Episode 955: Patriotism and Christianity

In the words of the great theologian Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, aren't you? (audience cheers) And yet we know that there's a lot of struggles in our country. One of the things I'm also proud to be, especially this time of year, proud to be a Baptist. You know, we have one of the most foremost Baptist historians in our church, Dr. Karen Bullock, and she's, she and some of her peers are on a mission trip to Nigeria to teach some things there. But you know, I think about the different Baptist preachers that came to America who helped us really establish my friends here in the front row, let me even play John Leeland at one point. I don't know how good of a job I did. My acting skills aren't great. She says I did great. John Leeland was in his 20s, a Baptist preacher who really influenced James Madison to push for the first amendment. Aren't you grateful for the first amendment? We can say whatever we want to say, right? We can vote. We can say what we want to say, all those things. John Leeland, Roger Williams, established the first Baptist church in Rhode Island, Chubel Sterns, and I could go on and on. And what they fought against was a state religion, a state denomination that we would have to sign up and be a part of, that we would have to pay our taxes to, even if we didn't agree with it or believe it. And so I'm really proud to be a Baptist because we have established this Baptist liberty of conscience. That's between you and the Lord, and how we come to Christ and that those individual choices. And we can go on and on. But I'm really proud of that. One of my, another thing I'm proud of is my hometown senator for Louisiana, Dr. John Kennedy. I don't know if you've ever listened to John Kennedy. And he's great. Yes. I just played clips from him instead of me preach, but he's so good. But what he said was he was talking about the divide in our country. He said, and I thought this was brilliant. What we have is a lot of people with zeal without wisdom. If you met that person, don't look at him. Just think about that person, right? People have a lot of zeal, but no wisdom. So my message today is to help us as Christians as we are patriotic, generally here at Lakeside, that we would have that balance to always have zeal, but wisdom with that. And I want to quote first from Chuck Colson. So I remember Chuck Colson was part of the Watergate scandal, went to prison, became a Christian in prison, and started the prison fellowship. And he said, the Christian position is beautifully balanced. So on one hand, we don't defy our country. We don't wrap the flag around the cross. We know that our ultimate citizenship is in heaven. That's where ultimate allegiance is. But the only place for expressing that allegiance is in the concrete loyalty God calls us here on earth, including loyalty to country. We can't love mankind in the abstract. We can only love people in the particular concrete relationships God has placed us in and our family, our church, our community, and our nation. So can we love God and country at the same time? Well, of course we can. But we have to have the balance. We have to have the zeal balanced with the wisdom. According to a Gallup poll patriotism, and this won't surprise any of you, is that in all time low, only 39% of Americans say they're proud of their country. Now I want to give a working definition of patriotism for this message today, that it's love of country as it's manifested in loyalty to service to and giving honor to one's country. It's about loving the people, the place, the ideas, and the unique culture of the place God has placed us. So that's to me what patriotism is. You have a different definition, we can debate that later. But as we look at her outline, I ask the question rhetorically, can patriotism ever be bad? Now we know there are examples of people who have taken love of country to an extreme. And in his great book, The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, he talks about this and he says, "Any love taken to an extreme becomes evil." He says, "Love becomes a demon when it becomes a God, a little G-god." And so Christians who are skeptical of patriotism are concerned with the way that it might hurt our desire and love, for example, for evangelizing the nations. If we wrap ourselves and reflect to the point where we don't care about sending missionaries to other nations, then we are actually going against Christ's own message, his mandate to us in which we call it the Great Commission, to take the gospel to the whole world to every nation, tribe, and tongue. We are here by the way, lest you think that. We are here, by the way, because somebody once in history cared about evangelizing America. Aren't we grateful that some of those preachers I just named them all want to go actually came from Europe and desire to evangelize. They've been probably sent preachers out to Grandbury, Texas at one time, because what a bunch of pagans out there. Let's get those people saved. So we have to be thankful for others in history and the history of Christianity caring about the Great Commission. In fact, let's remind ourselves what Jesus said. He said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations in the Greek word for all there is what. It's all, isn't it?" Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you and surely I'm with you always to the very end of the age. Now, I want to look at two other places in Scripture that I think will help us with the balance again between zeal and wisdom, that if we go first of all to a place where patriotism became idolatrous. And I want us to travel back to 800 BC and think about a man who took love of country too far and that man is Jonah. You know the story of Jonah. He lived near the shores of Galilee in the Northern Territory when the kingdom was divided. And he was somewhat of a hero and ischial at the time. As you go back to 2 Kings 14, he prophesied about a period of peace and prospered in Israel and he was a strong ally of King Jeroboam who had expanded the borders of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. It was thriving, but there were also problems in Israel. And while the country had unprecedented peace and prosperity, they were also engaging in idolatry and injustice and so God calls Jonah. And he tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, which is the capital of Assyria. Now if you don't understand how radical that was, it's because you may not know that Assyria was Israel sworn enemy. They may have even attacked them earlier and killed some of the Israelites and so scholars speculate maybe even people in Jonah's family. They were ruthless and bloodthirsty, almost like terrorists and they were very proud of that. So in light of that, the context here is the call in Jonah chapter 1. Jonah, son of Amitai received a direct call from God, "Get up, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out against it because their wickedness has come up before me." So God's asking Jonah to go to this group of people and share the good news that they had an opportunity to repent and turn away from their wickedness and toward God. Now we tend to criticize Jonah for not going and yet it would be like God asking us to go and evangelize Hamas or ISIS or California or, oh wait, now I'm kidding. Again, I'm from Louisiana and we have to pick on somebody, right? Just kidding. We love Californians and other some of you here. But this was a mission he didn't want to take and Jonah was so patriotic, Israel's flourishing while Assyria's on their heels are experiencing turmoil and famine and all these things. And Jonah had two reasons to resist God's call. One, he was probably scared out of his mind because the Syria was their enemy and they would, in fulfillment of Hosea's prophecy in just a few hundred years would come and conquer Israel. It was God's judgment on Israel, but it wasn't just fear that kept Jonah from going there. He also had political reasons to resist the mission of God. If the message of repentance and salvation was heated by the savages, it would mean that Israel's enemy might repent of their ways and begin to flourish and Jonah didn't want that. He didn't want them to experience God's salvation. We read here in Jonah how really ticketh he was in chapter four, but to Jonah, this seemed very wrong and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, isn't this what I said, Lord? When I was still at home, that is what I tried to forest all by fleeing the tarsias. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God. Slow to anger and abounding in love. Can you hear the disgust as he's describing these very positive things about God? A God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life. It is better for me to die than to live. So not only does he want Israel to thrive, which is a good thing, but he wants every other nation to suffer. And this was against God's desire for the nation of Israel. The nation of Israel has been raised up to bless other nations. They were not to keep the goodness of God to themselves. They were to be a light to the nations. And so this is an example of someone taking country or love of country too far. If our love of country keeps us from wanting to share the gospel with the whole world, we've taken it too far. And over the years, I've had people tell me in all the three churches that I have pastured and nobody in this service, certainly, but it may be in the third and first service. Where they say, Pastor, we are sending too much money overseas. We need to keep it right here. There are plenty of lost people right here in Grandbury, Texas. And they are exactly right. There are plenty of lost people in Grandbury, Texas, but it's not an either or it's a bothane. And again, that's what God calls us to. Don't be mad at me. Be mad at Jesus. He's the one that gave us the grace. great commission to go to the entire world. Which leads us to the second thing. What we recognize is Christians is that there's this earthly city and there's a heavenly city. And they're at war with one another as we did as we dealt with in the last series on spiritual battle. Jonas' love of country wasn't bad in and of itself. It was bad because he made it more important than his love for God. And we shouldn't be naive to the ways that we also can slip into that posture. You see people who claim Christ and their entire social media feed is about this, about politics or it's about trumpet playing or it's about, you know, filling the blank. And I say that, Tung and Cheek, can you imagine if you're a pastor who has called to the ministry and the gospel on all I ever posted was trumpets being against the woodwind section. We can't stand them. The string section there driving me crazy. The drummers, we hate the drummers. Can you imagine that? You would think I was a little off. You might even pay for counseling. Come on, pastor. You could have an opinion, but you don't go crazy with it, right? And maybe we think God loves us more than other people in the world. Maybe it keeps us from sending missionaries or participating in that. But Jonas' problem was not that his love for his country was too big. And I think this is a problem with everybody who's gotten the balance out of whack. It said his love for God was too small. It's not that we love trumpet playing and bungee jumping and driving