Faithfulness | Pete Nicholas

Welcome to Redeemer Downtown: Introducing the Faithfulness Sermon Welcome to the Redeemer Downtown podcast. We are so glad you're listening. Whether it's your first time or you listen often, we do hope this message encourages and challenges your faith. We are diverse community in the heart of New York City, seeking renewal through the gospel and learning to follow Jesus together in the city. Today's message is from our series The Power of Good, taught by Pete Nicholas. Speaker 2 Our reading is to Timothy chapter 4, verses 6 through 8, and it can be found on page 965 in your Bibles. For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing the word of the Lord. Speaker 3 Thank you, Laura, very much. Well, we're continuing our sermon series in they're looking at the aspects of the fruit of the Spirit. And we've been calling this sermon series the power of good because we've been saying that whilst many of us long to live an impactful, A transformative life, that far from what we kind of currently believe that an impactful life is a life of power, a life of asserting yourself, a life of winning and winning the debate and winning the argument. That actually the most impactful lives that the Lord Jesus wants us to live, whether we are someone who follows him or not as we come to this is actually a life that is living out the power of good. And we see that in Galatians 5, verses 22 to 23, where we get this incredible description of the spiritual life, a life of full of Lovejoy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And so we've been unpacking each of those 9 aspects, those 9 virtues that make up the singular fruit of the Spirit over the past few weeks. And this week we're looking at faithfulness. Our Mixed Relationship with Truth and the Sermon's Core Questions Now faithfulness is all about our relationship to the truth, the truth about ourselves, the truth about the world more generally and supremely, the truth about God. Now, I don't think you have to be a a kind of cultural analyst to know that we have a pretty mixed relationship with the truth in the United States society today. I think a relationship that might sum it up might be illustrated by something that a friend of mine shared with me when I was actually back in London. She works as a General practitioner, AGP, or I think as you call it, a primary physician. So she's a doctor and one day she shared with me that a a young teen girl came into her practice looking a little bit nervous and a little bit anxious. And as she came in, she said to her, what seems to be the problem? And the teenager said, well, I'm really nervous. Can I see you in confidence or you're going to have to tell my parents? And she asked her how old she was and she was 16. She said no, I can see it's fine, I don't need to let your parents know. She said why, what's going on? And she said, well, I got a tattoo the other day and I haven't told my parents they'd kill me if they found out. But the tattoos got infected. And then she proceeded to kind of show a little bit of her ankle. And she had an oriental symbol on her ankle, which had clearly got red and inflamed after having been put there. And so my friend, the doctor kind of said to her also, that's very interesting. And obviously it's your first tattoo. She said yes. And the, the young woman said, no, this, this tattoo really means a lot to me. I got the symbol done because it's something really fundamental, a real value that I want to live by. And my friend said, well, what does it mean? And she said, oh, it's the Chinese character for truth. And at that point, my friend looked at her and said, well, you want to live in truth, but you don't want me to tell your parents. And you could see the teenage girl realizing the kind of tension she was living in. And that really sums up where we're at today. We love the idea of truth and lots of different measures. Why is it that we constantly often have that link on websites to Fact Check something, right? Why is it that we have endless congressional Senate committees trying to get to the truth of what happened in certain scenarios? Why is it that one of the highest values for us in leaders that we want to serve under is integrity, which really means a holistic life of truth? And yet at the same time, whilst we long for the truth, we have a very mixed relationship with the truth. We talk of personalized truth. You've got your truth, I've got my truth. We would never say that about facts. You have your facts, I have my facts. I mean, it doesn't really make sense. And so we live in what some sociologists have described as a post truth age, which, as I've said for the pulpit many times, doesn't mean we're kind of like I'm so over truth, just give me lies and deception. Rather, post truth means that we no longer believe in an objective, an external standard of truth. Instead, we now believe that if I look within, I will find my truth pretty similar to my preferences, in my opinion. And so therefore, this issue of what does it mean to live out the virtue of faithfulness could not be more relevant for us as a society. So let's look at why it is so important as we first of all look at the importance of faithfulness and try to understand what it is. Then we're going to look at the fight for faithfulness. As we see in the life of the Apostle Paul, why to be faithful describes is often described as a fight. And then thirdly, the motivation for faithfulness. So the importance of faithfulness, the fight for faithfulness, and then the motivation for