you as righteousness.”

So there in Genesis 15 – here’s Paul’s argument – in Genesis 15, Abraham is a justified man. He is ungodly. He was called as a pagan man from Ur of the Chaldees. But here by faith he is justified. What’s the order? First, he was justified by faith with Abraham, and then chapter 17, he received the sign of circumcision. So, look at the end of chapter 16:16. You see Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. This was his bad idea. This isn’t working with my wife Sarah. We’ll go to the concubine Hagar and have a child that way. So, nine months for her to have a child. So, at the very least, he was, you might say, 85 at the oldest when the events of chapter 15 happened. And then look at chapter 17:1 when Abraham was 99 years old. So, we have at least 14 years. The Jewish Rabbis said it was 29 years, but let’s just say it’s at least 14 years between Abraham being justified by faith and Abraham receiving circumcision. You look at the end of chapter 17:24, Abraham was 99 years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. So, this was a sign given to Abraham to his household and henceforth to all the sons on the eighth day. So, here’s Paul’s argument. It’s brilliant, simple, brilliant. They hailed Abraham as the forefather of their faith. We saw that in Romans 4:1. He’s the forefather. He’s the ancestor. They say he is the Jew par excellence, Father Abraham. The Jewish people are descended from Father Abraham. He’s the fountainhead of the Jewish people. But here’s what Paul is saying. He wasn’t even a Jew. Now, he was a Semite from the line of Shem. But if a Jew means someone, a male who is circumcised, then Abraham wasn’t even a Jew when he was justified because it was at least 14 years before he received the physical sign of circumcision. So, here’s Paul’s argument. Circumcision, which was the sine qua non – it’s good to have a few Latin phrases in your arsenal – it means “that without which” or the essential thing. It was the defining characteristic. Circumcision defined the Jewish people. Paul is saying it cannot be that circumcision is necessary to be truly one of God’s people because Abraham was already righteous in God’s sight, he was already justified, at least 14 years earlier before he was circumcised. That’s the argument. Genesis 15 comes before Genesis 17. So, you can’t say, as he’s imagining his Jewish arguing partner, if you’re going to say that, well, in order to be justified by faith, you really have to be a Jew, or this only works for the Jewish people and you need circumcision first – Paul says that didn’t work for Abraham, and he’s supposed to be the one who started this whole Jewish nation.

So, think about verse 11 now, back in Romans chapter 4. So, he sets out the issue in verse 9. He gives the argument – brilliant but simple – in verse 10. And then he talks about circumcision, and he gives two words. So, circumcision is not the grounding. Circumcision is not what made Abraham justified because that happened a decade and a half later. Circumcision was not a prerequisite. So then, what was circumcision? Two words. First, he says in Romans 4:11 it was a sign. What’s a sign? It points to something else, like a weather alert on your phone. If you saw all the thunderbolts or lightning and thunder and clouds, and you said, “Look! A storm.” Nobody thinks it’s raining on your phone, but that is a sign, a pointer, like a donkey or an elephant for political parties, or a table decoration with colors of orange and brown and a bumpy-looking gourd. We have one of those in our house. It just looks like something diseased. I can’t even – get it away from the kitchen table. But what does that signify? Just tells you it’s fall. Even when it was 80 degrees this past week, the sign signifies. So, circumcision is the sign. That’s what verse 11 means. And what did it signify? What was it pointing to? Well, back in Genesis 17, we see plainly, it was a sign of God’s covenant. We read in Genesis 17:10, “This is my covenant which you shall keep between me and you and your offspring after you. Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins. It shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.” And then multiple times it says “and your offspring after you.” So that’s what it’s a sign for. Even the language of cutting a covenant, which is how they often did covenants in the ancient world – and here it is a literal cutting of the foreskin. We still have that kind of language – if you cut somebody a deal. So, they’re cutting a covenant. That’s what it’s a sign for.

And what did this covenant with Abraham promise? Well, Genesis 17:7, we see three things: I will establish my covenant between you and your offspring after you throughout their generations to be an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your offspring after you. I will give to you and your offspring – so the first thing he promised is you’re going to have offspring – I will give you the land of your sojournings, the land of Canaan, and I will be their God. So, there were three fundamental things in the Abrahamic covenant. I promise you offspring. I promise you land. And I will be with you. You want to get three P’s? You could say progeny, promised land, divine presence. Ah, that’s good. I ought to be a preacher. Three things. But the heart of it – I want you to see the heart of it there – is “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” It was the presence of God. So, circumcision was the sign of this covenant with Abraham and with his offspring. It’s also called – so that’s the first word, a sign – and then Romans 4:11 says, “The sign of circumcision as a seal.” This maybe familiar language to some of you. The Westminster Confession says, “Sacraments are holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace.” That language, signs and seals, is not invented by us. It comes right here from Romans 4:11. That’s how we think about the sacraments. If there was more time, we could show how the sign of circumcision and the sign of Passover in the Old Testament are given spiritual meaning in the New Testament, and the sign of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are applied spiritually back into the desert wanderings in 1 Corinthians 10. In other words, there’s an overlap in this conceptual universe between circumcision and baptism and the Lord’s Supper and Passover. There’s an early book in the history of the church – probably dates to the second century – it’s called Second Clement. Maybe it wasn’t really from Clement of Rome, but it’s a sermon, and it may be the first fully intact sermon outside of the New Testament that we have. And in this sermon, it often refers to baptism as the seal. In fact, that language common in the church fathers, to talk about using interchangeably the seal or your baptism. So, this language “sign and seal” quickly becomes sort of sacramental language.

