The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Don't worry, this sovereign God is on our side. Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we're focusing on the second half of Psalm 37, where David continues to contrast the righteous and the wicked. David reminds us that blessings abound when we choose to follow the ways of the Lord. And what about the wicked? God has a plan.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. When we choose to follow God and to live out our faith through our words and actions, blessings will follow. God doesn't promise us material wealth, but he gives us spiritual riches beyond measure. If you have your Bible now, turn to Psalm 37, verses 21 through 40.

Dr. James Boice: Last week when we began to study the 37th Psalm, I pointed out that it is really an exposition of the third of Jesus' eight beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. The third beatitude concerns the meek: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Jesus doesn't explain what that means in the sermon, though he probably did in things that are not recorded for us in the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount doesn't explain how we become meek, but that's what Psalm 37 does. This psalm is really a great Old Testament exposition of something that wasn't given until a thousand years or so later.

Now, it doesn't mean that meekness is not mentioned in the New Testament. It is, though it's somewhat hidden anymore because the translators of the New International Version have chosen to render the word not by "meek" or "meekness," but by the word "gentle" or sometimes by the word "self-control." They didn't do that where the beatitude itself is concerned. I don't know exactly why, except people probably are used to the beatitude as it stands: "Blessed are the meek." If they changed it there, people would think they were tampering with Scripture. But in other places, it has been changed, and yet that's the word that lies behind it.

It's in Galatians, for example, in that long list of the fruit of the spirit that Paul gives in the fifth chapter: "The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness" (that's the word, it's actually meekness) "and self-control." Again, he does the same thing in Colossians 3:12: "Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness" (that's the word, the word meekness) "and patience."

Peter talks about it in the third chapter of his first letter, verse 15: "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness" (or meekness) "and respect." James also says, "Get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly" (that's a different translation, but it's the same word) "meekly accept the word planted in you." Those verses all teach a great deal about meekness, that it is a gift of the Holy Spirit and it's given to us so that it will bring blessing in our lives and in the lives of other people.

And yet, in spite of that, it is nevertheless true that the passage in the Bible that best explains what this is and tells us the steps for becoming a gentle, a meek, or a humble person is the 37th Psalm. Last time when I introduced the psalm, I also said it's very difficult to outline. I think there's a good reason for that. This is one of the acrostic psalms. Acrostic psalms are those psalms in which each verse or a collection of verses or couplet begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and that progresses in sequence.

So the first verse would begin with the letter A, for example, and the second verse with the letter B, and so on. Often those psalms seem to have no particular outline at all because they're simply following the alphabet. And yet, I think there's something of a sequence of major ideas in here, although it overlaps. I suggested that in the outline I gave last time. The first 11 verses describe the quiet spirit leading up to the beatitude because the 11th verse of the psalm is where Jesus actually got the third beatitude. He quotes it almost directly: "The meek will inherit the land."

Then there's a second section that describes the way of the wicked, verses 12 through 20. A third section contrasts the ways of the wicked with the ways of the righteous, verses 21 through 26. Then there's an old man's counsel to the young, verses 27 to 33. Finally, the last section, 34 to 40, where the chief theme is to wait upon God or take the long view. A lot of that overlaps, so that kind of an outline is somewhat arbitrary, and yet it helps us to see our way through the psalm.

Now, we looked at the first two of those sections in the last study and we look at the last three, the second half of the psalm, in this. The section we're looking at now contrasts the ways of the righteous with the ways of the wicked. Yet we've already anticipated that a little bit. When I was talking last time about the ways of the wicked, I showed that there were four contrasts that are found from verse 12 through 20. They're very clear because the word "but" occurs in each one.

The first two of those talk about the wicked: they propose one thing but God proposes something else for them. But the third and the fourth contrast bring the righteous into the picture and it's a continuation of that idea that we get into the contrast that we find here. One contrast introduced earlier is that the power of the wicked is going to be broken, but the Lord is going to uphold the righteous. The Lord is going to provide for the righteous in times of famine and difficult financial situations, though the wicked are going to be cut off.

Now, we pick up with that at verse 21, and we have three more contrasts here, two of them very clear and one is there but not quite so clear. What are they? The first one is in verse 21: "The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously." There are a couple of ways you can look at that and the commentators do. They even invent ways that no rational person would look at them. But one of the ways that does make sense is this: one of the commentators, a very good one, says the reason the wicked borrow and don't repay is that God doesn't bless them. They don't have the means to repay.

And the reason the righteous give generously is that God prospers them. There's something to be said for that because it is talking about the prosperity of the righteous to some degree. The difficulty that I see with it, and the reason I choose a different interpretation, is that the words themselves don't suggest that contrast. The contrast would be between material blessing and a lack of material blessing, and the words don't say that. The contrast there is actually between generosity on the part of the righteous and a spirit on the part of the wicked that's the opposite of generosity.

So what I think that is talking about there is a selfish, grasping attitude on behalf of the wicked and a generous, unselfish attitude on the part of the righteous. Now, what it says about the wicked is that they borrow and don't repay. If what we're talking about here is not an inability but actually a moral failure, then the problem with the wicked is that they're out for themselves, for number one. We don't have to go very far to see that. If that is the measure of the wicked, we live in the midst of a very wicked world.

This is the very essence of our culture, a culture that says "look out for number one, you've got to take care of yourself." To put it in a funny but not really so funny way, the one who wins is the one who dies with the most toys. You've heard that said. Now, that's the spirit. One of the commentators, I think, says what you have here is a difference between perpetual takers and constant givers. The wicked are perpetually taking, and the reason they don't repay is that they're borrowing money to get ahead. That is the shortcut to success, to build a fortune.

And they don't repay because they don't want to repay. They want to hang on to the capital as long as they can. Perhaps it's true as well that they overextend themselves in that kind of greed and, as a result of that, their enterprises fail and they can't repay. But the problem is not the inability, the problem is the greed that lies behind it. I think we do have to talk about that in terms of our culture. You can't take a verse like this and not understand it in terms of our culture because what is happening in the Western world, and particularly in American life, is that we're being encouraged to be wicked in exactly this way.

That is, to live beyond our means, to borrow and not repay. A very short time ago, last week, when Dave Dugan, the chairman of the trustees, was speaking in the morning, he mentioned how the credit card companies send you notices telling you that your credit is so good that they have upped it from what your limit was before to something higher. If you had credit of five hundred dollars, because you're such a trustworthy customer and your credit is so good, that's being raised to a thousand dollars. And if your credit was three thousand dollars, they're raising it to five.

That's about as far as I go. Some of you will know that it goes higher. But that's the kind of letters most of us get. Now, somebody really has to be out of their mind to be taken in by that. It would be a fool indeed who thinks that these credit card companies (and some of them are companies you haven't even heard of that are sending you their cards with pre-approved lines of credit) searching throughout all of American culture to find people whose credit is particularly good so that they could extend them a great line of credit and you just happen to be one of a very small number who fit that category.

That's not why they're doing that at all. Anybody who knows anything about what's going on knows that the reason they're doing that is that they get more money for their money by encouraging you to buy on credit than they do by lending it at commercial rates. You see, if you lend at commercial rates to the banks, the prime rate now is down somewhat, it's about nine and a half percent last week I understand, you get nine and a half percent. But if you can encourage somebody to overbuy so that they have to pay interest on what they have bought on their credit cards, you can get 18 or 20 percent.

That's double. That's why they're trying to get you to borrow money and live beyond your means. That's wicked. The Bible's against that. The Bible is against usury, that's the Bible's word for it. And yet, that's the very cornerstone of what we imagine to be a profitable culture. And in this, of course, the government leads the way. The government is going beyond itself to borrow astronomically. When the government cuts back, as they tried to do on the current budget, they don't actually cut back; all they cut back on is the rate of growth.

We're getting into more debt all the time. And yet, I'm not so worried about that where the government's concerned. I think it's a disaster, but governments do all kinds of disasters. What I'm really worried about is how that impacts Christian people because Christian people get into that as well and they've got caught up, and they're worldly in a very basic sense and then they can't repay. If you take all those offers for credit cards that come to you and find out how much credit you have and add it all up, by simply applying for a few of these cards within a very short time, you can have credit of a hundred thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

You can buy up to that limit and then you owe all that money. If you have a mortgage on your house for a hundred thousand or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you know how long it takes to pay that back. On a house, you're not paying rates as high as you do on a loan on your credit cards. And yet that is the way we're being encouraged to live. Now, if we're going to be among the righteous in this verse, we're going to have to break with that. Christians are going to have to take a different policy entirely.

I want to give you two principles for what we should do with credit cards. I'm not saying cut them all up or lock them in a safe. Some people have to do that. It's like if you're an alcoholic, you can't even take a drink, and if you're addicted to credit cards, you better get rid of them. I'm not saying that. We live in that kind of a culture and things cost so much money you can't carry hundreds and hundreds of dollars around with you all the time to pay for things. You have to use credit cards.

But here's the policy Christians should follow: never put on your credit card what you're unable to pay immediately when the bill comes without paying any interest whatsoever. If you can't pay that bill when it comes a month later, don't put it on your credit card. Wait. That's the first principle. I'll repeat it: Christians, this is serious, it's a difference between the wicked and the righteous, that's what my text says. Never put on your credit card what you're unable to pay when that bill comes immediately without any interest whatsoever. That's the first principle.

Here's the second: never charge so much on your credit card that you're unable to give to the Lord's work what you should give (I suppose that's 10 percent of tithe) and have money over to help people who need it. In other words, charge, that's all right, but make sure you can pay it and always keep it within bounds. That's not so hard. It's just a question of self-discipline, and we should be disciplined. Want another text? Here's the great text for our age from the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not covet."

And that's what our society is built on. Greed is what it's built on, and we mustn't do it. The way we're going to come at the end of this is to wait on the Lord. Wait on the Lord to exalt you in due time and put down the wicked. Here's another way in which you should wait: wait for the things until you have the money because that's the Christian way. Now there's a second contrast here, verse 22: "Those the Lord blesses will inherit the land, but those he curses will be cut off."

In that psalm, when it says "inherit the land," it certainly is talking about the land of Israel because in the Old Testament, that was the great blessing. To have a part of the land was significant. There were laws to protect the right of the land for the various families, and if for some reason a particular family would lose its share of the land, there was an obligation placed upon kinsmen to buy it back so it wouldn't depart out of the family. When it says "inherit the land," that's certainly what it's talking about.

It's obvious that that doesn't apply to us in the same way. There are no promises in the New Testament that Christians are going to inherit the Promised Land or any other land, any earthly land. And yet, there is the third beatitude, isn't there? The third beatitude says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Now, that's a significant change. The word "the land," "Ha'aretz," refers to Israel. "The earth" is something else, broader. And yet, it's speaking about a kind of inheritance, and Jesus does use the word.

What does that refer to? Well, there are several things it could mean, and it's been interpreted in this way by different people. For one thing, it could be looking forward to a day in the future in eschatology when the saints are going to reign on earth with Jesus Christ. Not every eschatological outline permits that interpretation, and so those that don't hold to that are going to weed it out. But if you believe that the saints are going to reign with Christ on earth in any sense, well, that's one way in which that can be fulfilled.

There's a second way it can be fulfilled, and that is with the view to prosperity in general. Not talking necessarily about owning real estate in Philadelphia, but it means generally speaking the Lord will bless the meek. If you follow in God's way, if you do the kind of things that are here, God will prosper you. That's not categorical because it isn't true in every single case, but often it's true, generally it's true. And of course, there are millions of Christians who would testify to that. It could mean that.

It could also mean that if we are really meek before God, humbly submitted to God, then there is a sense, a very real sense, in which the whole earth is ours. The reason I'm inclined to that interpretation is because the Apostle Paul said something very like that himself. He was not a rich man. He was poor, he was an itinerant evangelist, and at times he barely had enough to eat or live on. He had to work often for a living just so he could support himself. He certainly wasn't prosperous in this world's goods, and yet he says in 1 Corinthians, "Poor, and yet possessing all things."

You see, a certain sense in which he understood he possessed it all. It was God's and he was God's, and so it was all his. He says the same thing explicitly writing to the Corinthians. He says, "All is yours, whether Paul or Apollos or life or death or Cephas or anything, all is yours because you are Christ's and Christ is God's and everything is God's." Now, if that is the way to take it, then that is significant because it means that Christians are going to have a different approach to material things from non-Christians.

Someone who doesn't have this attitude and understand that they possess it in this sense in Jesus Christ is going to try to acquire it. If you own something, then that's yours, it's not mine, and what I want to do is get what you have myself. And so I go about this business to acquire more and more things. The strange thing about that, of course, is that the more we acquire, the less secure we seem to be. It's the great wealthy ones that suddenly topple and you read about it in the paper how they go bankrupt, their Taj Mahal is out of business, and that type of thing.

But a Christian is different. A Christian doesn't have to acquire it in order to possess it. We can go anywhere in the world and recognize it as God's world and say, "It's ours." You can look out on the ocean, you don't have to own the ocean to enjoy the ocean. You can say, "Isn't that wonderful? Look what God has given to me to enjoy for this moment." I don't have to put it in a bottle and take it home for it to be mine. Or look at the sky. What a wonderful sunset that is. What a wonderful sunrise that is. Isn't this a glorious day God has given to me?

I think it's really in that sense, probably, that the meek inherit the earth. We really do, it really is ours because God has given it to us to enjoy. Well, there's one more contrast here. This is the one I said that's not quite so clear. Up to this point, every one of those has been connected with a "but." You count them up, there's six of them. But when you get to verse 23 and 24, there is no "but," and I think you have to understand it as preceding the verse. In other words, it picks up from the latter part of verse 22: "Those he curses will be cut off, but the Lord delights in the way of the man whose steps he's made firm."

Even though he stumbles, and Christians do stumble, he won't fall because ultimately the Lord upholds him with his hand. Many of you will know that 23rd verse better in the King James Version, and maybe rightly so because the King James had a very good translation at this point. That old authorized version said, "The steps of a righteous man are ordered by the Lord." That's a good thing to know because we walk through a world of many uncertain paths and many occasions for stumbling, and we do stumble. But the steps of a righteous man are ordered of the Lord.

If you're doing what is described in this psalm, then God is with you and he's going to direct your steps even though you may go through difficult times. Harry Ironside, in his commentary on the psalm, tells something that comes from the life of George Mueller. He is the man who built the orphanages in England, a great man of faith and prayer. He always laid his requests before God in prayer, never mentioned them, and God provided everything he needed for these orphanages for a whole lifetime. It was a remarkable story.

Ironside's story has to do with somebody who was a friend of George Mueller, and on one occasion picked up George Mueller's Bible and was thumbing through it and he came to this psalm. And next to that 23rd verse, which in the authorized version said, "The steps of a righteous man or a good man are ordered of the Lord," Mueller had written into the margin "and the stops." And Ironside said that was significant because obviously this man had been meditating on that, a man of faith whom God had richly blessed, but who had experienced also times when he had been put on hold.

And he recognized with, I think, true spiritual insight that that's part of God's direction too. You see, we live in such a mechanistic, progress-oriented society that unless we're moving forward regularly and sometimes rapidly, we think nothing's happening. I can speak to that because that's the way I feel, instinctively that's the way I am. It doesn't have to be great progress, but it has to be progress. I've got to see it and I've got to see it happening and happening regularly.

Where that came into our culture was when we started to connect our country by trains and the schedules had to run on time and so forth. That's when all of that changed. Before that, people didn't think that way, they were willing to wait. It was said, back before the coming of the locomotives when everybody traveled by stagecoach, it didn't matter if you missed the stage, you could catch one next month. But today people get upset if they miss one turn of the revolving door.

And that's more or less the way I am. But what we have to learn is that God uses the stops as well as the steps, and the stops are ordered of the Lord as well. I suppose we ought to say on the basis of this text, "and the stumbles." There's a sermon with three S's if you want to be alliterative, "and the stumbles," because God uses the stumbles too. Even when we stumble, God teaches us certain things and he uses those for his glory. We get to the end of this section and there's a testimony on the part of David who wrote it.

It's what we've heard, I mentioned it last time: "I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread." What he's doing there is adding his personal testimony to the truths that he's just enunciated in the previous section. That does make us pause because we want to say, is that our testimony? Can we say that? Now, some of us aren't old enough to say that. But assuming we are or however long we've lived, can we say, "I've never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread"?

The first part, yes, the righteous are never abandoned by God, none of us would say that. But have we never seen poor Christians and poor children? Spurgeon, interestingly enough, a great man of God, a believer in the Bible certainly, was a bit troubled by that and he wrestled with it and he solved it this way: he said that's David's testimony, but I can't say that that's mine. He said I've helped many poor families and I've helped poor children of people that were undoubtedly upright people.

So he said, generally speaking, it's true, but he wouldn't say it was categorically true from his experience. I suppose my experience is somewhere in between. I don't think I can say I have ever literally seen the children of believers begging bread. But I don't doubt for a minute that there are poor Christians, I know some of them. And I don't doubt that there are places in the world where the children of Christians beg because everybody begs because there's nothing to eat. I think that much is true.

But generally speaking, this is a good principle. It's simply David saying God is faithful to his people. God takes care of them. They may go through hard times physically just as they may go through hard times in temptation, they may stumble and so forth, but God provides for them and millions of Christians will testify to that. They'll say, as they look back at hard times, many even in our generation looking back at the depression, people who lived through that or were old enough to have done it will say those were terrible times. People lost everything, they were jumping out of windows, but we never went without anything to eat.

God provided us enough to eat all that time. Millions of Christians would say that. Derek Kidner is one of the good commentators on this and he does something kind of interesting at this point. He's trying to outline the psalm (remember I explained how difficult it is to outline it) and he does it for verses 12 through 26 by taking a bunch of phrases from Paul's letters to the Corinthians, from 2 Corinthians 4:9 and 6:10. And he breaks it up using Paul's phrases as the titles, and it's interesting.

Here's what he does: section one, "persecuted but not forsaken," verses 12 through 15; "as having nothing and yet possessing all things," verses 16 through 20 and 25; number three, "making many rich," verses 21, 22, and 26; and finally, four, "cast down but not destroyed," verses 23 and 24. In other words, what he's saying is this was Paul's testimony too. You have the testimony of David in the Old Testament, you have the testimony of Paul in the New, they're one and the same, and it's a testimony to the grace of God even in hard times.

We have the next section and the next section is what I call the old man's advice to the young, people who haven't lived quite as long as he has. He has given his testimony in verses 25 and 26. Now, as an old man, he speaks to those with less experience and he says, look, here's my counsel. There are two things that are said, one here and one in the last section, two imperatives if you will. Verse 27: "Turn from evil and do good." And then verse 34: "Wait for the Lord and keep his way." That's what he's telling us to do. Trust, turn from evil and do good, and trust in the Lord, wait on the Lord, and turn from evil.

It's interesting that he adds "and do good" because that's what we've already seen in verse three. Remember when we talked about it, you have a list of things that we're to do in that earlier portion of the psalm and the very first one is "trust the Lord," but it adds immediately "and do good." Because those who trust God will do good. The fruit of the new life within is going to express itself. It's why James later on in the Bible can say if you say you have faith, well and good, but I want to see evidence of it.

Show me your faith by your works. If you don't have any works, I'm not going to believe you have any faith because faith's got to express itself that way. That's exactly what David is saying twice over in the psalm. When he talks about doing good, we understand as we read on that he's thinking not just about deeds of social concern, but he's also speaking about right words or good words. Because verses 30 and 31 begin to talk about that: "The mouth of the righteous man utters wisdom and his tongue speaks what is just."

Did you ever think of that when you think about doing good or expressing the life of Jesus Christ within? It's not just doing things, it's speaking what is right, saying things that are just. We are so casual with our tongue. We say it's just words, it doesn't matter, I didn't mean it, or I was exaggerating. The righteous person who's touched by the spirit of Christ doesn't do that. He speaks truth. And if you say, well, how is he able to do that? Why?

The answer is verse 31: it's because the law of God is in his heart. If you don't have the Bible in your heart (and I think that means more than simply having read it once or coming to church and hearing it preached on from time to time; it means actually knowing it, memorizing it, dwelling upon it, meditating upon it) if you don't have the Bible in your heart that way, you're not going to do what's right or speak what's right because you're just going to drift along with the culture and you're going to follow the same standards that the world has.

You're going to do all of those things we've seen here. But if the word fills you and that's what you're thinking about, well, then you will speak what is right, you'll do what's right as well. At any rate, we come to the last section beginning with verse 34 and it says, "Wait for the Lord and keep his way." We've seen this before, this isn't a new theme, but it is the dominant theme of the last section and it really wraps it up. What he's saying here is that there are times in our lives when the Christian way doesn't seem to be the right way.

And you say, this business of living the Christian life, look at all the trouble I'm going through. And David says, yeah, but you need to take the long view. It is true, ungodly people will prosper for a time. God allows it, it brings actually greater destruction upon them in the end, but they are brought down in the end, and it is always better to serve the Lord. He'll keep you even during the hard times and he'll bless you a great deal at the end.

He uses an interesting image here which is the exact reverse of what we saw in Psalm 1. Recall what he said in Psalm 1 about the righteous: the righteous are like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bring forth their fruit in their season. Here he uses that same image, but it's reversed. Now it's of a wicked man: "I have seen a wicked and ruthless man flourishing like a green tree in its native soil," but he soon passed away. We read that and that doesn't seem to be a very good image, at least if you read it critically as you might if you were a critic of poetry.

You would say earlier we saw the righteous compared to beautiful flowers in the field in verse 20: "The Lord's enemies will be like the beauty of the fields." That's right, flowers that spring up but last only for a day as soon as the sun comes out, that image fits. They're fine for a time. But now when you're talking about a flourishing green tree in its native soil, how is a tree like that to disappear overnight unless it's cut down, which of course he may be thinking about but he doesn't say?

I think the answer to that is exactly what I've been saying. Here's a great green flourishing tree and this is an ungodly person. They've gotten that way by unjust means, by dishonesty, we know it. And over here are the righteous and they're compared to a flourishing tree and you look at that from the outside and you say, look, what's the use of being righteous? You can do just as well by being ungodly and maybe that tree is even flourishing more.

If you look at externals, that's what you're going to think. And what the psalmist is teaching us to do is not do that, but to look at it on the basis of the word of God. To think in a godly way, to meditate upon these truths, to hide them in our hearts, to let that God guide our thinking and form our mind and understand that although the righteous flourish and seem to do as well as the ungodly, sooner or later they're going to be cut down. It's really saying what Proverbs 3:5 and 6 is saying: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding."

Lean to your own understanding and it looks like it pays to be sinful. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. Blessing now, care now, comfort now, and blessing and glory hereafter. At this point someone will say, but I just can't do that. I can't be like that. Here you're talking about what it means to be meek and the answer is what we saw at the beginning. We're to trust in the Lord and do good, we're to delight ourselves in the Lord, commit our way to the Lord, we're to be still before the Lord, we're not to fret, we're to refrain from anger.

I do all of those things. I am angry, I do fret, I am not still, I don't commit, I don't delight, I don't trust, and so forth. I just can't be like that. And you know the answer to that? That's right, you can't, not by yourself. But you see you can if you'll come to God because that's the character that he'll develop in you. Jesus Christ said, "Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am" what? "Meek. I'm the meek one. And if you come to me, I'll teach you what it means to live in a godly, meekly consistent fashion and not to worry because ultimately everything is in the hands of a sovereign and righteous God."

Our Father, thank you for this psalm which has been a blessing to so many people for so many ages. People in times of trouble consult it, people who are upset, who were worried about the future and who have found reassurance here because by reading these words they find themselves anchored once again in your character, and you are the one who changes not. Our Father, help us to follow in those godly steps and do likewise and so grow into that character which is godly and so different from the character of the world and prosper spiritually as you have determined we should. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

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