faithfulness. Faithfulness as Consistent Truth-Holding: The Pilot Analogy All right, let's look first of all at Second Timothy chapter 4. And actually I want to start a little bit before, because you can see that this passage is all about our relationship with the truth by what comes before it. Verse 3 of chapter 4 is the kind of antithesis of faithfulness the apostle Paul writes for. The time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what they're itching is want them to hear. I don't imagine a parent after church is reading this passage to their child and the child kind of has that penny drop moment. They say, mum, dad, that sounds awful. You're saying that 2000 years ago people in society would change truth just on what they wanted. I'm so glad we don't live in a society like that anymore. You see the problem? This is fiercely relevant to us today, this idea of actually truth being about what we desire, not about what is actually really objectively true. And in contrast to that, the apostle Paul describes his life particularly here, his life and pastoral ministry, and he says in verse 7, I have fought the good fight by implication, the fight of faithfulness. I've finished the race, I've kept the faith. In other words, saying he is saying that he has been faithful. Now let me try to define faithfulness for us. I think faithfulness is consistently holding to the truth, where that's the truth about ourselves or others, the world or God. So consistently holding to the truth, that is what faithfulness is. I want to emphasize consistently because that means doing it in all areas of life and also means doing it over a long period of time. Because notice the Apostle Paul is coming to the end of his life and it's only then that he is able to say I fought the good fight. And otherwise, holding to the truth is something we don't just do for a period of time, but we need to do consistently in all aspects of our lives over a long period of time. And it's the truth about ourselves, what we're like about others and the world, what it is really like and about God. Now, why is that so important? It's important if you imagine it, because the truth really shapes us very deeply as people. And actually interacting as people of truth in the world really matters for relationships and things like trust and mutual understanding and care for one another. And also it matters hugely in our relationship with God. Here's a way of thinking about it. Imagine that someone's a pilot and imagine that this pilot is charting the course for where she wants the plane to go. And at the beginning of the journey, as she charts the course, she obviously puts in the destination coordinates and then off she goes. And as they flying towards it, let's imagine that very early on in the flight that the coordinates, or rather the direction of the plane relative to the coordinates is off by just five degrees, just five degrees. So 95% the plane is going the right direction, 5% is going in the wrong direction. Just a small amount. At the end of a 7 hour flight, that plane is going to be completely off course and nowhere near its destination. So it is with us in life. This is not saying that we are completely committed to lies, but even if we're off on the truth by 5% over the long course of our lives, in the way we see ourselves, in the way we relate to others in the world, and in the way we relate to God, that is going to lead us to completely the wrong destination. And So what pilots need to do when they're flying is constantly course correct, constantly check the truth of where they should be heading and where they are actually heading and adjust the course to keep them in line. And so faithfulness is a constant course correction. It is not saying that any of us by nature do not make mistakes or do not go off course, but it is a course correction whenever we're shown that we are out of step with the truth about ourselves, the world, or God, that we course correct and realign ourselves with the truth. That's why this matters. Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Folly of Overstating Our Strengths Now think about this in relationship to ourselves. As we've been going through the virtues, we've been engaging with some of the ancients of philosophy and theology because they talked a lot more about virtues than we do today. And so we've engaged already a few times with people like Aristotle and Aquinas and Augustine. I'm going to engage a bit more with Aristotle and Aquinas this morning because they both spoke about faithfulness and they described faithfulness as a mean, a median point between an excess and an undervaluing or an under emphasis. Now the excess of the truth would be when someone is prideful or boastful, and so they exaggerate the truth about themselves, usually to make themselves look good or something like that. Obviously that's not the truth. On the other hand, sometimes people will downplay the truth because maybe they're worried about the consequences, or maybe because they're very self deprecating and they lack the courage to really hold to the truth. And both Aristotle and Aquinas both say that actually faithfulness is about occupying neither an excess nor a kind of deficiency of the truth, but actually occupying the middle ground of the truth, the core of the truth. Here's how Aquinas puts it in his Summer Theologica. The true essentially denotes a kind of equality, and equality is a medium point between more and less. Hence, for that very reason, if a person says what is true about himself, he observes the