Doubts
Jeremy MacDonald · Tidal Church Moncton · November 2, 2025 · Malachi series
Jeremy MacDonald opens the Malachi series with God speaking to a doubting people. He answers their question of how He has loved them by pointing to His past faithfulness, inviting us to remember where God has been faithful and to confess where we have wandered.
More from Jeremy MacDonald · The Malachi series
Topics: Love, Faith, Forgiveness
Transcript
[0:00] Well, this morning I have with me a very special Bible. This is the first, or one of the first Bibles that I received. The first one from somebody, not from my family. I got it when I was at a church actually here in town. It's still inscribed to me. I was in Pioneer Clubs. I was 19, September 12th, 1993. I was five years old, is when I became a Christian. And I always like to say God turned my life around because as a 4-year-old, I was just wild. But no, but it's an interesting story of God's faithfulness that at the age of five I was given the Scriptures, which I absolutely love. I love getting a chance to open them here. I love to preach from them. I love to read them. The Christian Scriptures are these infallible words of God in incredible ways.
[0:45] But as a 5-year-old getting the Bible, if you can picture just the cutest kid that you can possibly imagine, that was me, doing what I would think would be the right thing, which is opening up the Bible then that I now own, and, learning how to read it on my own, how terrifying parts of the Bible would be for me as a five-year-old, for example, Revelation. If you go there and imagine you're reading this at night as a five-year-old, I saw beast rising up over the sea. Its seven heads and 10 horns with 10 crowns on its horns. Like that's the stuff of nightmares for a kid, right? And so you're like, well, yeah, but there's context and it's true. And so you're trying to like, you know, how do we teach and help people understand? And then, you know, I get to middle school and I'm trying to find like the guidance for my life.
[1:31] And then I come to a place like in Hosea 1, verse 2 that says, go marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, which is not what I did. She, my wife's here, not, this is not the story, and this is not advice for you either, but it's in there. What's the context to be able to say something like that? Like it's an honest question because the Scriptures have so many fascinating, terrifying, interesting intrigue stories. And to understand the context and what does that mean for you and for me is a challenge sometimes. Like Eutychus, for example, Eutychus was in the New Testament and Paul was preaching, and Paul is this, you know, person that had launched the churches all around these Mediterranean rim. He was there and presumably I think he was leaving the next day. And so he was preaching and he kept preaching and he was going into the evening and there was like this balcony, and Eutychus is in the balcony listening and then falls asleep and then falls and dies.
[2:25] That's crazy. So I'm just saying, if you're in the balcony and you get tired, please don't fall and die. Please go up or come down or do something different. But then in the New Testament, he actually gets like raised from the dead, like Paul, like revives them and then keeps preaching. And I think sometime in the future it'd be so interesting to talk to this guy 'cause it's like you ended up in heaven and then God's like, no, you didn't finish the sermon. You gotta go back and listen to the rest of the sermon. And so just listen to the rest of the sermon. Also, important note, maybe that's the point. Ehud, this left-handed swordsman who does this political assassination in the Old Testament. Bezalel, who is a craftsperson who has the Spirit of God on him. And if you're a craftsperson, I have no idea exactly what you do with, you know, if you're an electrician or you're a framer or you're, you know, a finished carpenter or whatever the thing is.
[3:13] But you should know there's somebody in the Bible that the Spirit of God infused life and purpose and meaning into the work that he was doing. And you can carry the purpose of God into making the pipes straight again, not my expertise, Elior, who is not at all a person in the Bible, but sounds really good. And just a reminder that if you ever listen to somebody talk about things, you should always double check their work to make sure that they're telling the truth 'cause he doesn't exist. But then today, and this next few weeks, we're gonna do a series on the book and the person of Malachi. And so Malachi kind of fits in this category of like something that's a little different and out of the ordinary. Like if you read and open up the Scriptures and you hear Jesus talk and invite you to live a certain way, that kinda makes sense.