pentos. It's that our love for God is too small. We can love all that stuff. But don't let your love for God be too small. His hatred of the Ninevites blinded him to what God wanted him to do to see the people of that nation experience God's love. So to avoid Jonas' mistake, we shouldn't go in the other direction and view all forms of patriotism as idolatry. I think C.S. Lewis again in his book The Four Loves is so helpful, which by the way he wrote after World War II. He talked about the importance of not seeing our loves or allegiance as binary choices. In other words, it's not one or the other. It's putting them in the right order, expressing them in the right order with our relationship with God. So this phrase from C.S. Lewis ordering our loves, I think he's actually borrowed that from Augustine who wrote in the four century, "Living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things to love in the right order." So I don't think the choice between patriotism on the one hand and our faithfulness God on the other hand, it's an ordering of those things as reflected in Second Peter 2. He says, "Show proper respect to everyone. Love the family of believers, fear God and honor the emperor." So that's an ordering of our loves in that short verse, right? It doesn't say to fear the king. He says, "Only fear God but honor the king." So it's not either or it's not God or the king unless the king is telling us to disobey God and then we should disobey the king, right? I've had very well-meaning Christians say, "Well, I don't think I could ever pledge allegiance to the flag." I don't like pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States because we only pledge allegiance to Christ. But I don't think that that again, it's an either or. I think it's about lesser pledges. And so as we look at number three, I think we all have to recognize that we all take lesser pledges. In May of 1984, I took a pledge. I raised my hand and pledged allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America as I enrolled in the United States Army. I was 18. I don't even think I could have quoted one sentence from the Constitution. But I made that allegiance as I joined the military and served our country in that way. Then a few years later, that was in 1984. In 1989, I stood in front of the altar and I pledged allegiance to my wife, Gina, who would be my wife, Gina. I did this in front of all these witnesses. I pledged to her in the pastor who was my future father-in-law. I didn't say, "Well, Mark, you have to choose the love of God or love of Gina." He didn't say that. He said, "If you love God supremely, with all your heart's soul, mind and strength, you're going to love Gina the right way." And I think that's how we view most of our commitments. That's an ordering of our loves. We also have six children and I love them and I adore them, but I love Gina more. I've always said the best thing you do is to love their mom, to love their dad. But I do hear people say, "Maybe you've said it." Maybe you know somebody who said it, say, "My children are my everything." But you see what happened. You see the problem there with that? When you take a lesser allegiance and you raise it to the level of our ultimate allegiance, we're not actually loving them well, are we? If I make my kids my everything, then what happens is I expect things from them that they have no ability to give me. Only God can do that. I say that to my pre-meritle couples all the time that Jesus tells us the two greatest commandments, the first to love God with all your heart's soul, mind and strength, the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. The problem is, if we don't get the first one right in a marriage relationship, then what happens? We tend to make our spouse our Messiah, don't we? And boy, you wouldn't want to have that kind of pressure, would you? Would you want to be a spouse where your spouse expected you to be their Messiah? Yeah, it happens all the time. If I expect things from my wife that only God can give me, I'm going to be a bad husband. I'm going to have too high of an expectation so we have lesser commitments. We pledge allegiance every month, don't we? I pledge allegiance to my mortgage company every month, my utility company, my cell phone company. And I think it's the same with country that we don't have to choose love of God or love of country. If we love God supremely, then we can love our country well. That's the balance. Is it possible when love of country and love of God could come down to either or? Certainly, we have examples in Scripture in the book of Acts when Peter and the disciples are told to stop preaching. They said they have to obey God rather than men. Or you think of countries around the world where people of faith have no freedom. And they're told not to pray or to worship or to read their Bibles and we see that with the church in Iran, by the way, which I love that even in the midst of persecution, God still grows his church and country, it's like that in China. When they throw Christians in China and prison, they call that their seminary, that that's when they learn about God because they're in a place where they're not actively ministering. They're in prison at the time. Or you think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was called to resist the Nazi regime and he could obey God or he could obey the Nazi regime, but he couldn't do both. But even this kind of resistance that you see in the book of Acts or with Bonhoeffer, it actually springs from a love of country, doesn't it? That Bonhoeffer went back to Germany because he loved his country so much. You want to see it rid of the evil that it had taken hold. So true