middle point between exaggeration, saying more than the truth about himself, and deficiency, saying less than the truth about himself. So think about this. Let's say you meet someone and as you're chatting to them, you notice that whenever they tell a story about themselves or give an account about themselves, they exaggerate the truth about themselves. Now, why is that problematic for them? Or maybe let's make it about you. Why? If you do that, why is that problematic for you? Well, that type of pridefulness, even if it's only by 5% of consistently overstating the truth about yourself, is a kind of boastfulness, right? We intuitively find that unattractive and other people, but it actually can be quite damaging. Firstly, it's damaging because it normally almost always comes from a place of insecurity. And so one of the reasons we exaggerate the truths about ourselves is we're trying to overcompensate for a weakness that we actually have and that we're uncomfortable with being honest about. And so by overcompensating, we're actually blocking ourselves of the means of personal transformation, which is to deal with the insecurity, to deal with the deeper problem. We're pretending it doesn't even exist. And so we kind of front and put on a mask and project strength when actually deep down there is a smaller tender side of us, a wound maybe that needs to be healed. And so it never gets healed. But not only that, a person who exaggerates the truth about themselves. Well, you know, as often as said in the film Focus with Will Smith, you die with the lie. So once you have exaggerated the truth about yourself, you now have to live with that lie. And so someone says, can you do X? And you say, oh, sure, I can do it. And they say, great, would you mind doing it? And now you're in trouble because you've boasted that you can do it, but you can't really do it. You've exaggerated your strengths. So you now find yourself in the dangerous situation of trying to do something you're not fully equipped to do. You know, we talk about fools rushing in. Well, that's a type of folly. You're putting yourself in a precarious position where you have to maintain the mask, the lie that you can actually do something that you know deep down you can't do as you deal with all the associated pathologies of anxiety that the mask is going to slip and people are going to be found out. Or you deal with the consequences of you make mistakes and you're not able to be helped with it because you're constantly saying I got this and yet you and everybody else knows you ain't got this. Not only that, once we live like that, think about how that relates to other people. We're made to live in community with other people. And when we overstate our strengths, exaggerate our abilities and our competencies, then it means that there has profound implications for other people in community around us. First of all, it says to them that we don't need them, which is not true at all. We do need them. We need them deeply. And so it means that other people aren't able to bring their gifts to the table because we're pretending like we're self-sufficient. We could do it all ourselves. And so we become isolated from them and they become isolated from us. I wonder how much of our sense of loneliness today is because we're doing this on a regular basis. How Lack of Truth Harms Community and Our Relationship with God But not only that, when you project strength and say that you've got this, you know what you do? When you view other people, you can't help but see them as a threat because you're over exaggerating your strengths and therefore you can't admit their gifts and their strengths. So what do you do? You bring them down to back up your lie about the fact that you're strong and you're better than other people. And so that's where gossip comes from. That's where slander comes from. And by the way, just for the avoidance of doubt, there is a Christian equivalent to that. It's like for your prayers. I'm just very concerned about him. Oh, why you really? Well, we, we cut people down to make ourselves look big to maintain the lie. And so it starts to break apart community and cause fractures, an alienation in community because we're not holding to the truth about ourselves and therefore we won't tell the truth about other people. And leaders who do this in organisations stifle the gifts of the team because they're so insecure that other people might be better than them or that their heroic persona is going to be exposed. And then of course, it leads to problems in our relationship with God. Jesus Christ says this fundamental truth about what it means to follow him. Apart from me, you can do nothing. He's saying he is the alpha and the Omega. He's the sovereign Lord. He's the giver of all good gifts. Without him, nothing good can happen. We need him, Oh how we need Him. We need him like air in our lungs. And yet if we're constantly projecting an excessive strength, then of course we're saying to ourselves and to every other people that I don't really need God like that. And so we downplay God and he becomes like a divine management consultant. They're for us in a pinch. But most of the time we're doing just fine, thanks very much. Good to have a saviour when life's not going great. But most of the time I'm fine. I mean, Jesus and me, we're kind of mates, but you know, I don't really need them. That's not the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. So we downplay God. Do you see how just in five to 10%, if we don't hold to the truth, then we become distorted