[4:01] You go to the 10 Commandments, you know, do not steal. You're like, oh, I can understand what to do with that. But when you open Malachi, there's a lot going on and it sometimes can be kind of challenging to know what to do with it. So as we were planning this series out with our teaching team, I'm hoping kind of two things happen. The first is, I hope that this text actually will speak to you and to me, I think it well. But the second thing is, I hope that you and I get a more, maybe not more robust, but that we would learn more about how to engage the Christian Scriptures. Because I don't know about you. I mean, I've grown up with them. I've been reading them for, you know, over 30 years and still to this day, I still have questions and wonderings, what does this mean and what am I supposed to do with this?
[4:47] And I discover new things. I'll tell you about some of the things that I discovered for myself as I was preparing this message. And so when you approach a text, there's part of the Christian Scriptures. There's a couple of things that I think you should do, and I wanna kind of model and show you them. But it's an idea that you can actually carry into your own reading, your own study, your own, you know, as you get a chance to open up the Word of God. And the first is to understand that the Bible is written in a particular time at different times throughout the 66 books. So like the first part is different than the last part to a different people in a different language. And sometimes understanding the context is actually really helpful to help kind of place things and give an explanation.
[5:34] So I'm gonna show you a slide that you can't actually read. 'cause it's super tiny. And this is actually another secret. If you have heard me preach before and you're like, where's his notes? And so on like that, oh, the trick is I just put it all on the TV and sometimes I put things on the TV and it's not for you. It's actually for me. So I remember what to say. It's actually a lot of this stuff. So that's just between you and me. But this slide, and you can take a picture of it or I think maybe we'll send this out. I made a reminder between services to send out something like this on the newsletter this coming week. So you should subscribe and you'll get something like this. But this is just a timeline graph. It kind of shows the fact that there is a timeline to the Christian scriptures. So the bigger blocks are kind of like explaining what's going on across time. And then the little blocks underneath are showing the different parts of scripture and where they fit into the timeline and the people and what's going on.
[6:24] And the story of God starts in Genesis with creation, but then it changes and it moves and it grows. And you have Adam and Eve, but then you have Noah and the flood, and then you have Abraham and this promise to bless the nations, that God would bless the nations through Abraham. And he turns his name into Abraham. And Abraham has Isaac and Isaac has Jacob, and Jacob's name changes to Israel. And Israel has 12 sons. And there's the Joseph in the coat of many colors, and they end up in Egypt because he's sold by his brothers. And then in Egypt, the nation grows and grows and grows and time goes on and they become enslaved in Egypt. And then there's Moses, and he brings the out of Egypt, and out of Egypt, they move into the Promised Land where there's the conquest, and the Joshua explains and kind of covers this conquest of the Promised Land.
[7:13] And then there's this nation that formed that God is the head of, and that the nation is meant to be a blessing to the nations. And yet they fall away so much and so often from what God has called them to. And so they ask for a king and God gives them a king, and it's not what they had hoped it would be. And then a new king rises up and it's David. And then to this time, there's so much of the Psalms are written there, and the and then the David's kingdom is established and there's prophecy and there's explanation. And then as the nation of Israel continues to walk away from the Lord, they're exiled and God pushes them outta the Promised Land. And in exile, they're left wondering, does God still love us? Does God still care about us? And then they're invited back and they come back to their land.
[8:00] But it's not the same as it was before. And this is the time that Malachi is written, post the exile, as some of the Israelites are coming back in and they're looking around and they're realizing they have their temple again, but it's not as glorious as the first one. They have their land again, but they don't have the same freedoms as they used to. They have these stories of God doing incredible things from before, and they're kind of wondering, where is He now? And so for the story of Malachi to be placed, you should know when it happens. And it's this last book in our Old Testament, interestingly enough, because it's kind of like the last thing we hear from the Lord before we hear of the heralding of the coming of Jesus. And there is this sense, and in this thing here, you can kind of see the idea that there might be a silence of a few hundred years between Malachi and Matthew.