We’ll think about what a seal does. Not a [seal noise] – not that seal, you understand, but a (it’s good impression, I know) – but my books, all thousands of them that are going to be moved, most of them have, you know, a nice embosser. The front page says Library of Kevin DeYoung. That’s a seal. Indicates possession. Or a wax seal on an envelope, an official document, indicates and authenticates the document. Or today you have to get a notary to sign certain official documents. When I was flying back on Monday from the U.K., I needed a U.S. passport. Went to Global Entry that I could come in. That little book, just paper in itself, but it’s a sign that I’m American citizen. It’s a seal validating that claim before others. So, circumcision is a sign of the covenant, and it’s a seal. And I want you to note very carefully – look at verse 11 – what is it a seal of? Because people can misread this and think it says circumcision was a seal of Abraham’s faith. That’s not what it says. It is a seal of the righteousness of faith. It’s a double genitive construction, which in Greek grammar is the most – the simplest way to translate it is “of.” So, you could say it is a seal of the righteousness of the faith. The ESV translates it “a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith.” Now this is important, because Paul is not saying that circumcision was a symbolic memento of what he had done, but rather it was a seal of what God had done and God would do. Which is why – you’re thinking, how can circumcision be all of this, a seal of the righteousness of faith, and yet plainly this is not just an ethnic identity marker. That would go completely against the whole argument that Paul is making. If we say, well, circumcision was just about being a Jew, he’s making the exact opposite argument. He’s saying Abraham in some ways wasn’t even a Jew. He’s giving this richest, deepest spiritual significance to what circumcision signified and sealed.

So then, why was this sign and seal given by God’s command to eight-day-old infants? It was a sign of their inclusion in the covenant, a sign of God’s covenant promise and provision of righteousness through faith. For Abraham, it was a sign and seal of a promise that he had knowingly embraced. For his sons, it was a promise that they were engaged to embrace. So yes, it has a different facet, but materially related to the same covenant, the same promise. One way to think of it, perhaps, is like a wedding ring and an engagement ring. So, having knowingly professed and expressed this faith, circumcision was to Abraham a sign and seal, the actual wedding ring. But it was also rightly given as a sign and seal to his infant sons as a kind of engagement ring, a betrothal as it were, that they then need to make these promises their own. It is, if you can see where I might be going with this, by this same logic that in the Presbyterian church, we believe in infant baptism. That baptism is a seal not so much, first of all, of our faith, but it points away from us to God’s work, a seal of the righteousness of faith – that faith which for believers has already been expressed, and for their children is given in anticipation. So everywhere baptism, yes, connected to faith. For Abraham, it was that faith he already had, and the sign of circumcision was then given to his sons for a faith that they were engaged to profess. All the spiritual things we can say about baptism, we can say about circumcision. Baptism is absolutely about forgiveness and justification. All branches of the church probably agree on that. Circumcision we see here is explicitly about being forgiven. We see that in verse 7, and verse 11, it is explicitly about being justified. Neither sign – and here’s where I know we have good faith disagreements with believers, some even in this church, maybe some in your family or school – neither sign is first of all about faith, but both signs, baptism and circumcision, are about the righteousness that comes to the sinner by faith. A faith that someone may have already expressed, like Abraham, or a faith that one is engaged to profess, like the infant sons who descended from Abraham. It is that logic with circumcision, because there’s no denying circumcision [was a] sign and seal of the deepest, highest, best spiritual privileges: justification by faith. Paul says that’s what circumcision was about, and Abraham got it, and he gave it to his sons. And by the same logic, baptism signifies those very same spiritual realities and is given to believers and to their children. That was the short detour to talk about the sacraments.