and of course in our view of ourselves, our view of others in the world and our view of God. And so we need to constantly course correct and come back to the truth of who we really are, of our need for others and the way the world is and of God and what He is really like. That is what faithfulness is all about, faithfulness towards ourselves, towards the world and towards God. Why Faithfulness is a Fight Against Our Own Desires Which leads us to the second point, which is the fight for faithfulness. Maybe you'll say, OK, look, all right, I get 5%. I can probably admit maybe 5%, maybe 10% if you really push me. I'm off course feed, so I'll go and course correct. Thanks so much for the sermon. We can leave it at that, right? The problem is you need to realise how hard it is to course correct and why it is so hard. Because if it was easy, we'd all be living lives of faithfulness and integrity. And I would gently suggest to you that if you asked a loving other in your life, they might suggest that you have a few deficiencies in that area. So let's look at why it's a fight. Look at verse 7 of chapter 4. The apostle Paul says this. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I've kept the faith. He uses 2 metaphors here, two kind of sporting metaphors. 1 is of a fight, a kind of boxing match maybe, or of a battle, a military metaphor. The other one is a race. They're similar and they're connected. The fight is saying this to be faithful, to hold the truth requires you overcoming an enemy, overcoming an enemy. It's not straightforward. If it was just downhill, if you could just relax and you would naturally be faithful, then it would be a much easier sermon to preach. But in many ways the reason faithfulness is so hard is because there are enemies, enemies within and enemies without that are trying to distort the truth, and we don't know who those enemies are. Then we will consistently fail and lack integrity. The second metaphor is a race. It's a marathon race here, and this is saying we need to consistently fight over a long period of time. Think of this way. You can run brilliantly for 25 miles in the marathon, but if you stop running on that final mile, you do not finish and all the previous work is undone. In other words, so it is with faithfulness. It's not just doing it one of one off or inconsistently, but consistently holding to the truth because the moment you stop is the moment the problem set in and you lose course and you end up in the wrong destination. So we have to consistently do it. Now, this is hard. And the enemy that the Paul has in mind here is there in verse 3. For the time will come when people are not put up with sound doctrine. Instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around themselves teachers to say what the itching is want to hear. In other words, what's the enemy? The enemy primarily is an enemy within, which is the hardest battle to wage. The enemy to truth is our own desires. I really need you to understand this because once you get this, the Christian spirituality suddenly makes a ton of sense. Without this, you never really understand yourself. There's a behavioural economist called Dan Ariely and he wrote a book a number of years back, about 10 years back, called The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. And in it he engages with a huge body of research from behavioural economics and social psychology that shows our relationship to the truth. And his conclusion is this, that none of us blatantly lie or start out blatantly lying, but all of us will try to shave the truth and tell white lies or partial truths about things just enough for us to get an advantage, maybe a psychological advantage and a conversation. Maybe an advantage in work or something. Just enough to get an advantage. But here's the thing. Just a small enough amount that we convince ourselves we're still being truthful. So here's what he writes. So he talks about this. He says we cheat just a little, enough to pass unnoticed, to convince ourselves that we aren't really being dishonest after all. This fudge factor is key. We want to cheat and benefit from it, but we also want to think of ourselves as honest people. So we resolve the conflict with what he calls cognitive flexibility. Other people call this self deception. We convince ourselves we are moral by the standards we hold, but we're happy to break those standards so long as we convince ourselves that we haven't really broken them. You see how subtle it is? I mean, it's like just shaving the truth on your tax return just a little bit. I mean, it's not gross fraud. I'm not into that, but just a little bit. And after all, doesn't everybody do it? And then when your friends say, are you honest on your tax return? Of course I'm honest. And you're thinking what I mean by honest is honest like everybody else, but you're not being honest and you're not being honest with yourself, right? Or do you exaggerate the truth about yourself in a conversation? I do. But do you walk away from that thinking, I can't believe I just lied just to make myself look good? What's wrong with me? No, you just kind of think, hey, it was a white lie, no harm, no foul, right? And so you maintain the fudge factor between your dishonesty and your perception of yourself that you rehearse to everybody else. And I'm a truthful person of integrity and faithfulness. And so you don't actually hold to the truth. You're off by 5%. But remember our metaphor before? If you're off by 5% over the course of a long period of time, you're going to miss your mark