patriotism doesn't mean you accept everything your government dishes out. In fact, love of country means that at times you care deeply about changing it. That's what I love about so many of my brothers and sisters there, like side. I see you on the front lines in our community and our state and in our nation that want to make change for the better to make our country better. So if we love God supremely, we can love our country in the right order. But we live in exile. That's the next example number four in your outline, Jeremiah 29. Often Christians who resist any idea of patriotism will say, "I don't know if I can be proud of my country because we see more like Babylon than Israel. We seem to be wicked in embracing all these things. How can I love a country if we live like Babylon?" Well, that's a good question. So let's go to Babylon. That's what Jeremiah 29's all about. We go from the 8th century BC with Jonah to the pagan kingdom of Babylon in the 6th century with another prophet named Jeremiah. And he's speaking to the people of God. You have to understand that the place of the people of God were in. They had been captured from their homeland in Israel and they were taken to a place that they didn't know. They didn't know the customs, the food, the language. They had very little influence on Babylon. Certainly they wouldn't have voted. And if they could have voted, they wouldn't have voted for Nebuchadnezzar because his policies were bad. And on top of that, they had false prophets, false prophets telling them, "Listen, you're only going to be here for a little while. Just get yourself in a holy huddle. Don't immerse yourself in the culture. Don't make plans because you're going to be out of here quickly." Those are the false prophets. But the true prophet Jeremiah comes along and says, "That's false." And I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is you're going to be here for a long time. You're going to raise your kids here. You're going to raise your grandkids here. But he says, "The good news is," and it's the famous verse that we quote all the time, right? Jeremiah 29/11. "Eleven for I know the plans I have for you, plans that prosper you, not harming you, plans that give you hope in the future." So that verse, believe it or not, is not about you finding the perfect parking spot at Costco. You know, it looks fantastic on a mug, doesn't it? It's about God's people in a terrible situation that they wouldn't have chosen. Of course, we know we're not Israel. It's all about context, isn't it? So it's not a direct application to us, but I do think we can make that application because in the New Testament, first Peter and Hebrews, we are called Christians as exiles and strangers. We're citizens of another kingdoms. So often even in America, don't we as Christians feel like outsiders in the way that are called culture is pushing us out and demonizing us. We feel like the policies don't go our way, so we feel a little bit strange and out of place sometimes, don't we? So what does Jeremiah say to these exiles? The book of Hebrew says we look for a city whose builder and maker is God because we're exiles. People will say that means you shouldn't have an attachment to your country because we're citizens of the kingdom. Well, what does Jeremiah say to the exiles? Again, in Jeremiah 29 says, "Build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children." In other words, plant on heaven a family, plant on increasing and not decreasing. And then he says, "Pursue the well-being." And some translations say the flourishing, the actual word in Hebrew is shalom. You're familiar with shalom, right? Which is the sense of flourishing and well-being. Pursue the well-being of the city that I have sent you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf so that when it thrives, you will thrive. Pursue the well-being of the city, God's put you in. Even if you don't like it. Even if you feel like an exile sometimes in America, think about how these people felt. I mean, comparatively, right? Take the worst president we've ever had. And we're not gonna debate that here anyway. Not that dumb. Take the worst president and the worst policies we've ever had in America. And then if you could travel and time back to Babylon and said to them in 600 BC, "Hey, I'm gonna give you a choice to come live in America with the worst president we've ever had." They'd take that every time, wouldn't they? Living for the kingdom of God is always gonna cut against the grain of the world in some ways. And if you feel it, that's normal. Jesus promised that in Scripture. 1 John 2, "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, "love for the Father's not in them. "For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, "the lust of the eyes and the pride of life." Comes not from the Father, but from the world, the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. And then the Apostle Paul and Ephesians too. And again, that was in our last series. Talks about how the world is run by the prince and power of the air. So what does it look like as Christians to live in a sense of being an exile? Well, it definitely doesn't look like getting in a holy huddle and not building roots. Jeremiah gave them the opposite advice. He said, "There were to be distinct as the people "of God just like we should, "but they were not to absorb the negative culture, "but rather they were to seek the welfare "of the flourishing of the city." In other words, these Israelites in exile are to be loyal to Babylon and seek her good. In other words, this is what we don't like to hear sometimes. They were actually called to love Babylon. So how do we connect this idea to patriotism? Well, again, is it possible to obey this command from Jeremiah 29 to be an exile and seek the welfare of the city that God's put you in? I think not only is patriotism acceptable for the Christian, I think it's really somewhat part of our discipleship. And what I mean by that is discipleship in the sense of being warned. If some people are tempted like Jonah to have a disordered patriotism, a patriotism that eclipses your faith in Jesus to the point where nobody even knows that you're a Christian because you're emphasizing more on that side. In other words, like John Kennedy said, "Zel without wisdom." Or discipleship in the other sense of like warning that the Israelites in exile, some people are tempted the other way to sort of be detached from the place God has put them to be cynical about where God's put them. We have to wrestle with whatever idolatries were tempted towards one of those two extremes. Jonah's love for Israel should not have diminished or threatened his call to go to Syria. Jonah had more love God said for that stupid little plant than he did for the people God called into minister to. G.K. Chesterson, British author has this essay called the Patriotic Idea. And he says something profound. He said, "Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing. Instead of beginning it at the most distant and thus it ensures what it is, perhaps the most essential of all earthly considerations that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation." In other words, he's saying something profound. He's saying, "We practice our love in the order of our love by loving the things that are closest to us." I mean, love that weird person in your Sunday school class, right? Again, don't look at him, just love him. And if you can't think of a weird person in your class, maybe you're the one, you know? I don't know. Just kidding, just kidding. I'm the weird one. I'm the weird one. (congregation laughing) It's easy to say I have this love for the world that God tells us to love, but if you can't love the people that God's put you around, put around you rather, then you're really not expressing the love for the world. It says in 1 John 4, if anyone says, "I love God and hates this brother," he's a liar, for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, how can he love God, whom he has not seen. It's great for you to say, "You love God, but your brother's right there." And you can't stand him. So patriotism helps us to practice that. Love the thing that's closest to you and then extend that outward. I think the essence of loving one's country is really about two things. It's an acknowledgement of God's sovereignty that he's put us in this place. You know, in Acts 17, Paul says when he's speaking on Marseille that God and his sovereignty ordained the people in the places and the borders in their times, God didn't make a mistake calling you to live in Granberry in 2026. He's not up there regretting saying, "Man, I should have put Mark in Brazil in 1950. I should have put him in Europe in 2050." No, he doesn't have those regrets, he's sovereign. So at least this principle, you are here and now for a reason, at your Esther moment, right? Esther was called for such a time as this, according to Uncle Mordecai. And God has called you here for this reason for such a time as this. So number one, it's an acknowledgement that God's put you here just like the exiles in Babylon that you're going to want to make it flourish and grow and build roots. But the second thing I think about patriotism is gratitude, gratitude for what we've been given. We kind of get numb to that. Sometimes we're not, we don't have the gratitude. You know, it's kind of like when we grew up and whether you grew up in a difficult household or a great household, I think, by the time you get to be about 14, you become very cynical about your parents, right? They don't know anything. I mean, you're at that wise age of 14 and you know they don't know anything. And then what happens, you grow up and you get married, you have your own kids and you realize, you know, they were pretty wise, weren't they? I even had a roof over my head. And I think that's true about our country. We start to think, man, this is a terrible place. It takes me 30 minutes to get the church from acting. You know, it's a terrible place. I'm talking to you. But maybe when you travel, you go on a mission trip. I remember my first mission trip was in 1990 to Brazil and we went with the seminary. And it was just, I mean, it blew me away. I thought I grew up in poverty. I didn't grow up in poverty. They're in poverty in that country. So it's easy to lose a sense of gratitude. You know, there are a lot of places in the world where patriotism's not even a debate. You think you get to debate patriotism in North Korea? Of course not. Even the opportunity to debate things is a privilege in America. Again, go back to John Leland. You can hate a particular leader. You can refuse to salute the flag. You can send Facebook posts and write news so that you're saying how much you hate the country and how much you despise a particular leader or policy. And you're not gonna be punished. In fact, you probably will find a decent-sized audience that'll agree with you. We call that algorithms, don't we? You should thank God for our freedoms. Thank God for your country. I don't think it's good to be cynical to hate your country like a lot of people do. Consider Jesus with the centurion in Matthew 8. He interacts. Jesus interacts with the centurion. He's got a family member that's sick and dying in Jesus' heels him. And what does Jesus say about the centurion? Remember the centurion context. This is a man who wore the uniform of a government that it was times brutal and godless. A government that promoted sexual perversion that's worse than 21st century America. And what did Jesus say about him? Truly, I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. He didn't say how dare you wear that uniform in that country to commend his faith. Faith, same thing with Peter when he baptized Cornelius in Acts 10. So I think it's important for us to understand that healthy patriotism isn't the same as blind loyalty to a particular policy or leader. It doesn't mean we agree with everything that's been done in our history. In fact, one of the most patriotic things we can do and again, something I admire about my friends, my brothers and sisters in Christ here, like I said, is that we do things that make our country better. We advocate for policies that will make our country better. And I think there's a difference in peaceful protests and destructive riots, don't you? I think there's a difference between prophetic words calling for repentance and a cynical view of our country. I think about Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became an abolitionist and he wrote a great essay called, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" And he actually reveres the founders or a nation. He loves the founding ideals, but he's pleading with the country to live up to those ideals. And Abraham Lincoln did the same thing with the Gettysburg address. And so if you love your country, it's out of deep love that you work to change things. Think about your kids, those of your parents. If your kids think that you hate them and despise them, they're never going to change. It's only when they recognize that you love them, that that motivates them to change. Love is what motivates repair and relationships. Love is what motivates action. And I think this way about the pro-life movement. We have been working for more than a half a century. Pro-lifers have marched in the streets and tried to pass laws. And we're saying we love this country and we would also like to extend those freedoms to all creation, even those vulnerable, the unborn. Throughout our history, Christians have played this role in preserving this fragile experiment called American. You know what? One day America will no longer be. Will only be citizens of the kingdom. But until that time, God has placed us here Grandbury, Texas, for a reason that would help to share the gospel around the world and help our city to flourish. Let's stand together. As we have our time of invitation and I just am so grateful you joined us for this hour. And I want to make sure as we've seen this last song that everyone listening right now has their invitation to the kingdom of heaven, that they have their reservation with God himself in heaven. And it's made possible by just responding to the gospel. Many of you have already done that, but maybe there's someone listening right now and you've never taken that step. And here's your opportunity to do that while we've seen this last song. But know that you have to respond to the gospel. This isn't something forced in your life. And we know this through this across the gospel that God created you to have a relationship with you. But without me even knowing everything about you, I know this about you. You have sin in your life just like I have sin in my life. And that sin separates you from God. God can't be in a relationship with you as long as you have sin in your life. It creates a huge dilemma. And everybody has taught outside of Christianity. We'll just do good things and all work out. But you can imagine the anxiety that that creates in that worldview. Our worldview is the perfect worldview because it's originated with God. God's plan was to sin. God the Son and Jesus to live a perfect life to die on the cross in our place. We know it was completed because he uses an accounting term. He says it is finished on the cross. It's paid for all of our sins are paid for that Jesus took them on himself. And then we know he didn't stand on the cross. He was resurrected of the first fruits, which means, first fruits means we can join him in that citizenship in heaven one day if we'll do this one thing. God can't force his way in your life, but this is the offer. This is the invitation that every person who trusts in Christ alone, God says, then I'll give you eternal life. I will restore my relationship with you. What's amazing about that, this last thing, that life begins the moment you say yes to him. It's not something you build up to. You don't clean up your life first and then come to him. He says come just as you are. All the sin that comes with it. All the baggage of your life in God says, I'll change it. I'll do a supernatural miracle in your life and you'll testify to your end days. You'll testify to your last breath that God changed me on that day. I was born again. Have you not been born again? Come and take the hand of one of our ministers. Any of the things that God puts on your heart, church membership, prayer concerns, you come and take the hand of a pastor as we sing this last song. But let's pray first before he sings. Father, thank you for your goodness. Thank you for the good news of the gospel. We pray that every person that's listening right now will have that assurance of where their ultimate citizenship is, Lord, that they would call out to you if they haven't done so. God saved me, a sinner. Lord we know there are a lot of other concerns today in the hearts of many. Lord we just pray that as a church we love one another through those concerns so that we can leave out of these doors as missionaries. Oh we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Let's sing together.