Let’s come back to follow the rest of Paul’s logic, and then we’ll finish with some lessons. So, you see in the second half of verse 11 and verse 12, this is the point. The purpose – it’s nice when the Bible does that: okay, tracking with you, back on, what is this about? Here it is – the purpose was to make him (Abraham) the father of two sets of people who are now a part of one family. So, Father Abraham is the father of all who believe. So, this is Paul’s argument. He’s saying if you are not a Jew, Abraham is your father when righteousness is counted to you by faith, just as it was counted to Abraham by faith. You don’t have to be circumcised to be counted righteous, because Abraham was counted righteous at least 14 years before he was circumcised. And then he says in verse 12, if you are a Jew, Abraham is your father, but not merely because you receive the sign that he received of circumcision, not a mere fleshly thing, but for the circumcised, if you, too, walk in the faith that Abraham walked in. This is what he’s saying. It’s a radical thing. We’re so used to it, Jew and Gentile. That doesn’t feel like the polarizing issue for most of us, but you put yourself back in the first century, he’s saying something truly astounding, that you don’t have Father Abraham as your father just because you’re circumcised if you don’t have faith. And even if you’re a Gentile and you’re not circumcised, he is your father if you believe. People sometimes talk about the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – as if by virtue of having important stories about Abraham that somehow Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are roughly the same. Not so. The apostle Paul would say we do not share Abraham as our father because we have undergone the same religious ritual. We do not share Abraham as our father because we have descended from the same earthly family tree. We do not share Abraham as our father because we consider his example worth imitating. We do not share Abraham as our father because we seek to obey God as Abraham obeyed God. No, we only share Abraham as our father if we have the faith of Father Abraham. And in Galatians chapter 3, Paul makes explicit that Abraham had faith in Christ. You say, “How can that be?” Well, he had faith in the promise of the offspring that would come from him. That was not – ultimately the most important part was not to be Isaac or the many descendants from Isaac and Jacob and the patriarchs, but that ultimately it was the offspring, capital “C” Child, the Messiah who would come. Abraham heard that promise, knowing Genesis 3:15, knowing about the seed of the woman to crush the seed of the serpent, and in that promise, he believed. Galatians 3, “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham and the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham” – don’t think you got to get to the New Testament to get the gospel – “saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.” That’s what it means in the fullest sense to be a child of Abraham, to have the faith in the promise like Abraham had. That’s the logic of the argument.

Three lessons. Three lessons about justification. Number one, we are not justified by signs and rituals. Now, we are going to celebrate the sacrament, rightfully so. Jesus himself commanded, left to the church two of these signs and seals: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We don’t want to undervalue them. And yet, it’s a perennial temptation in all religions in the history of the world to turn salvation into the mere performance of a ritual. I remember when I was in seminary, we did this immersion weekend. We drove down from Boston to New York City, and we spent time. We went to a Hindu temple, a Sikh temple. Don’t worry, we weren’t doing any of the things. We were just sort of – we had permission to watch, and then we met with one of the senior priests, and we asked them questions. It was also an opportunity for us to share our faith. So, we were trying to do evangelism. But you would watch these rituals, and they were all young men performing these oblations or these food sacrifices. These were not folks who had been to extra years of advanced education. The thing was just to perform the ritual and do the thing or spin the wheel in some Buddhist traditions. It was merely a ritual to perform. No sermon. It was about a ritual. That’s the way the ancient religions of the world worked. You do a sacrifice, you do a thing, you please the god, you get blessings. There’s always a temptation to think, well, you just do the ritual.

Think about in the Mormon church, their practice of baptisms for the dead. This is what it says on their official website: “Jesus Christ taught that baptism is essential to the salvation of all who have lived on earth. (Not so, but continuing.) Many people, however, have died without being baptized. Others were baptized without proper authority. Because God is merciful (this is what the Mormon church says), he has prepared a way for all people to receive the blessings of baptism. By performing proxy baptisms on behalf of those who have died, church members offer these blessings to deceased ancestors. Individuals can then choose to accept or reject the ordinances that have been performed on their behalf.” There’s a Mormon temple coming up on 51 just down from where I live and Nathan lives and some of you live, just in one of those empty lots there on the way from Lebanon to Harris Teeter. There’s a Mormon temple. Only in Mormon temples can you perform these baptisms for the dead. You see what their own theology says? You perform those for people who are already dead. They haven’t had the ritual, but you can do it, and then they can accept it somehow in the grave, in the afterlife, and you’re doing something. The very fact of this religious ritual is doing something for their eternal destiny. And with all due respect, we see the same mistake in Christian traditions. Catholic catechism says “through baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God, through the sacraments.” The Catholic catechism says in the sacramental economy, we have the dispensation of the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice. So, in baptism in the Catholic Church, you receive justification by faith. You are born again. You are forgiven by the very act of having undergone that ritual. Or the Orthodox Church – Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox – this is what it says. Their website, Orthodox Church in America: “In the Christian church, the practice of baptism takes on a new and particular significance. It no longer remains merely a sign of moral change and spiritual rebirth, it becomes very specifically the act of a person’s death and resurrection in and with Jesus.” The Orthodox Church says later, “Through the act of immersion (which they administer immersion to infants also), the baptized person dies and is born again in the resurrection of Christ into eternal life.” So there also the ritual of baptism itself causes you to be born again, spiritual rebirth.

