Jesus 4 Everybody: A Movement of Suffering

Good morning. I'm looking at Acts chapters six, seven, and eight this morning—the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr in the church. You can tell I've got a little bit of a chest cold, so I'm gonna be looking to the congregation to carry me on the reading this morning. I need you to be bold. Alright? Let's read God's word together. Portions of Acts chapters six, seven, and eight.

They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas, a convert from Antioch. They had them stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them. Now Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and signs among the people. Opposition arose, however, from some members of the Freedmen's Synagogue, who were both Cyreneans and Alexandrians, and some from Cilicia and Asia, and they began to argue with Stephen. But they were unable to stand up against his wisdom and the Spirit by whom he was speaking. Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, "We heard him speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God." They stirred up the people, the elders, and the scribes. So they came, seized him, and took him to the Sanhedrin. They also presented false witnesses who said, "This man never stops speaking against this holy place and the law. For we heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses handed down to us." And all who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at him and saw that his face was like that of an angel.

"You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears. You are always resisting the Holy Spirit. As your ancestors did, you do also. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They even killed those who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become. You received the law under the direction of angels and yet have not kept it."

When they heard these things, they were enraged and gnashed their teeth at him. Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven. He saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. He said, "Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."

They cried out with a loud voice and covered their ears and rushed against him together. They dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. And the witnesses laid their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he cried out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." He knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And after saying this, he fell asleep. Saul agreed with putting him to death.

On that day, a severe persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria. Devout men buried Stephen and mourned deeply over him. Saul, however, was ravaging the church. He would enter house after house, drag off men and women, and put them in prison. So those who were scattered went on their way preaching the word. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

The Marvel of Modern Technology

You know, I think we seldom take a moment to think about what a marvel this age is that we live in—such a technologically advanced age. You can have coffee where scientists extract the main thing that matters in coffee, which is caffeine. You can drink decaf coffee and it tastes, well, maybe not quite as good, but almost as good as regular coffee. In that coffee, you can put a sweetener that's based on the sugar molecule that's been chemically altered just slightly. This is called Splenda—an artificial sweetener that has no caloric value to it.

You can serve that up with egg whites that you can buy in a carton where somebody has removed the yolks from it so you don't have to have the cholesterol. You can have on the side of your breakfast plate a slice of seedless watermelon or seedless grapes, which is a marvel because that's what grapes are intended to do and watermelon are intended to be—to carry the seeds.

We live in an era where we've figured out how to alter things and remove things that we don't like. I was amazed to watch—we have six children. My wife had three naturally and then three with epidurals. She is an amazing person. I watched this and I was like, "Holy cow, I had no idea." But with the epidural for the last three, she's sitting there flipping through a magazine. There's a way even with childbirth we can extract much of the pain from it.

And yet one of the things we've never been able to do is figure out how to remove suffering from life. We can't take suffering and pain out of this existence. When you were a kid, did you ever play going on a bear hunt? I remember this from elementary school.

Going on a bear hunt and the leader would do this and everybody else would do this and you'd repeat what the leader would say and there would be all these obstacles on the journey. So you come to a river and you repeat. Can't go over it. Can't go under it. Can't go around it. Gotta go through it. And that's what life is like, right, with suffering and pain. I wish we could go on a bear hunt and go around it and go over it and go under it, but we can't. We have to go through it.

And I don't know, there's a lot of you who are engineers. I don't know what you all are doing with your lives. You're supposed to be removing things like suffering and pain and I don't know what y'all are doing. Like, I'm an English major. We just know how to talk about it. So get to work.

But seriously, the fall that we read about in Genesis 3 has ensured that there is no life in this world. There never will be a life that truly escapes suffering, hardship, and pain. I don't know where you are this morning. For some of you, this sermon and topic may feel really remote. For others, this feels very immediate. But one thing I can guarantee as your pastor: hardship, suffering, pain. This is guaranteed in this life. This is a part of this life and what really matters, what really makes the difference is how we go through it.

