Christopher: Fear tells you stories about the future. Horrible stories, unsettling stories, stories that rob the peace of the present because fear is saying, what if this happens? Well, that'll happen. What about that? What about that?
Fear is telling you stories all the time about children lost or sick, about finances running out, about bodies breaking down, about lives falling apart, about relationships imploding. Fear is telling us stories about the future. And the more we listen, the more it tells. And the more it tells, the more we live in the world it's making for us. We live in the world of its stories.
Caleb: The following message was recorded at King's Tree Church. May the spirit use it to help you see, savor, and sing the beauty of God in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. This
Christopher: morning we are returning once again to first John. I had intended to give a specifically Christmas focused message this morning, but because of the snowstorm, that more or less was given last weekend. So last Sunday is when there was given a specifically Christmas focused message, and that's online. You can look at that, and of course we will do that again for Christmas Eve, but this morning I wanna take us then back to one John. One John chapter four.
One John chapter I'm sorry, chapter Yeah, chapter four, chapter four. So if you can remember, again, it's been quite a while because of various interruptions, but back last time we were in one John, we just finished up verse 16 of chapter four, which says that we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides or remains or lives in love lives in God, abides in God, remains in God. That's what we looked at last week, this idea God is Or two weeks ago. God is love.
Therefore whoever is abiding in love, remaining in love, they are abiding in, remaining in God, and that's what we're going to look at more closely today, specifically what does it mean to abide in love? Those sound like good terms, but what's that mean for us, And what is the result of that abiding in love that John lays out for us here? So look with me at verse 16. We'll start in the second half of verse 16, and we'll go down through verse 18 of one John chapter four. Here's what it says.
God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. By this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. That's what we're gonna look at this morning.
Let me pray for us as we begin. Father, here we are gathered together in your presence, always in your presence, but uniquely here as your gathered people coming together in the name of Jesus, united in Jesus, and bound together as one body in the Holy Spirit. So Lord, here we are bringing to you burdens, hopes, fears, uncertainties. Lord, some things we know, many things, most things we don't know. Here we are, a bundle of needs brought before you, and Lord, we know that your heart for your people is grace and peace in Jesus Christ, and so I pray now, Father, that according to your great heart, as it's displayed in Christ you would have mercy on your people.
You would give grace to your people. You would give life joy peace hope endurance to your people. You would give Lord the mercy of rebuke to your people and all of this Father through your word. So I pray for grace now, supernatural grace to be able to faithfully unfold these things, lead me in what I say, be with your people in what they receive, and Lord we pray also for the children downstairs, for those in the nursery that your hand would be upon them, surrounding them, and building in them foundations of faith, that you would be with Pastor Sean as he teaches the children, that he would teach in your authority, and with a way that they can receive and understand, and that all of this church, Lord, would now be built up into Christ. So we consecrate to you these moments now.
In Jesus' name, amen. John's logic here is pretty clear at the end of verse 16. Because God is love, those who are abiding in love are abiding in him. That's the basic idea, but what does it mean to abide in love? What does that mean?
Because again, so many things like this, that can be one of those Christian y sounding terms that we say, Oh, we gotta be abiding, abiding in love. What does it mean though? What does it mean for John when he says that? I think there's at least three components to this abiding that we can see here, at least three components. The first one is abiding in love means abiding in God's love for us.
It means remaining in God's love for us, and hopefully by this point as we're going through one John it's clear to us that when we talk about God's love we don't mean a generic thing. We don't mean a kind of an amorphous feeling. We mean the very specific love that God enacts and is at the cross of Christ. We mean that. That is the love of God for us in which we are to abide.
In this is love, that God our creator, God the one for whom all things has taken to himself as his own our sorrow, our sin, our death, our damnation. He's taken it to himself. He's made it his own in Christ on the cross. He's carried these things to their uttermost and exhausted them in the grave, and he's been raised up again into invincible joy with us united to him, gathering us up into himself, he becoming our life, our peace, our joy, our hope. This act, this work that is all of God given is his love for us, and John says, Abide in it.
