Watching and Waiting

Father in heaven, help us now as we come to your Word. We want to be a confident people, you want us to be an assured people, but oh Lord may we not be a presumptuous people. Help us to have a keen eye to see our own sin and hypocrisy and then to cast our eyes upon Christ and whom there is forgiveness full and free. Speak to us now by your Word, give me an unction from the Holy Spirit and by that same spirit would you give to your people ears to hear in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Our text this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25. The parable of the Ten Virgins. Matthew chapter 25 verses 1 through 13. Matthew 25 beginning at verse 1. “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Give of them were foolish and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept, but at midnight there was a cry. Here is the bridegroom, come out to meet him. Then all those virgins rose and trimmed their lamps and the foolish said to the wise, give us some of your oil for our lamps are going out, but the wise answered saying, since there will not be enough for us and for you go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.” While they were going to buy the bridegroom came and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins came also saying “Lord, Lord open to us”, but he answered, “Truly I say to you I do not know you, what therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

It was about 10 or 15 years ago, lo when I was a young man in my 30s, and one of my friends from high school, I may have mentioned this before, he had the idea that three of us friends from high school ought to climb one of the fourteeners in Colorado. There are 53 peaks in Colorado that are taller than 14,000 feet. Some of them you should not try, they’re different levels and we did one of the level one or two. You need to sort of be in basic shape and acclimated a little bit to the lack of oxygen, but no special skills for which we were very glad, otherwise you would not have a pastor. It wasn’t my idea, but I went along with it and we decided to hike in a few hours the night before, sleep in a tent, very much not my idea, and then go the rest of the way up the mountain the next day, I don’t know how many miles, but you really need to get to the top before the afternoon because that’s when the afternoon showers and storms can come in and you wanna make it down, so it is a number of hours up and hours back. So we went out part way and then slept that night and one of my friends who is into camping more than I am, it’s impossible to be into camping less than I am, he knew a little bit what he was doing and so we packed a tent, one tent for three grown men, it was very tight, and since we were going out there in the late afternoon we were going to have a meal, we had a little stove and our little propane and we had our little pots and pans and making our macaroni or whatever we did, and we had, this was smart, we had a little pulley system figured out to hang up your food between the trees, you don’t wanna attack bears and whatnot. So, we hardly slept, three of us crammed in that little tent on the ground, but we had at least planned for a big dinner and for sleeping. We did not plan as well for the main event, which was hiking up to the top of the mountain. I should have brought better shoes, meaning real hiking shoes, I sprained my ankle and hobbled on the way down. We should have packed warmer clothes. Turns out even in summer 14,000 feet it’s cold up there. We should have brought some of those hiking poles. We saw all sorts of people with those little poles, and we thought, where’d you get those things, that looks really smart and helpful. I wish I had brought some gloves, not only because it was getting cold, but then end it was nothing very technical, but you did have to scramble around some boulders and my hands were these soft pastor hands were getting beat up, I wish I had some gloves and most of all, most of all, we should have brought more water. We had the little filter thingy, and we filtered out some water from the stream, but that was down the mountain a ways and just had one sorta Gatorade bottle that you would go out to the track with and going up and going back down until we got to the stream again I was thirsty. Now, I’m here. We did make it up, we did make it back, but I look back on our preparations and lack thereof and think, I’m really glad we made it down. We, 30-something guys, and I hear that the male brain forms in the early 20s, but maybe ours hadn’t formed all the way. I look back and you sort of were shaking a little bit when we got down and okay we just did that and I realized we had not planned very well. I bet most of you have something like that in your life you got through on the other side, maybe you had some consequences to pay, maybe you didn’t have consequences, but you think, that was not very smart driving through the night, driving through a snowstorm, golfing in a thunderstorm, don’t do it, climbing trees, if kids still did that, you’d get to the top of a tree and wonder, how do I get down. Maybe you got lost in a foreign country, maybe you thought that credit cards didn’t charge very much interest, maybe you bought a house that you couldn’t afford, and you look back and you think that was dumb. Woo! I’m glad I did not get eaten by a bear. We have all done things that are foolish before and hopefully don’t have to live with too many of the consequences, but here’s the point of this parable, what if there is such a thing as spiritual foolishness, spiritual foolishness, the consequences of which you will live with forever. There is no foolishness, more foolish and more consequential than spiritual foolishness. That’s what this story is about, that’s what Jesus wants us to consider here in this parable.