[8:50] It's not quite a silence. God was still working and speaking to people in the same way that God is not silent today. He's working and He's speaking to His people. But we don't have any recordings, we don't have any more scriptures from this time. Malachi is this last word. And Malachi, if you watch Bible Project videos, which you should, they're on YouTube, they're really interesting. They'll explain kind of books at a time and concepts. And so the Bible Project explains that the Israelites who repopulated the city proved to be just as unfaithful to God as their ancestors, resulting in poverty and injustice. And so in Malachi, we find out just how corrupt this new generation has become. That's the context, kind of the timing and the place. And so we're about to open up, and for this week, we're gonna walk through Malachi chapter 1.
[9:37] Next week you come back and we'll do Malachi chapter 2, and we'll come back and on week three, Malachi 3 and 4, and and ask ourselves, okay, what does this, what does this mean for them? And what does it mean for us? And the second thing that we do outside to understand the context is when we approach these texts, we ask ourselves a few key questions. And these are great questions. You, again, if you wanna snap a picture or just remember this or take a note, these are not my questions, but just questions that help inform the way that we should process and think about the scriptures. And the first is, when you're reading, to ask the question, what did the text mean to the biblical audience, the original people that it was written to? See, the Bible isn't always written to us, but it's for us. And so to understand that means to understand who is Malachi speaking to and what was he speaking about?
[10:25] And so that's the context we were learning about, that what's the differences between the biblical audiences, us and us, we have wonderful indoor plumbing and of the whole host of other things that are true for us today, that is not true for them. And so you can bake in, there's all these details. And the point is that when you look and understand there's differences between us, that's okay. We should just acknowledge those differences and then recognize that the same God that Malachi is hearing from is the same God that we talk about and sing about here today. Third, what is the theological principle in this text? Theological, theos, this study of God, the ideas about who God is and what He means to you. And to me, this is an important part. This is part of the reason why, you know, we get a chance to gather around these scriptures, is so that the God of the universe, that we can understand and know Him.
[11:17] And so we discover that through His word. Fourth, how does our principle fit with the rest of the Bible? Because if you come up with a new idea that doesn't match what you hear in the other parts of the Bible or doesn't match through Christian history, you might pause and say, I wonder if I got it wrong. And then fifth, how should individual Christians today live out this idea of God? These are the questions we're gonna wrestle with as we open up Malachi chapter 1, verse 1. And here is what we read. This is the message that the Lord gave to Israel through the prophet Malachi. Malachi being a person, also being a word that means messenger. So it's a bit of a title here, but Malachi is coming as one of what we would now describe as the minor prophets.
[12:05] There's many of them throughout the Old Testament. You can read through lots of the different minor prophets. And when you read a minor prophet, it's not that prophets were like seers and kind of seeing into the future. Sometimes we think that's what prophecy means. Like, oh, I know exactly where you're gonna be in seven years from now, and I know who you're gonna marry, and I know what job you're gonna have. That's not prophecy as the Bible describes it. The prophets typically did three things. And you'll see all three of these things happening from Malachi. The first is that they often have a word that, you know, shouts repentance, speaking to Israel and to the people. He says, "You've broken the covenant, it's time to return to God." That's a core message of the prophets. The second one is judgment. See, breaking the covenant and the and the commandments of God has consequences.
[12:50] And so I'm gonna explain those to you. That's what the prophet does. But prophets also bring hope that God is faithful and will ultimately bring a glorious restoration. And so when we go through Malachi, what you'll see is that these things get embodied in kind of this framework that happens. And it repeats itself numerous times, twice in the first chapter, and then a few more times as the chapters go on. And the breakdown is kind of that God will make a statement. The people are gonna protest that statement, and then there'll be an explanation of why that statement is true. That's the idea here. Statement, protest, explanation. Okay, so Malachi chapter 1, we just read verse 1. Let's read verse 2. Here's the statement: "I have always loved you," says the Lord.