Stephen's Testimony as Witness

We read this morning the story of the first martyr in the book of Acts, a man named Stephen, the first person to die for their faith. I know this passage may feel really remote to us. Most of us will not face persecution or especially threat of death for our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet suffering is what we will all face.

The word for martyr is actually just a transliteration of a Greek word which means witness. Martyr means witness. Stephen has a lot to say to us this morning as one who has suffered, as one who can bear witness and give testimony of how we get through this. He has a lot to tell us about how we face suffering.

This morning, I'm going to look at this under three Rs: the riddle of suffering, the reason for suffering, a rationale for suffering, and then resource for suffering.

The Riddle of Suffering

Suffering is a problem for people. It's always an existential or philosophical problem and it always makes people ask the main question: Why? Why is this happening to me? Where did this come from? What did I do to deserve this?

Our society, to be honest, doesn't give us very good tools for dealing with hardship and pain and suffering. If you experience the loss of a child, the loss of financial security, the loss of a spouse, the loss of your dreams, the loss of a job, the loss of your health, the loss of a career—this has a tendency to leave a lot of Westerners and Americans really confused and discouraged. We don't know what to do with this.

The sociologist Peter Berger says this: every culture is supposed to give some explanation that bestows meaning on the experience of suffering and evil, and yet Western culture gives very little. And so we end up saying dumb things to one another. Brené Brown has pointed this out. She said we do the "well at least" to one another. You know, "at least you were able to get pregnant. At least you had a marriage for a while. At least you had a few good years together. At least you still have your health." Do you feel how empty those words are? Those are terrible words because we stumble over what to say.

We need a rationale. We want a reason for something. We want to know why—both in a general sense, but also in our particulars, in the particulars of our situation and our circumstances. And this passage, Stephen's death, is really helpful for us in understanding that there are reasons even if we don't see them. Let me walk you through this to show you how Stephen's death, his suffering, was not meaningless, this violent death.

The Reasons for Suffering

Reason number one: the background of Acts chapters 6, 7, and 8 is really Acts chapter 1, where the disciples are given a promise by God. Jesus says, "Stay here in Jerusalem and you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit and then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth."

Acts 2 catalogs how they did receive the power of the Holy Spirit that came upon them at Pentecost. And yet they sort of forgot the rest of that passage.

The rest of what Jesus commanded them in the great commission—because they stayed as a little sect, as a little group there in Jerusalem. They don't go out to Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth. And in fact, what we read in this passage is what comes next as a result of the persecution. As a result of Stephen's death, we read that the people were scattered.

Now we use that word sometimes. I'll say, I'm scattered, meaning I can't think straight right now. That's not what they're talking about. Scattered means literally being scattered, literally being dispersed. That word is used twice. It's a technical term used twice in the book of Acts, and it's the same word that a farmer uses to sow seed, scattering seed. So this is what happens as a result: God scatters His people to the places that He mentioned there. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth. This scattering is what comes from this, and this is what brought about the widespread proclamation of the gospel throughout the Roman Empire. The early church father Tertullian said it this way: "the blood of the martyrs is the seed, the scattering, the seed of the gospel."

So we can say, why? Why Stephen? Why did he have to die like this? Well, one reason is to get the church back on track with the great commission. A second reason: notice the end of chapter seven. Saul agreed with putting him to death. Saul was right there. Saul, who later would be called both Saul or Paul—the name doesn't change at his conversion. It's sort of a misnomer or misunderstanding of that. He's called both. But he's there watching. And this man will become the greatest evangelist to the Gentiles. And so witnessing the death of Stephen is surely part of Saul's conversion to Christianity—seeing this man die for his faith, seeing this was really true, seeing him suffer and die as a catalyst for the conversion of the apostle to the Gentiles.