This is the parable; you see the heading of the ten virgins of the wedding. We don’t know exactly what these weddings were like, but we have something of an idea from other sources and certainly Jesus is picking an illustration that would have been very familiar to them just like all of us have been to weddings and if somebody told a story about a wedding and the doors opening and the runners and the rice or the flowers or the candle and the bride coming down, we would all have some idea of what this was about and so they surely knew what this was like. Weddings in the ancient world for the Jews could be long affairs, sometimes a week, maybe more. They would involve various stages of going back and forth between the bride’s house and the groom’s house. Back then you would very likely marry somebody who was from your hometown, and you could walk back and forth between the bride’s house and the groom’s house and the culmination, everyone understands this, the culmination of the event after the official ceremony, the culmination was the wedding feast. There’s a reason that the Bible ends with a wedding feast. That was the climax and the culmination of the wedding week and part of that was a processional likely from the bride’s house to the groom’s house where the feast would take place.

Those of you with daughters can say now why did they change that where the groom had to provide the feast, when did this thing flip, but here you would go back to the groom’s house and you would have the feast. The responsibility to escort the groom, likely from the bride’s house to his house, where the feast was taking place, was the attendant we might call the bridal party. Here they’re called Ten Virgins. We don’t tend to use that language to refer to young women, but of course in that context it was the job of single, unmarried women and they would have assumed that they were then virgins. So, when you hear the Ten Virgins think these unmarried girlfriends of the bride. Maybe the bride has already been brought to the feast, maybe she’s along with the groom, maybe she’s getting picked up, the bride is not into this story, not because she doesn’t matter, but it’s not the part of the story that matters to Jesus. What matters is this processional with the ten virgins bringing the groom from one house to the next for the feast. It was not unusual that this would happen at night, but as we read here in the story it gets delayed and it’s not until midnight. Now that was pretty late to be celebrating the feast, not many of us want to be having a feast that begins at midnight so they needed lamps, they needed light. It’s translated here as lamp. Maybe you remember learning the song about, “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning.” I asked Nathan if he could do that, but he declined. The oil in the lamp, and you may think of a little handheld lamp with maybe a wick and some wax there and a little saucer carrying it about, or perhaps some kind of contraption that it’s in, and that’s possible and lamp is a fine translation because the Greek word, you’ll get this, is lampas, so it makes sense that we would call these lamps, but very likely this is not that kind of lamp. It’s not a lantern, it’s not a dish, it is almost certainly a torch. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talks about lighting a lamp for the world to see. That’s a different word, lynchos. This word lampas in chapter 25 is likely a big stick or branch wrapped in rags, dipped in oil which of course here would be olive oil. It’s the same word used in John 18:3 translated there as torches when the party comes out to arrest Jesus and Gethsemane in the middle of the night. So, think torches. They have a primitive stick wrapped in a rag, dipped in oil. And verse 4 references the flasks, that’s a fine translation, again we don’t know exactly what they were like, probably a kind of open bucket or pail filled with olive oil so that when this burns out, and it might last only 15 or 20 minutes, you can then dip it into your pail and get a fresh coating of the oil and set it on fire again and you can go. Five of the virgins brought the bucket of oil and five did not. Those are the details.

At the most basic level this parable is easy to understand. As the Puritans sometimes said, Jesus hangs the key at the door. It’s right there, you can get in and understand what this is about. Look at verse 2. It introduces the big idea. Ten virgins, five were foolish and five of them were wise. That’s the big idea. To put it elegantly the point of the parable is, don’t be dumb. You’ve heard my prayer before, which I do pray often. Keep me Lord from being sinful or being stupid. Some of you are nice enough in the handshake line to say, I pray that for you also pastor. Appreciate it, you’ve kept me from sinful and stupid things no doubt. One British commentator says these girls, in a very British way, says half were sensible and half were silly. Silly not ha, ha, but foolish. Notice the difference in these ten women, five wise, five foolish, would not have been obvious right away. They were all young women, they all had torches, they were all a part of the bridal party, they were all waiting to do the same job. Notice they all fell asleep. Other stories that Jesus talks about, falling asleep is the problem and you didn’t stay up and you weren’t waiting, but here they all fall asleep, so that’s not the problem. There’s one difference, one difference only, the foolish girls brought no oil, the foolish virgins were not prepared. In everything else they would have looked alike. Here’s how Robert Murray M’Cheyne, the famous Scottish preacher and designer of Bible reading plans puts it, “The virgins were alike in many things. To the eye of man, they appeared the same. All were virgins, dressed probably in white, all their faces fair and comely. Each of them carried a silver lamp”, now I just said they’re probably torches, but “A silver lamp bright and polished and every lamp was lighted, ne, all of them seemed to have one object in view, they went forth to meet the bridegroom. In one thing alone they differed, the foolish took no oil in their lamps.”

M’Cheyne goes on to extrapolate from this central principle to talk about how we can look very much the same in the church, though we are not always the same. You may be, this morning you are, if you’re here within this room, you are in the same church, at least you are for this hour and a half. You’re in the same church, you may have grown up in this church, you may go to the school associated with this church. You may use the same speech as all your other friends. You know how to drop covenant into a sentence just wherever you can, that’s what we do. You know how to talk like a Christian, you may even know how to talk like a reformed or Presbyterian Christian. You may in fact sound very much the same when you pray. M’Cheyne says you may even have to the world’s eyes the same outward behavior. You dress in the same way, you go to the same movies, you don’t go to the same movies. You use the same kind of words, you go to the same kind of places, you look like these ten virgins for all the world that you are identical and that’s how it is sometimes in the church. You may know all the things to say and you, with your group of friends, whether you’re 5 or 15 or 50 or 85, this can apply to you that you are there moving through life here at this church, wearing your Sunday best, looking the part, saying the part, praying the part, you look like all the ten virgins are the same, but half of them were wise and half of them were foolish. It’s not like these women here had half were witches on a broom with a wart and a cackle and the others were beautiful maidens who talked to animals and whistle all day. That difference would have been easy to spot. You could have said those are the bad girls and those are the good girls, but this is the same principle that we’ve seen in the other parables. Many are called, but few are chosen.

We began this series with the parable of the two sons, one who said he would go, and he didn’t and one who said he wouldn’t but he did. Or last week we saw with the many guests who were invited and the first group of guests had all agreed to go to the wedding, but then they didn’t go and then they went into the highways and the hedges and brought in the guests, but when the king went to see who was in the feast there was one man who did not have the proper clothing. This whole series of parables in Holy Week, we have Palm Sunday, we have Maundy Thursday, we have Good Friday, we have Silent Saturday, we have Easter Sunday. You might think of this as Teaching Tuesday. If you look at chapter 26:1 when Jesus had finished all these sayings he said to his disciples, “You know that after two days the Passover is coming. Two days is Thursday, this is Tuesday.” This whole series of parables on Teaching Tuesday and in the middle we have Jesus talking about the end of the age, a near fulfillment of this prophecy in 70 A.D. and a far fulfillment at the end of the age, and all of this teaching that he does in and around the temple on this Tuesday he is driving at the same point and it is this, to the rest of the world it looks like you are in, but are you? That’s what all these parables are about. It looks like you are in the kingdom, but are you really? You may be convinced you are in the kingdom; you may have convinced your church you’re in the kingdom, you may have convinced your parents, your spouse, your children, your parents, but Jesus is asking the uncomfortable and necessary question, are you in fact in, are you wise, or are you foolish? Now why were these five young ladies foolish? Well we’ve already seen because they didn’t bring the oil. But let’s dig deeper.

Three marks of their foolishness and this may be a mark perhaps of your foolishness. Number one, why were they foolish? They were foolish because they thought that the timing was in their control. The groom ends up running late, it doesn’t matter why he’s running late. Is he taking care of business, was he settling payments, was he just having a good time, the point is he got delayed and the five foolish virgins didn’t seem to countenance the possibility that they might need more oil because the groom might get delayed, so we’re going out, we’ve got enough, this will last us 15 or 20 minutes, this is about the time it always happens, we’re good to go. People who tend to run late for things, don’t elbow anyone right now, don’t look, but people who run late tend to underestimate how long it will take them to get somewhere or do things and they tend to have in their mind, well I think I could get there if every single light goes my way, all of the breaks, this is the one time where everything lines up and I’m gonna make record legal, record time to get there. That’s what people who run late tend to think. People who get there early assume there will be delays, I’m gonna get all of the reds, there will be unexpected contingencies. These girls thought, we know the time. And isn’t this true for so many of us. We have our plans, we have things ready, and like these women we think, surely the groom will abide by my plans, but it wasn’t the case. Very often, in fact we might even say, most often God does not do things according to our plans. There’s nothing wrong with having some plans. There are proverbs about look to the ant and hard work and planning and counting the cause, so planning is good. But we tend to map things out in our head, and you may think, I get married at 23, I have my first kids at 27, I have two more kids after that, I stop at 33. I get grandkids by 52, I retire at 62, I have good health until I’m 92, marriage is happy, my career will advance, my spouse and I will live into old age, I will live in the place I want to live, it will have the mountains right next to the ocean, it will have a job that is personally fulfilling and lucrative. My spouse will not get sick, my kids will not get sick, I will not get sick. Those are our plans, and we like to think that the plans are ours to make.

But as Christians we know this, God has plans. His plans are better than our plans. His plans very often seem to, at least initially, run at cross purposes with our plans. Again, it’s good to have dreams, it’s good to have vision, it’s good to make some arrangements, but are you and I presuming that we know what the next five years of life will be like and are you figuring that God must operate on your timetable. Do you think there is no chance that he returns sooner than you think? Very few Christians today live with any real expectation that Jesus might return. Or, if we must wait longer, are you ready to live a life of faithfulness, not just for a few months and a few years, but a life of passion and as the saying goes, a long obedience in the same direction. And here’s perhaps the most uncomfortable question when it comes to God’s timing. Are you figuring that there is always a later for you? There’s always a later, there’s always sometime later when you can get serious about God, when you can finally get into His Word. There’s always some time later when you can repent of things. There’s always a later. What if in God’s inscrutable perfect timetable, you and I are living in the later? We don’t know how many days we are given, how many years, decades, months. These women were foolish because they thought that the timing was in their control, and they knew exactly what would happen and they didn’t.

Second, they were foolish because they thought that in the eventuality that there was a delay they could simply borrow someone else’s oil. Listen, this may be the most important point of the whole sermon, and I should really put it as the third point, but it comes in the story as the second point. The foolish virgins must have seen the other ladies going out with their five buckets and maybe they even nudged each other as they thought about going back into the house and grabbing their flasks and they said, psst, they have extra, work smarter not harder, am I right? Those five do gooders, they’re bringing their pails, we’ll be fine. Heading up the mountain that friend’s got a Gatorade bucket of water on his back, I’ll bring a cup, he’ll share, it’ll be fine. Like the group project where you don’t do anything because the super smart conscientious kid is in your group you can think if you were that smart kid that everyone was free riding on or more likely you were the group that was doing the freeloading, but eventually even if you can get by and everyone in the group gets an A because you had the one smart kid who was doing the whole project, eventually you’ve gotta take the SAT on your own. Sink or swim. So listen very carefully, especially any young people here who have been going to church your whole life, maybe teenagers, students, you’re brought here this morning by your parents and truth be told you don’t want to be here, or the husband who was brought here just to make his wife happy, the foolish virgins were not made unfoolish because the people around them were wise. You might say that they were awakened to their need for grace, but it was too late. We need mercy, we don’t have oil, but when it came to that moment the wise virgins understood our oil cannot be shared. People speculate, well the oil is the Holy Spirit or something, but we don’t need to get overly precise, the point is right there, and it is obvious. There are some things you cannot borrow, you cannot get to heaven on someone else’s faith, you cannot like the foolish virgins could not. Look around in that moment when you’re exposed and you have to stand before the groom and say, but I’m with them. But they’re serious about their faith, but they came prepared, and I know them and I’m their friend and I’m their child, I’m their spouse. It doesn’t work like that. You will stand before God and you cannot on that day depend upon your friends or your family members and say, but they believed, and I like them, and I was a part of their friend group and a part of their family. You cannot like sneaking into some concert and the guard at the front is quite overwhelmed and he’s trying to grab people’s tickets, and you sort of just crouch in with a big group and there you made it, and nobody checked your ticket. Heaven doesn’t work like that. Somebody will check your ticket. These women thought that if something went wrong, they could always rely on someone else to have done the right thing. How many professing Christians does that describe in our world? I pray it would not be so in our church, but in a room this size it probably does. We think I’m fine because the people I know are doing the right thing, and as long as I look like the people, I know who are doing the right thing, at the end of the day that will be good enough. Here we see you cannot borrow someone else’s oil.

The third way in which they were foolish, they thought there would be no real consequences for their folly. Notice the wise virgins say, we can’t share with you, we’ve got a bucket here and if we give it to you, we’re gonna run out. That may seem like a selfish thing, but no they’re being wise. If they start passing this around and nobody has enough oil to light their torch, then there’s no light at all and there’s no processional, and there’s no way for the groom to find his way to the feast, so they say we can’t give you any of our oil, but why don’t you go into the shops. This is not uncommon that you might have in a great wedding feast like that, there would be little local boutiques that are open late into the night. I was flying back from Dubai a couple of months ago and I had a 2:00 a.m. flight and I said, well I don’t know what’s going to be open in the airport, and very foolish of me people I was with said, everything is open in the airport in Dubai at 2:00 a.m. Anybody flying west, that’s what time they get there and the place was absolutely packed because they know people are awake. Well, they would’ve understood people might need oil so they run off into town and they try to get that oil and by the time they come back the doors are locked. Do you understand this in the Christian life, there is a too late. This is one of the parables and there are so many texts that could prove this point. It’s why any sort of doctrine of postmortem repentance or a purgatory that’s going to purge away your sins in the afterlife, that you get some kind of second chance just doesn’t work. No, these ladies were there and said, we’re ready now and the door was shut. They missed their last chance.

One more Colorado story. We used to drive there every summer when we lived in Michigan, Tricia has family there. It was a quick 21 hours in the car with all of us. It’s even farther here so we haven’t done it but once I think, and we would get off the highway, driving from Michigan into Colorado, at Brush, Colorado and you would head south. You’d have to drive 74 miles due south from Interstate 76, which is heading into Denver, down to Interstate 70 and then take the backroads into Colorado Springs. And you would get off and there would be signs and signs warning you about the trip that you were about to take. They would tell you over and over again, time to get gas, time to get fuel, time to get some water, get your Doritos, you are about to head into the middle of nowhere and it was true, 74 miles on a two-lane road with nothing, and there was one town halfway in between, appropriately called Last Chance, Colorado. Population 23 in the 2000 census and I think that is generous. There is actually nothing in Last Chance. When you get there you are already out of chances. It is a stop sign and an intersection and maybe there are 23 people living in the hills somewhere, but there is no gas, there’s no food, there’s no water, there’s no fuel, not even in Last Chance, so all of the signs are there to help you. Before you set out on 74 miles on this two-lane road, be prepared. And if you are not prepared, you would pay the price. Some of us might pay attention to those signs and when it comes to spiritual things we think it’s all a big game. We think, no, no, no, there’s always tomorrow, I’m young, I’m healthy. There’s always somebody who will bail me out. No, no, I’m good with my words, I’ll always find a way to sneak into the party.

Well, these women to miss the wedding feast was to miss everything. It’s very reminiscent of Jesus’ sermon on the Mount. You see verse 11 they come, and they say, Lord, Lord open to us, but He answers truly, I say to you, I don’t know you. It doesn’t have to be taken as a literal, I’ve never met you before, it’s a verdict of judgement, it’s to communicate you weren’t ready, you weren’t prepared, you weren’t on my side and now when it comes to the feast I am not letting you in and Jesus gives the summary in verse 13, “Watch therefore, be ready.” That’s the point, that’s the difference between being wise and being foolish. You do not know the time or the hour. Are you ready? Now let’s be honest, there are stories like this, and Jesus tells a lot of them, maybe we’ve heard them before. If we’re honest it’s a little hard to live a whole life like this. I mean if I’m a babysitter and the parents tell me they’ll be back by 10, I get dialed in and wanna get the kids in bed by 9, I wanna start cleaning up at 9:30 just in case they come early and maybe 10 comes to 10:30 and I’m still alert and 10:30 to 11. Maybe I even can make it to midnight or to 12:30 with an anticipation, okay they’re a little bit delayed, but I’m watching. I don’t want this place to fall apart, I want it clean, I want the kids in bed, I’m alert, but if those parents were gone for 50 years it would be hard to continue to peer through the curtains hour by hour to wonder if they were coming. And so, some of us can feel like that.

It’s been 2000 years, yeah Jesus is gonna come back, but can I really live with this sense of every moment of every hour anticipation. The consistent message in the Gospels is one of ignorance, meaning you do not know the day of Jesus’ return. It will be like lightening in the sky, it will be like labor pains that come upon a pregnant women, it will be like a thief in the night. You and I do not know when Christ will return. But I want you to also consider this, not only do we not know when He will return, and He understands that life goes on, people will be married and given in marriage and you still have to study for tests, you still have to work. Jesus doesn’t tell us to go and live on top of a mountain and wait for a spaceship to take us, you keep going, life, it’s not a nonstop peering through the curtains, it’s a matter of preparedness and not only for Christ’s return, which we believe in and can seem abstract, but not only do you and I not know when Christ will return, neither do we know when we will be brought into his presence. The hour of his coming is not known to us and neither is the hour of your death, my death. There’s probably more, but I can think of three funerals we’ve had here since I’ve been here, I’m sure there were more for young men who died in auto accidents. Thankfully all of them were believers, sad, tragic, yet not without hope. We’re grateful in every case we celebrate the life and the faith and the brother, son, husband, knew Christ. None of those families thought that was coming. You and I do not know how many hours, minutes, years, months, weeks we have, and Jesus does not tell us that, that we would live morose lives, but that we would live wise lives.

That’s the measure of wisdom, the fear of the Lord, and to measure our days a right. The fool thinks everything is in your own hand, your timing is your own and if you get in a bind, you can borrow somebody else’s faith, or somebody else’s obedience and even if at the end you miss the party, you’re not gonna have any real consequences in life. Well, this parable ought to disabuse us of those three foolish notions. Are you ready, are you getting ready now, which means a life of repentance now, faith now, obedience now. It’s the spring season when middle schoolers and high schoolers and kids of all ages are going off to their proms and their spring flings and their dances. Let me tell you in the spiritual realm, be like the young women how they get ready, not the young men. Young men look and it’s alright, we’ve not leaving for five minutes, we can finish this game of basketball, lather up with cologne, we’ll be good to go. The young ladies are preparing for next year’s prom now. The beauty process, the dresses, every part of it, they’re ready. Well, you might say because it does matter in general a lot more to one set of those teenagers than the other. So, in this matter, not in every matter, in this matter, be more like a teenage girl than a teenage boy. Are you getting ready now, are you prepared. These 10 virgins were all the same except for preparation. Keep watch. The five foolish ones brought a flashlight, no charger, no batteries. They thought they could be ready just like that at the last minute. Are you prepared now? If you’re not, talk to one of these elders or pastors who will be delivering the elements in just a few moments, talk to an elder who will be here afterward, or talk to a mature Christian that you came here with. Jesus wants you to be ready, he wants you to be ready when you stand before him. You haven’t yet come to your last chance so take the opportunity now while you have it. This is the message over and over again in the New Testament, come to Christ while yet there is daylight. Take care brothers least there be in any of you an evil unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God but exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness and we might add by the folly of sin. Let’s pray.

Our heavenly Father reflecting on this Word and preparing our hearts to come feast. We confess before you and acknowledge our sins, but with our sinful nature that we are prone to evil and we are slothful in doing good, and also our particular shortcomings and offenses against you. You alone know how often we have sinned, we have wandered from your ways, we have wasted your gifts, we have forgotten your love, oh Lord we ask have mercy on us. We are ashamed and sorry for all the ways that we have displeased you. Teach us not simply to feel regret but to truly hate our sin and then cleanse us from secret faults and forgive us for the sake of your dear son. Oh most holy loving Father, send your purifying grace into our hearts that we may from this moment on live in your light and walk in your ways according to the commandments of Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.