hugely. That's unfaithfulness. The problem is the enemy within our own desires. We like to think that if I just saw the truth and I will believe the truth, that is so naive about the human condition. We often manipulate the truth based on what we want to be true, and we live into that reality. That's our truth. That's what we're seeking to do. From Eden's Lies to Scripture's Truth: Overcoming Self-Deception And this is as old as the Garden of Eden. For example, what happens in Genesis? And This is why Genesis is such an ever relevant account. In Genesis chapter 3, the tempter comes to Adam and Eve, and he says to Eve, did God really say that you cannot eat from any tree in the garden? Now did God say that? Read the text. No. Genesis chapter 2 God said you can eat from any tree in the garden, but there's only one tree you can't eat from and it's for your own good because even the day you eat of it you will surely die. The tempter tempts to the opposite. Why? Why is that so attractive? He goes on with his lie. He says because God knows that in the day, if you eat of it, you will become like God. In other words, you can be more than he says you are. You can exaggerate the truth about yourself knowing good and evil, and therefore you're not going to die. So go ahead and do it. So you see how our view of ourself that I can be more rather than being content with being a creature in God's good Kingdom, leads us to believe a lie that God is against us and that other people are a threat to us. And because we believe the temptation in our own desires about that, we wander off from the truth and fall into sin. That's what sin is. It's not the gross sins that we think of of monsters out there. Do you know how they became monsters? By holding to the lie in the small things over a long period of time, which leads to a massive course deviation over the long period of their lives. If we lie and then lie to ourselves about the lie and then lie to back up the lie, we keep doing that. That's what causes fractures in community. That's what causes deep psychological ill health. That's what causes unbelief in God. And it's not a lack of information, it's a lack of inclination. And so the apostle Paul says to be faithful, to live consistently to the truth about yourself, about the world, and about God, you need to fight the fight with sin, with our own internal desires that would distort the truth and then lie to us that we didn't really do it, that we're actually truthful and integral people after all. And by the way, This is why it's so important that we have the standard of truth that is the Scriptures. The Bible isn't the only source of truth in the world, but Christians believe it to be the ultimate source of truth because it is God's truth about what we are really like, about what the world is really like, and about what God is really like. And therefore, this is course correction. And so if you're not reading this on a regular basis, you're like a pilot who for a couple of hours doesn't actually watch where they are on the map. And you could have deviated far off course. That's why at Redeem a Downtime, we encourage people to read the Bible on a daily basis. We say 10/10/10 minutes of reading the Scriptures, 10 minutes of praying for yourselves and the world and God in light of it. And as you pray into it, you're course correcting, you're holding to the truth and you need to do it regularly. So do you keep course correcting? That's why the truth of Scripture matters so much. That's why the apostle Paul says, I have held to the truth of Scripture faithfully in his ministry. Now this is hard to do this fight. The Crown of Righteousness and the Truth-Making Power of the Cross So we need motivation. Let's look lastly and the motivation for faithfulness. Notice Paul's motivation in verse 8. He says there is in store for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearing. 2 things about this motivation. First of all, it's about righteousness. He calls it a crown of righteousness. We'll come to that in a moment and the future reality of it. But it's righteousness. That is to say that the truth about ourselves is that we are right with God not on the basis of something we do or on the basis of us being honest and integral people with great authenticity. But the truth about ourselves is that we need God to give us righteousness as a gift, as something we don't deserve, but he freely gives to us. Why do we need that? Well, because The thing is, the reason we've struggled to admit the truth about ourselves is because of our chronic insecurity and our shame. Shame makes us lie. Shame makes us die with a lie and keep lying. Because we're so afraid that if we admit the truth about ourselves that you won't love me and God won't love me and everyone will leave me. And so we lie and we put on the front and said, I'm totally fine. And yet therefore we live in the tragedy of never being truthful with ourselves or with anyone else about what we really like. But if we understand that God has given us the gift of righteousness, it enables us to be truthful, perhaps for the first time. Why is that? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book The Cost of Discipleship, says this. The cross is God's truth about us, and therefore it is the only power which can make us truthful. When we know the cross, we're no longer afraid of the truth. Why does He say the cross is God's truth about us and it's the only power to make us truthful? Do this thought experiment with me. What would it be like if someone knew the truth about you? All of your inadequacies, all of your exaggerations, all of your insecurities, all of the wounds that you'll spend all your time hiding and trying to cover up, all of the skeletons in the closet, the most dark things about you. They knew the truth about you, and yet having seen the truth about you, they did the one thing that you least expected. They loved you and they stayed with you. So many of you here are afraid that people are going to leave in the morning when they've seen the truth about you, when you've actually been naked and vulnerable with someone. That's the great fear, right? And so we enter into relationship when we show a little bit. Are you going to leave me now a little bit more? We're going to leave me now a little bit more. But we never say at all because we're too scared that if you show everything in the closet, all of the skeletons, all of the darkness, someone will go. That's why you're like, Oh my goodness, I didn't know you were like that. I'm off. But when Jesus Christ dies on the cross, he shows you that he knows you. Why? Because he knows how serious your lack of truth and your lack of integrity is so serious that he had to die for you. And so he knows you, the real you, the you behind 1000 masks, the you behind all the filters, the you who holds the key to the closet. He knows what's inside the closet. And at that moment he sees you. And he says, I'm not going to leave you. I'm here for you. I'm going to die for you. And I will never love you any more than I do right now. When I see you at your worst, I see your ugliness, I see your lack of truth, I see the lies and the cover ups that you've been pertaining all your life. And I'm still here for you. Oh, my friend, if you really get that, you go. He knows me, the real me. You know what that is profoundly healing. And because of that, because the one person in the universe, God himself has known you as you really are and has loved you, sin and all, not condoning it, but dying and forgiving you for it. Suddenly it makes you healed. And over a period of time, you start say, I can be honest with myself about what I'm really like and others in time. That's why Bonhoeffer says God's truth about us is the only thing that can make us truthful because we can start to be truthful about ourselves for the first time when we see Jesus is prepared to die for our lies on the cross. Spurgeon's Vision: Perseverance, Prayer, and God's Shaping Truth One last thing, notice that this righteousness has a future aspect for it. The apostle Paul says there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness. We said it's consistently holding to the truth over a long period of time. How do you do that? You have to look ahead, just like the marathon runner looks ahead to the prize of the finish line, just like a fighter looks to the end of the rounds when it's all done and keeps fighting. So you have to keep going. And therefore you need to know that even though righteousness is a gift now, you don't fully experience it until that day when you see Jesus face to face. And on that day, the crown will be given to you. So keep fighting. Let me close with this. Spurgeon, preaching on this passage, talked about the future crown. In these words he says, do you see that Little River of death glistening in the future in the sunlight across it? Do you see the pinnacles of God's eternal city, heaven given for you? Can you make out the joy of that country and all its inhabitants there waiting For you? Know then, that if you could now fly across, you would see written upon one of his many mansions. This remains for such a one, one preserved for him or her only. He should be caught up to dwell with God forever on that day. Oh, then he says, stop doubting. See the inheritance before you. It is yours. If you believe in the Lord Jesus, if you have turned away from your lies and your sin, if you've been renewed in your heart, then you are one of God's people and there is a place reserved for you. There is a crown laid up for you. There is a harp specially provided for you. No one else will have your inheritance. It is reserved for you and you alone, and you will have it soon, for there will be no vacant Thrones and glory in heaven when all the chosen are gathered in. So fight, Fight for faithfulness. Hold the truth about yourself. Keep course correcting, knowing that you are righteous in God's sight because of what Jesus done, and a crown of righteousness awaits you. Let me lead some prayer. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this example from the apostle Paul in Second Timothy 4 and for the way that he fought the good fight He holds. He held the faith. He was not perfect, but he kept course correcting, coming back to the reality of who he is and his need of the gift of righteousness in the Lord Jesus Christ. May we seek to be people who are truthful about ourselves, about the world, and about God because of the gift of righteousness and the crown of righteousness that awaits us. We ask it for His name's sake. Amen. Speaker 1 At Redeemer Downtown, we believe that the gospel has the power to renew both our lives and our city. If today's sermon touched your heart or sparked new thoughts, we encourage you to take it further. Share and talk about it with a friend, pray over what you heard, or continue to meditate on today's passage. We'd also love to stay connected with you. Discover more sermons and resources at redeemerdt.com. Thanks for listening. Until then, go in peace, live in grace, and let God's truth and love shape every part of your life.