[13:40] Now, for those people in that time, that's a challenging statement because of their history, because of their stories and expectations about what God had done. And so for God to say, "I have always loved you," I'm sure there's lots of people that are listening to Malachi and they're like, "Really? Like, I have my doubts." And the interesting thing for you and for me, I think, is that when you have doubts about God's love, although Malachi isn't written to the 21st century Christians in Moncton, New Brunswick, you might discover a lot of affinity, a lot of similarities between yourself and the people of Israel that Malachi speaks to.
[14:28] And the same God that sometimes feels distant to you is the God that in some ways felt distant to those Israelites. And so what happens when it feels like, "I'm not sure, is God really? Is He really, really there?" Well, the readers of Malachi would hear this from the prophet as an explanation: "I've always loved you," says the Lord, but you retort, "Really? How have You loved us? Give us an example." If you ever found yourself wondering that, "Lord, if You are real, like, I would just wanna see it, like, show up and do something miraculous in my midst, and then I'll believe You because I wanna know for sure."
[15:17] And so we demand a sign, it's like, "Hey, if You're real, like, turn that light green right away." Or like, you know, "If You're real, like, you know," you've tested some of those things, maybe, I don't know, maybe that was just me. "Hey, if You're real, help me find my keys." Like, there's all sorts of things that sometimes we play with God trying to coax Him to show Himself. And it's been the all of human history. "How have You actually loved us?" And the Lord will actually give an answer. In fact, what He says is, the Lord replies, "This is how I showed my love for you." And then explains a story of how His love is being shown. Now, it's a different kind of story, but it's one that would have a lot of emotion for the Israelites of that time. But it's a story that goes back, it's a story of God's faithfulness from the past.
[16:06] It's not from breakfast this morning. It's a story of faithfulness that is strong and rich and important and critical. But it's a story that they would've shared amongst their kids and their family and they would remember, and God was pointing out to them as faithfulness. Not from a story from this morning, but from the history. And I think this is an interesting thing for us to note, we'll come back to it, but the story that He shares is about Jacob and Esau. Jacob being, again, changed his name to Israel or got changed his name to Israel, Esau being his brother that sold his birthright to Jacob. But then Esau and Jacob were almost like these mortal enemies in some ways. And the fight between them grew throughout the years. And actually the people of Israel and the people of Esau, the Edomites, would become these really intense enemies and the enemies of the people of God.
[16:55] You know, there's a really a lot of strong language in the Scriptures as God explains and walks through how He's in the corner of His people, the Israelites, and how He's against their enemies. And this is that strong language that you hear, which to us it can be challenging 'cause we don't know all the context, but the fact that the people of God would struggle. And then God said, "But I loved your ancestor Jacob. I rejected his brother Esau and devastated his hill country. I turned Esau's inheritance into a desert for jackals. Esau's descendants in Edom may say, 'We have been shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins.' But the Lord of heaven's armies replies, 'They may try to rebuild, but I will demolish them again. Their country will be known as the land of wickedness. And their people will be called the people with whom the Lord is forever angry.' And when you see the destruction for yourselves, you will say, 'Truly the Lord's greatness reaches far beyond Israel's borders.'" And so this strong language of where the Israelites felt like there was an oppression happening to them, that there was this other group that had kind of weighed against them and fought against them and pushed against them.
[18:05] And here we are with this beautiful example of God saying, "No, no, no, I've been in your corner and I'm with you and I'm for you and I'll defeat your enemies." And I wanna just take a moment, 'cause I know even like for us as 21st century, like, "Okay, but what about those people?" Like, our compassion kind of shows up and just so that you're aware, just so that it's helpful, God's hatred and frustration with Edomites is in this instance not that He's needing to explain it because He's trying to say something to the Israelites, but it still exists and it's there. In fact, David Baker will say that Obadiah pictures Esau's descendants, the Edomites, as unfaithful parties of a covenant in their own history, and God's hatred of Esau is not permanent and absolute because it's that same term that also applies to Israel and Jeremiah. And in Hosea, it's this idea that yes, God is angry and frustrated because He wants to call the people back to Himself.