I submit to you that these ways of thinking about religious ritual are exactly the opposite of the logic that Paul is making. It is more in step with the logic of the Jews that he was trying to counter, who said, “But we’ve had the ritual.” Now, before we all pat ourselves on the back and say, “Thank God I’m not like other people,” it’s possible as evangelical Christians, you trust in the act of signing a piece of paper sometime at a camp or praying a rote prayer that somebody put into your mouth or walking an aisle or throwing a pine cone into the fire or raising a hand, thinking that some ritual performance apart from true saving faith has rendered you justified. We see in this text in the very heart of the Reformation, we are not justified by signs and rituals, only by a heart of faith. And it is a perennial temptation of the human heart to be drawn to those things. People today will be drawn to those things. You say, “Oh, I don’t know, this Protestant, this Reformed, this evangelical thing. I don’t know. Just tell me what I have to do.” And somebody says, “It’s very easy. Just go to Mass, do that, do this sign, just do these things.” Of course, we believe in doing things and having commands, but we must be absolutely clear that those signs do not make us justified.

Number two, more briefly. Second lesson: we are not justified by family and ethnic heritage. Now, we get that about Jews and Gentiles. We see that point. We’ve probably heard that before. We maybe even heard it about black and white, Asian, Hispanic. But we’re also talking about your family, my family. Family does not keep you out, and your family does not mean you are all the way in. You may be on one of those two ends. Some of you are saying, “If you knew what my family was really like, there’s no way. No way that I can be on the same spiritual plane with you, pastor.” Not so. Or someone else is thinking, though you wouldn’t quite say it, but you’re trusting in, “Yeah, I know I’m not perfect. I need to be born again. Justification by faith. I got it,” but boy, you’re feeling good about your family, about your heritage, about your practice of family worship and devotions and your Christian schooling and it’s possible you’re trusting in that family rather than in faith. So I want to say to the teenager who’s here this morning who has not really thought about your own faith before, or I want to say to the husband who’s being dragged here week after week by your wife, or the couple that happens to be here this morning but if you’re honest you come to church one out of four Sundays and you’re thinking to yourself, I’ve always been a part of a Christian family. Is it possible that family connection is a kind of circumcision in your life? A kind of ritual, trusting in the performance of that sign apart from really, truly personal your own faith and resting and receiving Christ? Or think about the unity in the body of Christ. If you look across this room, and don’t go stare at people right now, but you see somebody on the other side of this room, and they’re not the same color as you, or they don’t school their kids like you do, they don’t root for the same teams that you do, they come from a different country, they have a different accent, maybe they speak a different first language, maybe, heaven forbid, they’re Yankees from up north. Or you’re with not Charlotte transplants, but real Charlotteans, and they are diehard southerners. We’re all together. If you are truly, solely, genuinely resting on Christ, then that person with all those differences, they have the same spiritual Father Abraham, and we are a part of the same family. There’s no other place. Politics can’t do this. Schools can’t do this. Bring that kind of people together to say we have the same Father Abraham when we have the same faith and the same promise.

Which leads to a third lesson. Finally, we are not justified by signs and rituals. We are not justified by family and ethnic heritage. And finally, we are not justified by anything we do before faith or anything we do in conjunction with faith. Think of this table, which we’ll come to in just a moment. Christ is both the host – he’s the one who prepared it. That’s why we have all those strange details before the Last Supper. It says you’re going to find a donkey. You’re going to untie. You’re going to go, and there’s a room prepared. That’s showing that Jesus is the host of this meal. He’s set up everything. It’s all according to his arrangement. But he’s not just the host, he’s actually the meal. He’s the one we feast upon. And to come to this table, you have to recognize that you are dying of spiritual starvation, and apart from Christ, you’re already dead. That’s what it means to come in a worthy manner. You’re starving, and you know that Jesus Christ is the only meal that can heal you, that can satisfy you, and that will last. And here’s the wonderful news of the gospel: the invite list for this meal is for everyone who has ears to hear. You don’t have to worry about a wedding being restricted by the size of the reception hall or a Thanksgiving meal – you wish you could invite everyone, but your house is only so big. No, this can go out to everyone who believes. We so emphasize faith as the instrument of our justification by the working of the Holy Spirit because it is only by faith – and praise God, it is for everyone who has faith – the means by which we are joined to Christ, and we can share in all his benefits. It only takes faith. “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing, were not the right man on our side, the man of God’s own choosing. Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is he. Lord Sabbaoth his name; from age to age the same, and he must win the battle.” Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, we give thanks for the feast of your Word and the feast at this table. Would you now strengthen us as we receive it by faith unto eternal life? We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.