Now, that's all well and good that we can say two good reasons why this had to happen: the scattering of the church and the conversion of Saul. And yet, let's not magicify our Bibles. A lot of times when we look at characters in the Bible, we imagine them to be very different kinds of people than we are. So I want to remind you, Stephen did not know. He didn't know what was going on. In the moment of his death, what does he see? He saw crowds and rocks. He did not see, "Oh, there's Saul, he's going to be the new apostle to the Gentiles." He did not see, "Oh, this is going to result in the scattering of the church to get us back on the great commission." He had no idea why this was happening. In fact, what it looks like is chaos and meaninglessness. It looks like this is just death coming at me.

And I want to remind you of this: because in our sufferings and trials, when we're longing for there to be a why and to understand the why, and when we don't see it, we're like, "there must not be one. This must be chaotic and meaningless." What would have been overwhelming and scary for Stephen would have been the same way for us. But just because we don't know the reasons for our sufferings and our hardships doesn't mean there aren't any. Let me say that again. Just because we don't know the reasons for the hardships and sufferings that we walk through doesn't mean there aren't any.

Imagine you go camping this summer in the Midwest. The Midwestern part of the country has these little tiny bugs called no-see-ums, and they're named that because you can't see them, right? They're very small and they bite. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes this: if you look in your tent this summer for a Saint Bernard, a dog, right? And you don't see one, it's reasonable to assume there's no Saint Bernard in your tent. But if you look in your tent for a no-see-um and you don't see any, it's not reasonable to assume they are not there, because after all, no one can see them. That's the point, right?

Many assume if there were good reasons for the existence of suffering and hardship, they would be obvious to us like a Saint Bernard, rather than like a no-see-um. But why should that be the case? Here's the problem: it's so easy to assume that if we can't understand the math, if it doesn't add up in our heads, if we can't see the reason, there must not be one. And this passage, the story of Stephen, reminds us that God may not reveal to us the reasons, but it doesn't mean there aren't any. It doesn't mean our sufferings are meaningless.

Don't confuse God's apparent silence with indifference, with lack of purpose. Don't confuse your inability to see what God's up to with meaning—like there's no point to this suffering. That doesn't mean there aren't any larger purposes and outcomes. But let's be honest about this.

We think, and I think a lot of people walking through suffering and hardship think, if I just knew the answer why, that would make a lot of things better. And I'm not so sure that's really true. I think we think that if I could understand the reasons behind what I'm going through, that would make it all better for me. But as a dad, I can tell you that's not been the case.

If you've ever held a kid down while the nurse gives a vaccination and the kid looks at you, he doesn't want in that moment a lecture on germ theory. That's not helpful for explaining how medicine works. I've had to hold kids down while they're being stitched up and they don't want a lecture at that moment about how modern medicine works. Knowing why doesn't make it better for them. In the moment, they want two things. They want your face and they want your presence. They want mom or dad to be with them and they want you looking at them.

That's what we see happens in this passage. The face and the presence.

The Face of the Ascended Lord

So the face—when Stephen looks in the moment of his sufferings, he looks up to heaven and there's a vision that's given to him of Jesus. He looks up into heaven and can see Jesus at the right hand of the Father and he sees the face.

Now, let me remind you of the face. The face is the face of the ascended Lord Jesus Christ. If you were to make a trip today, you could go into heaven, there would be one and only one human body in heaven. The rest would be people's souls. But there's only one body, and it's Jesus' ascended body.

Now what does that body look like? Remember that the disciples could not even recognize the Lord Jesus in his ascension. And that is because I think Jesus bore all the scars of his sufferings—the holes in his hands, surely the place where they pressed the thorns into his head, the hole in his side. Jesus bears those wounds into eternity. We don't have a Botoxed Jesus in heaven. We don't have a buff Jesus in heaven. We have a Jesus whose body carries in it the marks of his suffering.

So here's Stephen. He looks up into the heavens and he sees not only the face of his savior, but the face of the one who suffered. The face of the one who endured.

The sufferings of Jesus are at the very center point of Christianity. It's at the very center of what we believe. Have you ever heard of Albert Camus? Not a Christian. This really was something that got in his head about the sufferings of Jesus. He said this:

Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by god could assuage human agony.

This got in his head because he was like, this thing about a god who suffers makes sense to me. It's the only thing that makes sense to me of the suffering of this world.

So we see a Jesus in heaven who lost his glory in becoming human, left that behind so that we could have access to it. We see a Jesus who was shut out so that we could be brought in. We see a Jesus who was bound and nailed so that we could be free. We see a Jesus who took all the suffering in a way that did not destroy him so that we have access through his suffering to relationship with God the Father.

Jesus Standing and Witnessing

So where is that face? Where is that face of suffering? What is that face doing?

We see in this image, Stephen looks up in heaven. He sees the risen Lord Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. It's the only time in all the scriptures that Jesus is described as standing versus seated at the right hand of the Father. Normally, he's described as seated like one who has finished his work and sat down. But here is Jesus and he's standing.

What's he doing? He's witnessing. He's bearing witness to the sufferings of Stephen. Stephen has been confessing Christ before men and here's Jesus confessing Stephen before God, owning him. At the very moment that the earthly court was condemning him, here's Jesus in the heavenly court commending him.

He's giving Stephen a vision of what he already knew intellectually—that what really matters is what happens before God the Father. But he's giving him this vision to help him understand and to be able to face his suffering with calmness and joy. When Stephen got a glimpse of this, this changed him. This is what gives him the strength. It's like he's saying, well, if he is for me, it doesn't matter what all the rest of you are doing. It doesn't matter what's going on right here. This is what really matters.

And this is why I can say to you as your pastor, your suffering is not meaningless. Now, I'm not going to put a Jesus bow on this. I'm not going to say it doesn't hurt. I'm not going to say it isn't soul crushing. I'm not going to say it isn't hard. Some of you can bear witness to really long and really hard seasons of suffering.

We've walked through this as a church in the last year and I don't want to clean that up or nice that up. But I do want to say, your sufferings—not just in a general sense but in the very particulars—are not meaningless. They're not random. God uses every part of them. Just as a lump of coal under great pressure becomes a diamond, God is using the sufferings that we walk through for his purposes to transform us into his likeness. He is up to good in the very particulars of our sufferings.

I just want to urge you this morning: I know it's hard, but you have the face of God because of Christ ever turned toward you. And what Stephen saw, you have. But there's something even more than just the face of Christ. He also has the presence. What do children want when they're getting the shot, when they're getting the stitches? They want the face and they want you with them. They want mom or dad right there with them. They want presence.

The Holy Spirit as the Main Character

Now, if you're just joining us today as your first sermon through the Book of Acts with us, this is how we're looking at the Book of Acts this summer. We're studying the book of Acts through this particular lens. We're looking at all the passages that mention the Holy Spirit by name because the Holy Spirit is the main character of the book of Acts—not the apostle Paul, not the apostle Peter, not even the early church. The Holy Spirit, what he is doing, is the main point, the main character of the book of Acts.

This morning, as we look at this, what do we see? What do we see about Stephen? He's mentioned twice in this passage as a man who's filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's presence with him.

Jesus and the Holy Spirit

Sometimes when Christians talk about Jesus, to be honest, we use very misleading statements. You might say this to a child: "Where is Jesus? Jesus is everywhere." Not really. In this passage, we know where Jesus is. Where is he? The right hand of God the Father. Finished work. Seated. Waiting to bring in the fullness of his kingdom.

Or we'll say this: "You need to ask Jesus into your heart." Well, not really. You're asking the Spirit into your heart. The Spirit doesn't care. The Spirit's fine with you fudging the language around this. Do you know why? Because of the deep connection between the work of the Spirit and the work of Jesus.

In first Corinthians 15, it says this bizarre statement about how Jesus, the ascended Jesus, handed off the work of redemption to the Spirit. — 1 Corinthians 15

The Spirit is the one who takes the work of Jesus and applies this personally to the life of a believer. The Spirit is the one who makes a person who's spiritually dead come alive. The Spirit is the one who makes it so that you come alive and you could see it. That's life. That's death. That's Jesus. That's living in my sin. And you run toward him. The Spirit is the one, therefore, who takes the work of Jesus and applies that individually to the life of believers.

So here's how Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15. He says something odd here about a first and a second Adam. He says the first man Adam became a living being—describing the literal Adam. "This is the second Adam, the last Adam, Jesus, became a life giving spirit."

Now that's shorthand for Jesus handing his work to the Spirit and applying that to us. At his ascension, Jesus hands that over to the Spirit. The Spirit takes what is Jesus's and makes it yours. That's great. But where is he?

And this is where we can say he's everywhere. He's everywhere, and if you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, he's the one who's outside of you but inside of you. He's the one inside the person of every individual Christian, and yet he's distinct from you. He is the very presence of the Trinity, the Godhead in your life, poured into you. He is within you.

We know this about Jesus: He knows what it's like to be us. We read statements that say things like, "He's a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. He was despised and rejected of men." These are things we experience. It's a great comfort to know that Jesus knows in every way what it's like to be a human being, and those are great truths. Jesus wasn't a fake human being. He didn't just look like a human being. He really was one. But the Spirit takes it a step even further.

If you don't—you gotta hear this—he comes inside. This is so shocking to the early disciples. Jesus said these words right before he's gonna die. He says, "I'm gonna go away from you and it's gonna be better." And they were like, no, it's not, because we have you right here. And yet what he's describing was the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on believers at Pentecost and at the moment of every conversion. The giving of the Spirit to individuals.

When you're in heaven one day, the Old Testament saints—David, Moses, Abraham, Miriam—you can go down the line.

Ruth, all of them. They will marvel at your life. They will ask questions like this. What was it like? What was it like for you to always have the spirit? Because that's not the norm in the Old Testament. What we experience this side of the cross in history is absolutely different. You have the presence and power of the Holy Spirit with you.

You remember my opener? We're good as engineers at removing caffeine from coffee and redoing the sugar molecules so it becomes Splenda, no calories. We're gonna take seeds out of watermelon and seeds out of grapes and pain out of childbirth. But we're not so good at adding things. Not like the Lord is. The Lord God adds the Holy Spirit to the life of an individual Christian.

Now, I've sat down with so many people in our congregation during times of hardship and pain, and the conversations all go about the same. It's some version of this: "Thirty minutes. That's all I'd like. I would like thirty minutes with God and I got some questions. I wanna know why. I wanna ask and understand the particulars of why all this had to be like this. Why was it so hard? Why did it have to go down like this?"

I get that because we wanna experience physical nearness. We think somehow that would make it all better. But look, Jesus says what you have now is even better than that. Even better than that thirty minutes. His Holy Spirit, his personal presence in you. This is why Jesus said, "I'm gonna go away and I'm gonna send the Comforter. He will be with you."

The Spirit's Presence in Our Suffering

So let me apply this. This is the most important thing I'm gonna say today. The Holy Spirit is with you in all the lowest moments. Now you have friends who can be with you in hard places, but you don't have anybody who can be in your shoes and know what it's like to be you. The Spirit does. In all the lowest moments of this life, in all the places of grief, in all the places of loneliness, he sees. He's with you. Not standing far off. With you in all those worst rooms.

Let me give you the list of the rooms. That exam room where you had the scan. The morgue. The law office where the divorce was finalized. All the bad places. The Spirit is with you, really with you in a way that nobody else can be.

So let me just break this down to make sure we're all getting it, we're all on the same page. It is a wonderful thing to know that God doesn't waste our suffering. That's good. It's an even more amazing thing to know that Jesus knows what it's like to be you, that he knows every part of what it means to be human. But it is a mind-melting thing to know that the Spirit of the living God is inside of you all the time. Never leaving, never on vacation, never gotta wake him up, never gotta remind him of who you are. The one who gives comfort.

So here's my question for you. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? This is the one only application for today's sermon. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Are you laying hold of the Holy Spirit? Are you aware of the Holy Spirit?