[18:55] He wants His name to be great in the world, but the Edomites are constantly against the people of God. Now, this is an interesting historical note, not a huge tie-in, but I find it fascinating. And since I'm the one with the mic, you gotta listen. So this is how it goes. The Encyclopedia Britannica, don't own a copy, but the internet does. And they had explained that the Edomites, they actually migrated to Southern Judea where they became known in the New Testament as the Ians. Okay, not interesting yet. That's okay. The Ians, according to an ancient Jewish source, Josephus, very common, very well known, speaks of Herod the Great as an Ian. And so then common historical understanding is that the Herods that we find in the New Testament were actually of this particular people group, which is fascinating because they are also positioned against the nation of Israel.
[19:47] All the way in the very beginning of the story of Jesus. Matthew 2, you'll catch this in the Christmas narrative. Soon when Herod the Great realized that he'd been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem in its vicinity who were two years old and under. That's the Edomites, that's the descendants of Esau. That's the people that are fighting and frustrating against Israel. And Israel's like, God, where are You? Where are You? We can't see You. Or do You really love us? And the frustration that they felt around not knowing if God really and truly loved them leads them to the second part of Malachi 1. And their second failure, put this way, Israel, or in this case, Judah's false perception of God in the first part of Malachi, not believing in His love for them, leads to the kind of worship in the rest of chapter 1 that disrespects God, failing to receive love results in withholding it.
[20:50] And that's not just a Bible thing. That's like a people thing, that's like your thing. Like you've got a relationship or a person that has felt like maybe they've pulled back from you or they've withheld some type of love. And as a result, your natural inclination is, we'll all do the same thing. I'll back away. I don't want to be with them. Sometimes we teach kids this. This is like, yeah, if they're gonna be mean to you, then just walk away and don't spend any time with them. And we miss the opportunity of reconciliation and pursuing after and trying to show the love even when we may not feel like we are receiving it. But what happens in Malachi, the people of God, they feel like God's not there.
[21:36] But God says, no, I've been here all along. Let Me tell you a story of My faithfulness. And for me, it's the same thing. You've wondered sometimes where is God? And yet we forget that He's been faithful for so many years, you forget and you don't recognize and know that He's been with you at pursuing you every step of the way. And if we would pause and just have eyes to see and recognize and know that our faith might change because we would actually recognize the place of the presence of God in our life, even in the smallest of spots, even as a five-year-old receiving a Bible, as a middle school student with a small group leader who would pray for me, it's a high school student with a mentor who would be committed to helping shape and guide the direction for my life.
[22:25] The faithfulness of God can be seen throughout our journeys if we are open to looking for it. But if we close ourself off, we end up experiencing what the Israelites experienced in Malachi 1:6, which is this, God says, "You have shown contempt for My name." This is the nature. They don't believe God loves them. And so now they're showing contempt for their name. And they protest. They say, "How have we ever shown contempt for Your name?" And the Lord says very clearly, "By offering defiled sacrifices on My altar," which is one of the ways that would be seen in that timeframe, that's the way that they would, you know, present sacrifices to the Lord. But in verse 13, it kind of helps us understand it maybe even a little bit more for our context, verse 13, explaining this more, "You say, 'It's too hard to serve the Lord,' and you turn up your noses at My commands," says the Lord of heaven's armies.
[23:25] It's this sense that for you and for me to follow after the Lord requires things of us. It requires our obedience. It requires us to take a step of faith. It requires us to live our lives in a way that sometimes can be confusing. It requires us to accept and to allow the Scriptures to shape our understanding of our lives and our direction and our affections. Even when we're like, I'm not sure exactly, but the Lord says, no, this is what I'm inviting you into. And the point is, and this is the point of the prophets, that what happens for each of them as they explain these things to the people is that sin is still an affront to God's holiness, but as they point out the sins of the people, that God is in the business of restoring and forgiving people like you and like me.