Stay there. Remain in that. Now breaking it down in that way using those language I just did is important and necessary, but oftentimes for something so multifaceted and so rich and so full as the love of God, language, though needed for its specificity, can sometimes make it feel cold or empty or distant. So I'll give you an image. Imagine that God's entire self, all that he is, all his beauty, and excellence, and joy, and fullness, all that God is is like a freshwater ocean spreading out as far as you can see to the horizon, as far as you can see left and right, an ocean spreading out of his life, of his fullness.
Then imagine that the curse, the fall, our sin is like a dam set up against that ocean. So you've got the ocean here. You've got a dam here set up in place in front of it blocking it off, and then on this side of the dam you've got this gasping wasteland, this desert where the water's been cut off, and it's a dead desert, and that is human condition. So you've got the ocean of God's life. You've got the dam of our sin, of our damnation.
The two words fit together there. And then you've got the desert of our soul as a result of this division. Then see in that dam a crack is broken in. A fissure is split in the dam. It's split on Christmas, you could say.
A fissure is split in the dam and it of a crucified man. It's a break in this dam in the form of the crucified Christ, and bursting through this form comes the ocean of God's life flooding down into the desert, flooding the desert, turning it into fruitful fields, turning it into running rivers, turning it from death to life. Have that vision in your mind. That life bursting through the fissure of the crucified Christ, that's like the love of God. God's love bursting out of Christ, pouring down his whole self spent and given and poured out into the gasping wilderness of our soul, and abiding in that love means standing under that flow, going before this fissure ruptured at the cross and the resurrection, and standing before the life of God given in love through Christ.
That's our abiding in love, and John says, Stay there. Stand there. Live there. Drink there. Be satisfied there.
Abide in love. That's the first part. Abide in God's love for you. But there's another part that's indivisible from that, because one of the ways we abide in God's love for us is by abiding in, continuing in our love for God, our responding reciprocal love for God. Part of remaining in our love for God is actually wanting God, actually desiring him.
Part of what keeps me standing in the flow of his love for me is I actually want him. I actually enjoy God. I have tasted and seen that he is good. So it's one thing to say, Oh, I love God. I love God.
I'm a Christian. Of course I love God. But what does that mean if we don't treasure him? What does it mean to say, I love God, if my heart is not thrilled by him? If I am not increasingly thrilled by his wisdom, his goodness, his beauty, his excellence, if I'm not increasingly desiring him the way an infant desires milk, the way a freezing body desires warmth.
Think about when it's real cold like it was last week in the zeros, and you are walking and your whole body says, I just want to get warm. I just want to get where it's warm. The soul's desire for Christ should be like that. The desire of a hungering stomach for food, so are our souls hunger to be for him. So part of loving God, part of abiding in love for God means actually wanting him, actually enjoying him, and the world is against us in this.
If you just say, Hey, I'm a Christian. I'm gonna put the bow of my soul into neutral and coast into an increasing enjoyment of God, that's not going to happen. If the boat of our soul is thrown into neutral, we will coast into an increasing indifference to God, an increasing boredom with God, because that's the direction the current of the world is going. Ephesians two talks about this world being under the control to an extent of Satan, and Satan is actively against our enjoyment of the Lord. It says in two Corinthians four that he's seeking to blind our eyes to the beauty of God.
There is an active, very powerful spiritual entity whose purpose is to blind us to the beauty of Christ, and to numb us to the desirability of God in Christ all the time 20 fourseven. It's not just, oh, a proliferation of media everywhere. There's a spiritual component to that, and it is toward numbing our hearts to Christ, numbing our desire for him. The constant distraction pouring out of phones and televisions and podcasts and everything can, I don't say necessarily must, can and often does become a means of numbing the heart to the beauty of Christ? Think about fluorescent lights in a city.
You're in a city. You look up, and you say, Oh, there's nothing up there, because the lights are all flashing, and the stoplights are going, and the house lights are on, but there are actually up there lights in the sky that are so almighty that they would burn the earth to ash. The stars would burn this earth to nothing, and yet you can't see them because there's a Burger King sign flashing here. You can't see them because there's a street light here, which is nothing. So too the fluorescent lights of just entertainment, the next thing, oh, this next movie, this next game, this next season, this next, next, next, those can make it so we don't even see the life incinerating excellence of God in Christ.
It can make the seraph humbling glory of God look to us mundane, boring, satisfying, or unsatisfying, and I would say fight that. Just fight that for goodness' sake. Fight that. Fight to love God. Fight to treasure Christ.
Fight to enjoy the one you say you're going to spend eternity with, the one I say I'm going to spend eternity with. Fight my soul and to enjoy him for goodness sake. What stirs our affections for Christ? What is it after having done I come away saying, Christ is beautiful. God is excellent.
I am satisfied in him. Do that more. Do that more. What? When I come away from it Jesus feels distant.
My affections are numbed to him. I think, well, you know, I know there's something there for me, but it doesn't feel What numbs my affections to Christ? Stop doing it. Stop doing it. Just don't.
If being obsessed about this team, or this game, or this movie, or this pursuit, or this thing always belittles Christ in my affections, then stop. God give us grace to stop, because this is what matters, treasuring him, enjoying him, knowing him. So don't let my conscience be your conscience. Take that and apply it to your own situation, but what does it look like for us to be pursuing the enjoyment of God? So abiding in love means standing in his love for us.
It also means abiding in my love for him, my love for him, seeing that increase. And third, indivisibly from these, it means abiding in our love for others. So John is emphatic all throughout this epistle. We are not standing in that downpour, that outpouring ocean of God's love. We are not standing there, and we are not loving him, pursuing him, enjoying him.
We are not if we're not loving one another. That's the linchpin. If we're not loving one another, it doesn't matter how nicely a pastor can stand up here and talk about enjoying Jesus. If I'm not loving others, all that's empty. Same for all of us.
Love of others is what proves that we are standing in the love of God for us, and we are abiding in our love for God. It says in chapter four verse 20, If anyone says, Oh, I love God. I just enjoy him. I treasure him. There's nothing like Christ.
Well, if anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he's a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. So this is critical. Abiding in love, not just standing in God's love for me, not just reciprocating in my love for him, but crucially loving one another. Having that love work itself out.
And this is simple because you see this on a human level. If a human begins to be enamored with another human, very often this one will start to act like this one. We start to act like the people that we love, the people that we admire, the people that we look up to, and that's a design because the human soul is a mirror, and it's made to reflect that which it's pointed toward. And so if my soul is standing under the love of God and pointed at him, treasuring him, the proof of that is the mirror of my soul is going to begin to reflect him, and that reflection looks like self giving love. The reflection of our God, if I'm turned toward him, treasuring him, the reflection that will shine out in my life increasingly is loving you all, loving one another, loving the Christians in our life.
Specifically John's talking about Christians, but of course that extends to our neighbor in general, but here he's specifically talking about other believers. Pull this together. What does it mean when John says abiding? It means these three things, and you can't have any one of these without the other. It's a three legged stool.
They're all interwoven. These three things remaining in God's love for us, standing in the love of God for me, returning in my love for him, which is indivisible from my love for one another, for those around me. That obedience to him, that response to him, that reflection of his character. That's what it means to abide in love. At least those three components are in John's mind.
And this, this abiding in love, this in his love, returning that love, loving others, that is what John means when he talks about perfected love. In this is love perfected. This is love brought to completion. This is love in its full flowering, this standing under the love, returning the love, and reflecting the love in lives around us. So you see there in verse 17, By this, what I just said in verse 16, By this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment.
Now just a quick word before we talk about the day of judgment, just a quick thing about perfected. It doesn't mean God's love was not perfect, and now we made it perfect, of course. What it means is it's like when a composer writes a song for a choir, that song might be perfect, but it's completed when the choir actually sings it. So too, as it were, the song of God's love is composed perfectly in the flesh and blood of Christ in his death and resurrection, but that love is completed, brought to its fullness when it is sung by the choir of the church. When we live it, it bears its appointed fruit.
That's this idea. And John says, When that's happening in your life, in my life, in the church's life, when love is being perfected among us, then he says, we may have confidence at the day of judgment because as he is, so also are we in this world. There's no fear in love, but perfect love, or perfected love, completed love casts out fear. So let's look at this for the second half of our time together this morning. Let's look at this idea of how love deals with fear, because John moves from talking about love to talking about how it casts out fear.
It gives us confidence in the day of judgment. It casts out the fear that has to do with punishment. Now in a minute we're gonna look at how this applies to all kinds of fear, but John's emphasizing judgment as the fearful thing that love casts out. The fear of judgment. The fear of judgment.
See in verse 17, By this is love perfected with us that we may have confidence for the day of judgment because as he is so also are we in the world. So this reminds us of course that there is a day of judgment. There is. Living in this life one day after another, one task after another, one responsibility after another, one birthday after another, it begins to feel like maybe it's just this way. Judgment.
There is a day coming when every one of us will be stripped of all the clothing, of all the excuses that we've wrapped around ourselves, and we will be completely exposed to the all searching eyes of the judge, and we will be divided on that day, whether it is apart from him unto condemnation or into him unto salvation, that day is coming for every soul in this room. For everyone listening to my voice, and for me, that day is coming. And that's a weighty thing, but John says having love perfected in us casts out fear of that day. We can have confidence on that day. We can have confidence when everything is torn away, and we are searched that the end will not be condemnation, but life.
We can have confidence, and the thing that gives us confidence is love perfected, abiding in the love of God, returning that love to him, and loving one another. If that's happening, this process is happening, John says you can be confident for the day of judgment. Why? Well, look at his logic in verse 17. Because as he is, so also are we in this world.
Okay, that's interesting. So having love perfected in us makes us confident on the day of judgment because as Christ is, so also are we. So something about having love perfected in us makes us like Christ, and that is our confidence on the day of judgment. What's he talking about there? Well, think there's two parts to that.
One is, very practically, as love is perfected in us, Christian, we are really being made to look like Jesus. Not perfectly, we know that just by looking into our own heart, but we are being made more like Christ. The basic form of Christ is being formed in us. The self giving love of our Lord is being worked out in us. His mind and priorities are being built in us.
If Christ is a river flowing this way, and we were a river flowing this way, in him now we are also rivers flowing this way. Even though we're muddy and dirty and there's all kinds of things messed up, we're at least moving now in his direction. So as he is, so also are we. We are being made like him. We are looking like him, and that gives us confidence on the day of judgment to say he's working in me.
He's making me like him. He's making me like himself. That's the first thing there that gives us confidence in the day of judgment. As he is, so also are we, being made like him. But there's a deeper thing than that.
There's deeper, because the only reason we're being made like him is because of our love, our love for one another, and the only reason we're loving one another is because he loves us. That's the deeper thing. That's the deepest part, because if I was to ask you, okay, as Christ is, so also are we in the world. That's why we're confident. Well, as Christ is.
What is Christ like? The ultimate answer to that is beloved. Christ is the beloved of God. That's where all his glory, all his beauty, all his fullness, all his excellence, all his identity comes from the fact that he is the beloved of God, perfectly, infinitely, fully. So much so that to be loved by God, to be loved by the Father is not one of the things that's true of Jesus.
That is his identity. Jesus is the beloved of God, and in union to him that's true of us too. As he is beloved of God, so also are we beloved of God, and that is the deepest ground of our confidence as we face judgment, that we are beloved. We are gathered in. We live in the house of God's own love.
We live in the heart of the Trinity. We live in him. We're beloved of him, and that gives us confidence ultimately on the day of judgment, because we know he will not separate his beloved from himself, and in his love he's made us his beloved in Christ. So that's this deepest truth. As Christ is, namely beloved, so also are we, and so we have confidence because of his love for the day of judgment.
Now I wanna push this further in kind of our final section this morning to ask, okay, I see how the love of God in Christ gives me confidence for the judgment day. I can see that. I can understand that. Praise God for that, but there's a lot of other things I'm scared of. There's a lot of other fears in this life.
Praise God, he loves me so I don't have to be afraid of hell, but my children might still die. My spouse may still become grievously ill. I still might have to go in for that surgery. I still might have to lose this thing that I'd rather die than lose. These things are still here, and they're still frightening.
They still carry a weight of fearfulness. So okay, I praise God I don't have to be afraid of judgment, but what about other fear? And John seems to imply, yes, this expands because look what he says in verse 18. There is no fear in love. He doesn't just say no fear of judgment.
He says, There is no fear in love, but perfect love or perfected love, this three part thing we've been talking about. Perfected love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment. That's interesting. The one who fears has not been perfected in love. Okay.
So John, John, just tell me, does the love of God help me in all my fears, or just in fear of judgment? Here's how I think he would respond, or here's what I think at least is true about what he's saying. Yes, the love of God casts out all of our fears, but that's because ultimately all of our fears are fear of judgment. Now let me explain why that's the case. Let me explain to you my thinking here.
You see if this makes sense to you. What does judgment mean? Well judgment or punishment, as he uses the phrase here, or hell is ultimately to be have God against us. Okay, that's judgment. That's punishment.
That's hell. That's damnation. God against me. God against me to be utterly without help. You have never had God against you.
No one, the most hardened criminal in all the world has never had God utterly against them, because they've still been able to enjoy a chocolate chip cookie, and enjoyment itself is a gift of God. But to be utterly cut off from him, with him utterly against you, means the capacity to enjoy is ripped from us because that's part of God. You hear people sometimes very foolishly say, Well, all the exciting people are in hell. That's where I want to be. There'll be a party down there.
The ability to acknowledge another human being as a fellow, as a compatriot at all is a gift of God. The ability to even experience a shred of enjoyment is a gift of God. The ability to think from one point to the next is a gift of God, and imagine existence with that all ripped away. There is no hope. There is no peace.
There is no end to this. It's agony without compassion, despair without hope, loss without return, because it is, as counterintuitively as it seems, existence without God. So that's this idea of judgment. Now what is fear? John says fear has to do with this.
It has to do with judgment. It has to do with punishment. Well what is fear? I think we could say this. Fear is a storyteller.
Fear tells you stories. Fear tells you stories about the future, horrible stories, unsettling stories, stories that rob the peace of the present, because fear's saying, What if this happens? Well, then that'll happen, and what about that? What about that? Fear is telling you stories all the time about children lost or sick, about finances running out, about bodies breaking down, about lives falling apart, about relationships imploding.
Fear is telling us stories about the future, and the more we listen, the more it tells, and the more it tells, the more we live in the world it's making for us. We live in the world of its stories. Now there's one thing about the stories that fear tells. In every one of the scenarios that fear is giving us, God is against us. Fear tells you stories about the future in a future in which God is against you.
Now it may not be explicit about that. You're not thinking, I won't be a Christian anymore, but the point is in the stories fear is telling there's this underlying sense of hopelessness, despair, freezing emptiness, cosmic solitude. If that happens, what'll I do? If that happens, I'll be gutted. I'll be lost.
It'll be over. The sense of that I'll be abandoned. That's the kind of story fear tells us. It's telling us stories in which God is against us, or to put it another way, perhaps more provocatively, all the stories fear is telling us take place in hell. They take place in hell.
That scenario of what will happen if that happens to you, and you feel like it'd be I'd be lost. It'd be over. That's story of you in hell because it's a story of you without God there for you. That's the thing. All the scenarios that fear paints for us are scenarios in which we have been forsaken by God.
Even if it doesn't come out and say that because it's smart enough to know a Christian's gonna call me on that one, but all the scenarios fear's giving us are a future in which God's not there, or at least he's not helping. Nothing, he's not doing anything. Fear paints a future in which we are abandoned by God, which means at the heart of fear is judgment, punishment, this opposition of God to us, and here's the point. That thing, which is the only thing fear has to hold over your head, that thing, that frigid monstrous heart of fear, which is a vision of a future where God is against you, that is precisely what is removed and made impossible by the love of Christ. That can never be the case for a Christian because of the love of Christ.
Fear is a liar not because the things it says will never come true. They may come true. Fear is a liar because when it is telling us things it forgets one thing. It forgets to say, and you will be loved. And you will be loved in the midst of that.
And God will have not forsaken you. God will have not forsaken you. You will still be held in the bosom of his love for you, unmoved from the intimate center of his care for you. That is the peace fear conveniently leaves out in all the scenarios that it gives to us, so we may indeed come into that valley that we've feared. We may indeed be brought down into those depths of horror or loss or sorrow that on the outside we would've given our right arm just to not be here, and yet here I am now in the midst of this.
How can this be? Indeed, we may come to those places. There's no promise that says we won't go to those places, but if we come to those places, we will be loved in those places. We will be loved there. That is what fear forgets to say.
That is what the fear chilling you right now is not telling you. It's not telling you there's love there. There's love there to meet you. The cancer may come. The loss may strike.
The life shattering blow may fall, but the promise is in it love will meet you. In it the love that is the joy of God's own life will meet us and embrace us, and if we're tempted to say, great, but what does that matter to me that some invisible being loves me with my child, God? What does that matter to me? I understand. Far be it for me to speak into that grief by my experience, but what I would say is if this love is God's life, if this love is enough for God, if this love is the feast of God's own soul, if this love is the gravity turning the entire cosmos, setting the burning tongues of the Seraphim on fire with praise for all eternity.
If this love is that, then it can meet you in that. It can comfort you in that. It can envelop you in that, and this is like nothing else, Christian. I don't know if you've been here before. When you come into the dark place of horror that you've feared for so long, and you're brought into it, and here you are now in the midst of it, and you can't It's happening.
It's happening, and in that darkness you find beyond all your expectations that love is meeting you there. What? What? This horror, and yet you find love is here. Love is wrapping me up, binding me, holding me, meeting me, keeping me.
In the midst of it, you find God is still God. Jesus is still Lord. The crucified one is still risen, and he's with me. That's the death of fear. When fear brings to you the thing you most feared, and here it is in front of you, and it's everything.
Know, it's a full press. Fear's bringing it all against you, and in the face of it, as it's tearing you to shreds, you find love is holding me. Love is meeting me. Love is here. And that's of course because love is hanging on your cross.
Love is hanging on our cross. And the face of love, it says in Isaiah 53, is marred beyond human semblance because God presses his face in love through all the thorns that fear can bring against us, and meets us eye to eye in the midst of it, and says, You are loved here, and this love never lets go, and this love holds you through, and this love raises you up beyond it, and that is the death of fear. That's the death of fear. Perfect love casts out fear. So Christian, may we be given grace in the face of love, in the face of fear to believe love.
In the face of fear, believe love. When you lay down for bed and you don't know what's gonna happen next tomorrow, you don't know if they're gonna be okay, you don't know if you're gonna be okay, You don't know if You don't know, and you're laying down in bed. Say to yourself, I believe the love of God. I believe love will meet me. I have no idea what tomorrow's bringing except more of his love, and hold fast to that.
Hold fast to that. And then let me leave you with this final word, because verse 18 might feel like a condemnation to some of us. Fear has to do with punishment. Whoever fears has not been perfected in love. Who here still fears?
I'm willing to guess it's many of us, and you might say, Well, I'm not perfected in love. I I'm a failure. No, I want to leave you with that word turned in your ears into a promise, because what that's saying is whoever fears has not yet been perfected in love. Don't hear that as saying, You should have been perfected in love. Hear that as saying, Are you afraid?
Then there's more love. Then there's still more love to find. There's still more love to enter into. There's still more of the feast for you to have. Are you still hungry?
There's still more to eat. Are you afraid? There's still more love to find. So the very fear that presses upon us is in the moment of it's terrifying us, a witness from God, there's more love. There's more love to find.
There's more love to enter into because this very fear that you're feeling will be cast out by my love. So come in deeper. Come in deeper. So let fear not be our master putting us on the ground, but let fear become our servant carrying us deeper into his love. Where there is fear, where there is fear, may it drive us by its very presence more deeply into the heart of God's unimaginable love for us in Christ, the love that finally casts out fear.
May it be so. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for this love, a love that truly and literally we will be spending eternity even to get our hands around. And Father, I pray that we would be made such a people that this love would cast out our fears. Let this love, Father, be perfected in us.
Let us as a people stand beneath your love for us in Christ and believe it. Let us reciprocate that love, Father, in a love for you, and let us reflect that love in love for others around us, and as this is happening, Father, may our fears be cast out. The door of your heart, the door of your love is the door behind which every answer is found, so may we knock at it ceaselessly, tirelessly until it is opened to us, because, Father, you've already opened it to us on the cross. We look to you, we praise you, and we ask now, Lord, satisfy your people in your love for us in Christ that you might be glorified as the source of all our good. We pray it, father, in Jesus name, amen.
Caleb: Thank you for listening to this message from Kingstree Church in Sabina, Ohio. To see more of the beauty of God and the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, come worship with us on Sundays at 10AM or visit our website at kingstreechurch.org.