You know, the next chapter over in Acts chapter nine, we read this about the early church:

And walking in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the church multiplied.

Let me say that again. And walking in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the church multiplied. How do we walk in the comfort of the Holy Spirit? Well, this means at least three things. You probably come up with more, but first, the Holy Spirit comforts us by reminding us that he lives in you, that all the power of the Spirit is in you. This is why Scripture says:

Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

The Spirit of the living God is inside of you. He reminds you of this. God sent the Spirit to use all his power within you.

Second, the Holy Spirit brings comfort by flooding our souls with the love of God. That's a promise in Romans chapter five. Romans five tells us:

We also boast in our afflictions because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. The hope will not disappoint because God's love is being poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Do you hear that? The Holy Spirit—by the power of the Holy Spirit—God's love is being poured out into every nook and cranny of your heart. This is one of those things. When you're going through hardship and you feel utterly alone and abandoned, this is one of those things where I'm gonna beg you to call upon the Holy Spirit. "Holy Spirit, tell me. You got something to say right now? I need to hear it. Speak to me." And this is what the Holy Spirit's job is to do. Pour out. You need a big gulp right now. You need a big old sip of the love of God the Father in every nook and cranny inside of us.

In all the places where we're filled with despair and discouragement and all the places that it's hard. Isn't this what we need? Brothers and sisters, you are never alone. You're not abandoned. You're not an orphan. The spirit is in you. Ask him to meet you in this.

And finally, the Holy Spirit comforts us in another way. He reminds us of our future. He says to you, your suitcases are packed. This life is not very long. You're bound for another place where every wrong and suffering and hardship will be made right, where everything will be made whole. This is not the end of the story. You're not stuck. There is a future and I'm here to make sure you get there.

Do You Believe in the Holy Spirit?

So again, today's sermon application: believe. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? We just said the Apostles Creed. Regularly in our church, we recite that. I believe in the Holy Spirit, but do you? Do you really believe that?

You know, we say we're with each other. I might say, "Hey, I'm with you on that issue." Well, it just means I agree with you. Or "Hey, I'm with you as you walk through this hard time." That means I'm going to try to be your friend. But the Holy Spirit is with us in a way that we can barely grasp how with us he is.

Older generations speak of the Holy Spirit as the Holy Ghost, and I try not to use that language because in our context, you've watched too much Scooby Doo, right? You know how the Scooby Doo stories go. Scooby Doo and all the gang are driving in the mystery machine and they happen to be going through a dark forest at nighttime. The van breaks down and there happens to be an abandoned house nearby. They go up to the house and you're like, "Don't go in the house," and they go in the house. They ask, "Is anybody in here?" Nobody answers. They're going to stay there for the night. Bad idea, right?

And what happens? They hear a thud, they hear a creek. They're like, "Oh, there's a ghost in here." And you know what's going to happen. But what is a ghost? In our modern way of speaking, it's an apparition. It's not really real. It's not physical substance. You see it for a second and it's gone. It's scary.

And that's why the whole idea of the Holy Spirit being the Holy Ghost makes it sound like your life is haunted. I'm afraid most of our lives are kind of haunted by the Holy Spirit. We don't really think about him. We think, "Am I alone in here?"

Is your life haunted by the Holy Spirit, or is your life hosted by the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the one who shows up in your life and walks with you and inhabits the very low spaces of this life and reminds you of truth and comforts you in affliction and is the one who carries you when you can't carry yourself.

Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?

Let's pray. Father, we pray this morning. We confess this is a hard word for us, and in truth, it's really hard for us to believe in the personal and permanent presence of your Holy Spirit in us. Lord, in many ways our lives feel more abandoned and empty. And we pray, Father, this morning for faith to believe what is better and more true and more real than even the people sitting next to us—that this Spirit of God is real. The Spirit of God has been poured out in us. Lord, we pray for faith to be able to access and live and step with the Spirit. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's respond to God's word in song.