[24:24] And so sometimes what happens like in those days is that when you think about God and your relationship with Him, sometimes it's awesome and it's great. And we ride those moments and we appreciate those moments. Those are incredibly important moments because they become the markers of God's faithfulness that we can look back to and recognize, and He's still faithful in the difficulties. But when we're in the difficulties, we need those moments to remember the story that He's been writing in and throughout our lives. We need those moments because if we're not careful, we'll forget at how faithful God has been in your story and in my story. And listen, if you're here and you're like, oh, I don't believe any of this stuff, the truth is that you've gotta know at some point, I mean, we hope that you just keep coming and you're always welcome here and you can believe whatever you wanna believe, but we hope that you would discover that this God truly does love you.
[25:23] And when you come to that recognition that you'll actually recognize and notice those moments of His faithfulness throughout your story, even when you weren't faithful to Him. That's the beautiful thing that we've all, the rest of us have kind of caught onto, that even when we stray, that God is still faithful to us. But that when we stray and when we wonder and when we doubt, one of the things we do is we step back and we think about His faithfulness. But then the other thing we do is like what the prophet calls the people of God to, is to recognize where we have fallen short, where we have given up following after the commands of God, where we have offered defiled sacrifices, where we have taken our lives and not lived them into what God has called us to.
[26:13] When we do these series. And when we do this preparation, we have a student from Kingswood. Actually, she's doing her theological degree. And so she helps us with some of the research, which is kind of fun. She jumps on Zoom and like pulls out some ideas and, and helps us as we're building the series as a team. We work together on this. And so, Abby is her name. And so Abby, she was writing out some thoughts about Malachi. She wrote this and I was like, "Oh, this is really good." Can I just share this, Abby? And so she said, "Sure," because I think it's a way to kind of sum up what we're hearing from the prophet Malachi. Abby says, if you're feeling distant from God, and I know not everybody here is, but some of you are. And if you're not today, you might next week.
[26:59] And you might remember the time that you felt like you had some pretty big doubts and that God felt like He might be far away. And she says, perhaps it is not He who has drifted away, but maybe it's, you see, God tells the people of Israel that He loved them. He has loved them and He does love them and always will love them. Maybe you feel distant from God because the enemy's attacking you, or maybe your faith is being tested to make sure it's more than just feelings. But try examining your life for sin or for complacency. And you may find nothing, but you may be surprised by how far you've wandered. While you weren't looking, how far you've wandered while you weren't looking.
[27:46] I heard a speaker just this week talk about how it doesn't take much to drift away. You just have to do nothing. And you'll drift into complacency and you'll drift into a distance from God and from the people around you. And it's just human nature. It takes intention to keep our eyes focused on Jesus. But when we do that, it's going to be shocking how often we recognize that as we look to Jesus, we're gonna feel and recognize the conviction of our sinfulness and our brokenness. See, this is the work of His refining in us, His sanctification work in us, His taking our inside and changing it and transforming it to be that new creation.
[28:32] There's an expectation that the way you are today is not perfect, and if you don't realize it, the person next to you does. But the Lord wants to make you perfect in His way. And so the work that we do as Jesus followers is hearing this reminder from Malachi, is remembering that the same God that was faithful to them and that called them to faithfulness calls you and me to examine ourselves and recognize how we haven't measured up. Where have we let complacency creep in? Where have we let our story be marked, not by the truth of the Scriptures, but by our own hopes and desires or inklings?
[29:18] And so here's my challenge for us for these next few weeks: is to read Malachi. It's a short, very short book. You can go through it a few times over these next three weeks and allow the text to roll through your life and to allow it to shape how you understand this God that we talk about and that we sing about here. And then to have a reflection time. And I want to even give us a moment here in a second to wonder, where has God been faithful in your life? Can you actually pause and remember and then mark it? Can you actually recognize this as a part of your spiritual discipline, that you would be able to tell the story of God's faithfulness in your life, not just to yourself, but certainly to yourself? 'Cause it's gonna help shape your affections for Him. But even to the people around you, where has God been faithful?
