Please open your Bibles with me and let's turn together to Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is so long, you can almost by random hit it as you open your Bible in the very middle. We won't be reading the entire selection. Let's begin by reading section Gimel. We'll skip over Aleph and Bet to look at the third of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Gimel, starting in verse 17, the Word of God. Deal bountifully with your servant, that I may live and keep your word. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. I am a sojourner on the earth. Hide not your commandments from me. My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times. You rebuke the insolent, accursed ones who wander from your commandments. Take away from me scorn and contempt, for I have kept your testimonies. Even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight, they are my counselors." Let's turn over then, next page, to Qaf, starting with verse 81, Qaf. 81. My soul longs for your salvation. I hope in your word. My eyes long for your promise, I ask. When will you comfort me? For I have become a wineskin in the smoke, yet I have not forgotten your statutes. How long must your servant endure? When will you judge those who persecute me? The insolent have dug pitfalls for me. They do not live according to your law. All your commandments are sure. They persecute me with falsehood. Help me! They have almost made an end of me on earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts. In your steadfast love give me life, that I may keep the testimonies of your mouth." Let's turn finally towards the end to Sheen. Sheen. 161. Seen and Sheen. Princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your words. I rejoice at your word, like one who finds great spoil. I hate and abhor falsehood, but I love your law. Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous rules. Great peace have those who love your law. Nothing can make them stumble. I hope for Your salvation, O Lord, and I do Your commandments. My soul keeps Your testimonies, I love them exceedingly. I keep Your precepts and testimonies, for all my ways are before You." Thus far the reading in God's Holy Word. Let's pray together. Shall we bow our hearts together? Lord, we join with the psalmist, and we pray that You would open our eyes, that we may behold wondrous things from your law. Lord, show us the beauties and the delights of your word, and show us Christ, we pray. For we ask in his name and for our own good. In Jesus' name, amen. Please be seated. People of God, well loved by our Lord Jesus Christ, The Psalms are a gift to you from the Lord. The Lord Jesus said after His resurrection, in Luke chapter 24, He said, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. The Law of Moses, the Torah, the Prophets, the Nebi'im, and the Psalms, or the Ketuvim. Those are the three sections of what we call the Old Testament, what the Jews call the Tanakh. Torah, Nebi'im, Ketuvim. T-N-K. Tanakh. That the entire Old Testament points to Christ. That the Psalms point to Christ. Am I too sensitive? Sorry about that. that these Psalms point to Christ sometimes by direct prophecy. It'll be very clear, just a line to Christ. But more often, the Psalms point to Christ by setting up patterns, setting up expectations that Christ fulfills. These Psalms lead us to Jesus, and because of that, it's through these Psalms that you can find a meaningful life. That you can find some stability amidst all the craziness of life in this world. That you can find comfort in the midst of the troubles that face you at this point in your life. And this Psalm 119 is an invitation to you. It's an invitation for you to enter in and to experience the same kind of delights and comforts that the psalmist experienced, to experience the life that the psalmist found in connection with God. These are invitations for you, if you'll listen carefully, to find joy, to find deeper life. This psalm is, as all the psalms are, it is a poem. It's very long. And it's the most structured of the psalms, right? Now with us, I dare say, poetry has fallen on hard times. I won't ask if you've read any poems this past week, outside of the Bible. But poetry in the ancient world, Most of what comes down to us of the great epics from the ancient world, the great stories come down to us in poetry. The Gilgamesh epic. Beowulf, in our own Anglo-Saxon culture. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, all these are poems. These are poems. In the ancient world, if it was worth remembering, it was worth saying in poetry. About a half, almost a half of the Old Testament is poetry. I don't know if you realize that, but the prophets are all poems, basically. Most of them. Lots of the Old Testament is poetry. And you may say, poetry sounds so restrictive. And this poem is very restricted. How is it organized? It's organized by the alphabet, right? Alif, Bait, Kimal, Daalit, Hey. Each alphabet, each letter is one section. And all eight lines in each of those sections is Alif, Alif, Alif, Alif, Alif, Bait, Bait, Bait, Bait. It's just a straight out acronym. Right? It's an acronym. Very structured. But as you've experienced, perhaps, in reading certain sonnets, like a love sonnet or even a haiku, you can have structure and express deep feelings, like a garden hose. When you tighten down on it, it squirts farther, right? That's poetry. You clap it down and the emotion comes out very deeply. Lots of feeling in this psalm and in most of the psalms. It also explains the fact that it's all A-A-A-B-B-B. It explains why the thoughts of the poet jump around a little bit, right? Because he's kind of looking for the next word that fulfills the pattern. And it doesn't flow in the same kind of... it's not like the... like the epistles of Paul, which are very logical and go from one section to another. There's a lot of jumping around. For example, in 137 and following, it's tzaddeh. All those words begin with tzaddeh. The word for tzaddik means righteous, or tzedakah means righteousness, tzedak means to justify. So, anything... there's lots of righteous... if you look at that section on tzaddeh, what do you see? Righteous, righteous, righteous, righteous, because it's said through the whole thing. No surprise. No surprise. But when you finish with this A through Z delighting in the Word of God, what's the impression that it gives you? It's like everything has been said on that subject, right? Every stone has been turned over, right? The Word of God has been fully considered, and it is just ravishing. It's beautiful. He's inviting you to experience and to taste the excellence of the Scripture. You'll notice that each of these sections has 8 verses. And I suspect that it's 8 verses because he uses, again and again, basically 8 words for the same thing. What is he talking about here? He's talking about the Word of God. He's talking about the Tanakh, that is, the Old Testament. The Old Testament. Now please understand, we were talking in our Sunday School class about the Old Testament, how many churches throughout the world don't have the Old Testament. This psalm has this celebration of delights in just the Old Testament. How much more for us as Christians shall we delight in the Word? Because we have the New Testament, the even greater light of the New Testament, right? So how much more does this apply, this kind of delight and praise and just... Real appreciation applied to us as Christians, as we think of the Word of God. But here's the eight words. You'll hear them again and again. He talks about laws, he talks about commandments, testimonies, precepts, statutes, rules, judgments, words. Yes, they have their own meanings, but they are synonyms in this case. They're talking about one thing that is the Word of God, as we have it, in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the writings, the rest of the Old Testament. It's like a chest of jewels that the psalmist is opening up and going through. It's a beautiful thing. What I'd like to do now, I like, as I've organized this, as you can see in your bulletin, I've organized it under five headings. It's basically an attempt, like a five-string instrument, just to pluck a few strings in this wonderful piece of music. We'll pluck some minor chords and some major chords as we look at this. The troubles... The background, if you think about it, there's all kinds of suffering and difficulties that the psalmist is going through. That's the minor chord. The major chord is the benefits that the word of Yahweh has brought to him. So you can look in your bulletins on the five categories, and that will generally guide us here. Each of these sections bounce around a little bit, but we're looking for threads that go through this beautiful tapestry. and I encourage you to keep your Bible open. I won't necessarily quote the whole verse, but at least you can see where I'm going, and I'll do a lot of quoting from the text. We read in verse 105, "...your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." That's probably the most famous line from Psalm 119. Amy Grant, in her sweet voice, has made that popular. For those of us that are older, thy word is a lamp unto my feet. What a beautiful expression. We read in 160, the sum of your word is truth. So here we have, this psalm points us in the direction of the doctrine that we call sola scriptura. Sola scriptura, the scriptures alone. That the Bible is the norm of norms. The Bible is the standard by which we judge all other documents, all other thoughts, philosophies, and opinions. It is the lodestone, the test of what is true. If this teaching is in keeping with the Word of God, then we know it's true. If this teaching is against the Word of God, then we know it is false. This word is the fountain of your wisdom. If you want to be wise in this life, you need to have contact with this word. We read in verse 98, "...your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me." Your precepts, 104, "...through your precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false word." This word of wisdom that you need is not just for you if you have advanced degrees. This is for you even if you're simple. For all of us, whether we're learned or unlearned. We read in 1.30 that the unfolding of your word gives light. It imparts understanding to the simple. This is for each of us. The assumption here is that, the minor court, is that you and I are ignorant and misled and deceived. We don't want to hear that. Me? Unenlightened? Yes. Our hearts go the wrong direction from birth. You only have to know, see a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old, they're going in the wrong direction and they need to be brought back in the right direction. All of us are like that. We love the wrong things, we love the right things too much. We think twisted thoughts and we pervert whatever it is we're thinking about for our own twisted ends. We need to be reoriented. We need light. We need light for our feet. and a lamp for our path. If you have this source of wisdom, you will be wiser than the traditional sources of wisdom, right? Certainly you'll be wiser than university instructors in our secular colleges today. We read in 130, excuse me, in 99, I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts." This is where you'll find light and understanding. Do you want to be a wise person? Do you want to be a knowledgeable, well-rounded, understanding person? You need this Word. You need the Word of God to be your teacher. And most importantly, this Word gives a sense of wonder and awe. And why is that? We read, as we said, in verse 18, 18. 18. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Verse 129. 19. Your testimonies are wonderful, therefore my soul keeps them. That's not just saying they're good. It means they're literally astounding. They are amazing. They are miraculous. They're wonder-working. This is the same word that we read in Isaiah. 20. A son is born unto you, a child is given to you, and his name shall be called Wonderful. Wonderful. That's an easy Hebrew word to remember. You know why? It's Pele. I think of Pele, the Brazilian soccer player. He was just amazing, right? And that's what that means. It's just jaw-dropping. Jesus is... The reason that the Psalms are so wonderful is because they point us to Jesus, who is... He is the miracle baby and the miracle man. And so this is the miracle book. This is a magical book. This is a magical book. It has power to transform your whole life. Do you want to be amazed? This is the book that has the message that will amaze you. This is for you. It's an awesome book. We read in 161, "...princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your word." It shows us Jesus Christ, who is indeed awe-inspiring. But not only do we find light for darkness here, we find rescue in our weakness here. If you look at this and consider, secondly here, rescue for our weakness. Many of the lines in this psalm are petitions for life. It's asking for life. Give me life. Look at verse 149. Hear my voice according to your steadfast love, according to your justice, give me life. 151. Plead my cause and redeem me. Give me life. 156. Great is Your mercy, O Lord. Give me life according to Your rules. 159. Give me life according to Your steadfast love. There are all kinds of things that are standing against the psalmist. So what is it for you? Whatever is embittering your life, whatever is crushing your life, whatever is restricting you from flourishing, whether it's poverty or being set back by some disappointment or some failure or a betrayal, these are the things that are pushing you down. The prayer is, give me life, an abundant life, Lord. Obviously, the psalmist is dealing with hard times. We read in 25, "...my soul clings to the dust. Give me life." There's a dust, a sprinkling of death over all of our lives. Not just when our grandparents die, or our friends leave us, or our spouses leave us, but there's this death over everything. Even we paint our house, and ten years later it looks terrible again. There's this dust of death over everything we touch. And we ourselves are weak, and as we get into our 50s, 60s, 70s, we feel it more intensely. The dust is on us, our very bodies. Where should we look? There's only one ultimate place we can look. We need to look up. Lord, give us life. And we find that life in Christ, right? This is eternal life, Jesus says at the end of our reading passage today. We have life in connection with Christ. 88 tells us here, in your steadfast love, give me life, right? It's because God in His kindness, in His chesed, in His steadfast love, in His covenant commitment to us, has loved us and He's given us the son of His heart. He's given us His own Christ to be our life, right? To do what we couldn't do for Himself. To give us meaning in our lives, in the midst of a life that's seemingly meaningless. And so, we're asking for a transformation. Look at verse 32. He says, coming from the work that Christ has done for us, He suffered all that we could not suffer ourselves, He's experienced hell for us, so that we would not have to experience hell. And He's won the Father's favor for us. And so now, even the difficulties that we experience in this life, now we know that God uses these things as fatherly chastisement, that they're ultimately for our benefit. Wow! God has His higher purposes in my losses and in my sufferings. Right? So we know this and we can respond then. He says in 32, I will run in the way of your commandment when you enlarge my heart. Right? So he's asking for an inner transformation. Brothers and sisters, how do we respond to the Gospel? We say, Lord, change me from the inside out. Work in me. Work in me. We read in 29, "...put false ways far from me, and graciously teach me your law." 28, "...my soul melts for sorrow. Strengthen me according to your word." He's asking for an inner transformation. So this psalm talks a lot about rescue, about life. What's the most general word that we can use to talk about deliverance? It's the name Jesus, right? What does Jesus, Jesus is the Greek form of Yeshua, right? What does Yeshua or Yeshua mean? What does that word mean? It means salvation. What does that word mean? It sounds very academic, right? What it means is rescue, help, deliverance, getting you out of a bad situation. That's what salvation means. It takes many different forms, right? We talk about the salvation of the soul from sin, yes. Salvation is this grand, big term. And that's what the psalmist is praying for again and again. 41, let your steadfast love come to me, O Lord, Your salvation. Whatever it is, Whatever is crushing you under the weight. Lord, save me. Lord, save me. And maybe it is your guilty conscience. Maybe it is an addiction. Maybe pornography has you by the throat and you just can't get rid of it. Lord, save me. Save me. Free me from this. Have mercy on me. Give me the strength and the discipline. Let me look and deliver me from whatever sin it is that's got me. Whatever addiction it is that's holding me down. Right? 81. My soul longs for Your salvation. I hope for Your Word. I hope in Your Word, right? It's this looking for help, looking to God for help, and we know that that's ultimately through Christ. So we find rescue for our weakness. We see, thirdly, reliability for our vulnerability, if I can use that word in the technical sense. Vulnere is the Latin word for a wound. Our vulnerability is where we get wounded, whatever is weak or how we get hurt in this life, whatever is the setback that we're afraid of. The assumption, of course, is that we're in danger. We are in danger. And we see this again and again in our psalm. Look at 23. He says, even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. Maybe people are against you. Maybe people are trying to do you harm. They're slandering you. Maybe somebody's trying to put you down at work so they can get ahead. This is what the psalmist is talking about, right? There's trouble. There's trouble. In verse 87, he says, "...they have almost made an end of me on the earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts." He's in real trouble. He's almost been killed. Maybe that's happened to you. Maybe you've been abused. Maybe you've been threatened. Maybe your life has been threatened in some way. Look at verse 109. He says, "...I hold my life in my hand continually." That is, there's just a quick step between him and death. Death is just around the corner for him. Look at 110. "...the wicked have laid a snare for me." People are after him. They're trying to trip him up. And you know, not only do you have physical threats and social threats against you, but you have moral threats against you. There is a tempter who is seeking one particular thing, and that is to trip you up in your Christian faith, and to make you grow cold and far from Christ. To get you into any sin he can. He wants to distract you from what I'm saying right now. He wants to turn you from Christ, because He wants you to compromise from what is right. He is the tempter who is out there for you. So you need help. You need something to rescue from that, and that's what you find in our Lord Jesus Christ, right? Look at the sense of dependability that we find in the Lord. Look at verse 89. He says, 86, The image there is of pilgrimage. I'm a pilgrim. I really appreciate Dan and Lisa taking me in last night. I'm a sojourner here. I don't have a place. And they took me in. That provides me a refuge. He says in 19, I am a sojourner on the earth. Hide not your commandments from me. In other words, I can't depend on just everything around me, or my own resources. I need some resource beyond myself, and that is You, Lord. I need you. You're the reliable one in the midst of whatever vulnerability or however you feel vulnerable and open to being hurt. The Lord is your stability. And fourthly, in our fears, He's our hope. He's our hope in the midst of our fears here. He's our hope. He says in verse 43, My hope is in your rules. Now you may say, what? Rules? No, it's the Word of God as a whole. It functions as a promise. The Word of God is filled with promises, and to the extent you believe them, then you will find comfort. You'll find hope, and you'll find calm. He says in 49, he says, "...remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope." 147, "...before dawn I rise and cry for help. I hope in your..." Word, right? When you're a kid, maybe you're tired of doing school, or you're tired of doing your chores, and you want to go out and play. And your mother says, in just a little bit, you can go out and play. She gives you her word. She says, you will go outside here in a short bit. And what do you do? You kind of go, and you calm down. Why? Because you know your mother well enough, you know that what she says, something, she's going to do it, right? So you're going to go, she'll let you have a chance to go out. So if you know God is dependable, then when you hear his promise, then you go, how do you deal with life? You can face the uncertainties and the fears, whatever fear it is that you're facing. And for a lot of us, fear is like, it just grabs us by the throat. Right? Fear keeps us from living a rich, confident, full life. We're always afraid of this. We're always afraid of that. Well, what about this? Well, what about that? And it constricts us. God doesn't want you to live that way. He wants you to have a full life, a joyous life. And you can have that by faith in Christ. If you look at Christ, you can have faith. What God says, He will do. He said He would send Christ as the Savior. He did send Christ. He said He would raise Christ from the dead, our great enemy. He did raise Christ. He said He will raise you from the dead. Will He raise you from the dead? If you believe it, you'll have hope, you see. If you don't believe it, you won't. You'll be afraid. Believe and receive, and you'll have hope through faith in God's promises to you through Christ. My hope is in your rules. Your rules. I don't have much time, and I won't develop it much, but a major theme here is the issue of shame and honor. Shame, shame, shame. He says that again and again and again. Right? Deliver me from shame. This is a shame-honor culture. He wants to avoid the shame and to achieve honor. And he finds that from God. This is something that God gives to him. Keeps him from shame and grants him the only honor. The only way to true honor is through obedience, is through faith in Christ and obedience to his commands. Right? So now you say, is it simply by an abstract faith? Is that what the psalmist is talking about? No, of course! When he's talking about rules and commandments, he's talking about rules and commandments, right? There's a certain way that we live. So we respond in faith through obedience. We obey. We say, yes, Lord, I want to live this new life. I want to do what honors You. That's the full, complete response. But last, let's take a look at this idea that God gives you happiness in your hardship. God is the one who gives you happiness, right? God gives you happiness in your hardship. This brings us to verse 1. Look at verse 1 of our psalm. 2. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart. What else begins with blessed? What other section of scripture? Whole section. The Psalms, right? The Psalms. Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who walks not this way, but in this way, right? What does our Lord Jesus say when He stands up on the mount? He gives His sermon to the whole crowd. What does He start with? Makarioi, right? Benedictus, right? Blessed. Blessed. Excuse me. Beati. The Beatitudes, right? What is this? This is happy. This is happy. How can you be happy? This is the great question, right, to be happy. You remember the story of Solon, who was the Athenian philosopher at the court of Croesus? Croesus had everything, super rich, had a huge army, had all this whole territory, had everything he possibly wanted. And he asked Croesus, the great philosopher, who is the happiest man in the world, Croesus? Of course, what was he expecting? You are, O king. And he mentions a certain individual that had a certain type of life and then died in battle, right? With honor, et cetera. He is the happiest. Who is the second happiest? Well, it must be me, Croesus. And then he mentioned another fellow who lived according to the Greek virtues, how they thought about Greek virtues, and then a glorious death, right? Don't judge. You can't judge until you see the whole, right? But that's the question. You can have it all, but what's a really happy life? If your happiness is dependent on your 401k, then what's happened in the last six months or so? You have problems, right? You've got a problem. So, if your happiness is dependent on that one individual that you've idolized, even if it's a spouse or a child. Parents often idolize their children, right? My happiness is dependent on this child having a certain type of life and success. I can't be happy if they don't have that success. Oh, that's an idolatry. There's only one way you can have a truly happy life, and that's to be connected to God Himself through Jesus Christ, the Great Connector, through the Mediator, right? And that's the delight of the psalmist here. He's delighting. There's so much delight in this psalm. Look at 14, "...in the way of your testimonies I delight." Chafetz, this idea of taking pleasure, right? 24, "...your testimonies are my delight." They're my counselors. 70. Their heart is unfeeling, like that, but I delight. 111, like an inheritance, right? I mean, if you knew that you were going to inherit 3 million dollars as an inheritance, right? It would change your whole way of looking at life, wouldn't it? You wouldn't worry about a $50 bill, whether I can pay my water bill or something. It's like, okay. You know that you're secure, ultimately, right? Because you know you have this joy. Jesus said, be careful where you put your heart, because where your treasure is, your heart will be. So where is the psalmist's treasure? Look at 1.11. Your testimonies are my heritage, my inheritance forever. They are the joy of my heart. He's delighting in it. Have you read The Count of Monte Cristo? What a great book, right? Great book. So this Edmond Dante, he goes down as far as you can go down. He has a happy life and then down into the pit of misery, unjustly in prison for so many years, right? And then suddenly he escapes from prison and he finds the treasure. the transforming treasure. To find the treasure completely transforms his life. And then the story goes on, and I won't get into that here. But the point is, there's a transforming treasure, and you have it in the Word. Because the Word shows you Christ, who is the pearl of great price. Christ, who is the treasure in a field. Right? He's worth selling everything for. He's worth leaving your parents for. He's worth leaving your society for, if they persecute you and run you off. Because He is the treasure box that's filled with more than a thousand pieces of silver and gold. My brother loves those treasure shows, right? Finding silver, whatever. I think he's kind of... Right? But see, that's Christ. That's Christ. To have Christ is to have it all. Transforming. To miss Christ is to miss it all. You may get this, that, and the other. Whatever you're looking for, you will get it. But will it make you happy? That's the question. Did it make Croesus happy? Croesus had a sad end. He finally realized it, that he wasn't happy, even though he had everything. He lost it all. Right? But will you be happy? There's only one way, right? It's the Lord Himself. Look at verse 69. It is He Himself that alone can fill our hearts. Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, as Augustine said, right? 68. You are... You are good. That's who God is. He is goodness itself. You do good. Same word, right? It's in this top section, text section, where the idea of good, the Hebrew word is good. Teach me your statutes, right? Look at 65, same basic verb there. You have dealt well. You've done good to your servant, Lord, because you are good. It is He Himself. It is He Himself. Brothers and sisters, these are the delights. we find in scripture. We find light for our darkness. We find rescue for our weakness. We find reliability and stability in the face of our vulnerability. We find hope for our fears. We find happiness in the middle of whatever hardship you have to deal with. Brothers and sisters, there's so much in this psalm. Please go tonight, this afternoon, later this week, please go back, read through Psalm 119. It's beautiful, it's rich, there's so much more for you here. But then how do we respond? Very briefly, how do we respond? If this is what God has done for us in Christ, if He's given us all of this by giving us His heart of hearts, He's given us this heart transplant by giving us Christ, how should we then respond? To love Him who is lovely, right? To respond in kind to Him. To love Him, right? He says in 47, We delight and then we love. Listen to how they go together. I find my delight in your commandments, which I love. 48. I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love. Right? Which I love. Brothers and sisters, this is God's gift to you. God has given you His Word, in human language. We've been talking about Wycliffe Bible translators, how Wycliffe is seeking to overcome cultural and language barriers, to bring the Word of God to other groups that don't have it. That's what God has done for you in Christ. He's come down. He is the Word! He's understandable. And God has brought you His Word in English, so that you can hear it, that you can believe it, and that you can find peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Spirit, increase of grace. And God's grace throughout this life and on the last day, when you face that grim reaper, you can have confidence and you can say, death, where is your sting? Thanks be to God. You have victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. He offers you all this by grace. This is the Gospel. This is the Gospel. Christ for you. This is what we're celebrating now. As you taste Christ for you. As you drink Christ for you. This is the Gospel. It's not you. It's He who's given it to you. And then what should your response be? Of course, love Him. As He's loved you, it's only appropriate if someone loves you. And someone so beautiful and so wonderful, to love your heart goes out to them. Isn't that an appropriate response? Let's pray. Almighty God, we do thank you for the one who is beautiful beyond comparison, our Lord Jesus Christ. And we thank you that you spoke to the prophets in many ways and in many times, but we thank you that in these last days you've spoken to us in your Son, who is your very image and through whom you created the world, who holds all things together by his powerful Word. Lord, open the eyes of our understanding that we may see Christ, that we may embrace Christ, rejoice in Christ, and love Christ. Thank You for the Gospel in visible, tangible, tasteable form. O grant us Your grace now, even through our ears, now through our mouths, and through our sense of smell, we pray. For we ask in Jesus' name, with the forgiveness of our sins. Amen.