[30:05] It's been faithful all my life. Where exactly, tell the story, remember it, and write it down and then recognize where you've wandered, because you and I are prone to wander and we have to acknowledge it and allow the Spirit to identify it so we can confess it and allow God to take it and then transform it. So let me pray for you and for me. And I wanna invite the Spirit of God to actually come and to even remind us of some of these things here this morning. If you join me, you can bow your heads. It's just a means of avoiding the distraction of the people around us or the person moving the TV or the people moving around the stage and allows us to focus our attention and our thoughts on our Heavenly Father, who invites us to be able to speak to Him in this kind of personal way.
[31:00] And so, Heavenly Father, we do ask that in this space, in this time, even now as we've been able to read these texts that You've preserved for hundreds, for thousands of years. Lord, we're asking for Your Spirit to come in our midst. And would You speak to us as real as You spoke to those people through Malachi? Would Your Spirit speak to each of our hearts even here in this moment? If we leave a moment of pause, would Your Spirit speak to us and remind us of where You've been faithful? Lord, You might bring to our minds a specific person. You might bring to our minds a situation. You might bring to our minds a place that we were. But would You, even in these moments, would You just give us a glimpse of Your faithfulness and reveal that in our mind's eye and our hearts to remind us that You do indeed love us and You have indeed done great things for us.
[31:54] Would You bring that to our minds even now? And then, Lord, I know that I've wandered and I've wandered in ways that are frustrating. I've wandered in ways that are embarrassing. I've wandered in ways that I need forgiveness and I need Your power to reshape my heart. And so for each and every one of us, would You give us a glimpse of how we've wandered even in the last month or the last week or the last day? Would You bring to our minds the relationship that we weren't Christlike in?
[32:48] Would You remind us of the situation where we didn't exhibit the fruit of the Spirit? Would You remind us of the place that we went to, that we knew we shouldn't have gone to? Would You remind us of the thing that we did or that we didn't do? And in this moment, Lord, would Your Spirit speak to each of our hearts and remind us of where we're wandering even right now? And Heavenly Father, we're grateful that we can bring these to You and we can confess and You can restore.
[33:38] But Lord, that there might be somebody here that as they think about the person that comes to their mind, that this Christmas season it's gonna require some reconciliation, some restoration, Lord, would You remind them that their worship of You is gonna require their deference and their love for that person? And that's okay. And we can pray and ask for strength for that, Lord, for the person that feels just weighed down by their sin. And the shame has even crept in, in this moment. Lord, would You speak to that heart? And would You draw them to Yourself so that they could hand over the shame and the burden of their sin to You? And You could bring the freedom that You're offering in this moment.
[34:23] But Lord, it does require us to step out and to allow You to do that work and it isn't comfortable. And so would You give that person the strength maybe to come forward at the end of this service for prayer, Lord, for the person that just is kind of feeling empty, that is wondering if any of this is even real? Lord, as we sing this next song, would they be overwhelmed by Your presence, knowing that sometimes we sing songs because we truly know and believe in You. And Lord, sometimes we sing songs 'cause we just desperately, we just desperately need it to be true.
[35:08] And so for somebody here today, would You be present in their life and present in this space and present in their worship and present in their singing? And Lord, for all of us, as You give us the opportunity to respond to You, would You find us as a group of people willing to hand it all over to You, willing to believe in who You are? It's a difficult day, Lord. It's a difficult time in our world and in our city and in our country. And yet in the midst of it all, Lord, the best thing we could do is to offer everything to You. And Lord, would You shape us into the people that You need us to be so that we can be the people of God for this generation?
[35:54] And Lord, we pray these things in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen.