October 6, 2024 | A Community of Grace

Transcript

This morning we're going to begin in first Peter chapter four. And then we will be in a few other passages along the way. But I want to draw your attention, really, to one phrase that we mentioned last week. In first Peter chapter four.

Sometimes God takes a phrase and just won't let that go out of your mind. So what he's done is I've looked at this phrase and I hope that he'll do the same thing for you. I hope that it will be a pulse that drives what we do as a body of believers and as individuals. It comes from first Peter for.

In verse ten, as each has received a gift. Use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace. Just that last phrase, as good stewards of God's varied grace from time to time, we will. We'll do something like this this morning. If you're visiting with us, we're really glad that you're here. What we normally do is we preach through sections of Scripture.

We're preaching through the book of First Peter, and we take the next section and just continue in the next section. But it's good for us sometimes to pause. And for two main reasons. One, it's good for us to come back to the core values, the root of who we are, all the way to the DNA of who we are as Berean Bible Church, what drives us and what should drive us.

Why do we show up on Sunday morning? Well, we assemble together. We gather as members of the same body, ultimately for the glory of God, that he would be praised. That we would be reminded that he deserves our praise. And as we do, there's five themes that run throughout everything that we do. First, we're we're rooted in God's Word.

That's our source of truth. It's our perfect authority, and our desire is to enjoy our God as he has revealed himself in every page, not just to know one little slice or one little favorite section of who God is, but to know as much as we can from what he has revealed himself to be. We're grounded in the gospel because God invites us.

As we sang this morning, he invites all of us to have a relationship with him as his children. Even though we were his enemies. Yet we can know him and love him not because of anything we have done, but because of his grace through Jesus Christ. That's the gospel. And if you are rooted in God's Word and grounded in the gospel, then what should happen is that worship should flow out of that.

And so we are worshipers. Our desire is that God would be our best treasure, our most valuable treasure, our highest goal for everything that we do. And when you worship God like that, based on His Word and coming to him through the gospel, it overflows with community or our relationship with one another and mission our love for those who are outside of this body.

And it's good for us every once in a while to pause and think through how all those things relate to one another, and how they relate to the sections of Scripture that we're studying as we go. It's also good for us to apply God's truth corporately. It's not enough for you, individually or me individually, to read God's Word and say, well, here's God's Word, here's how I need to live it out.

But we have a life together as a body. We need to know how do God's words and how does his truth apply to what we do together? When we make decisions, when we gather, when we interact with one another throughout the week? And this morning, that's that's really my goal is to say our community, our relationship that flows from the word and the gospel through worship, our relationship with one another should be characterized by grace because we are God.

We should be good stewards of God's varied grace.

So I want to invite you to go before God's throne with me one more time, because we need his help every time we come to His Word. And let's pray. God, your word says that we have received grace upon grace from the fullness of your Son, Jesus Christ.

The law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through him. The one who made you known to us. So, Lord, make yourself known through your written word by the power of your spirit this morning, and pour out grace and truth to us again today. Amen. This phrase good stewards of God's varied grace. It answers three simple questions.

The first is, well, what do we have? We have God's multicolored and his multifaceted, his varied grace or divine favor or help or divine pleasure. Sometimes I think we get a wrong view of God that creates a bad view of grace, and we think that God, God's grace, means he sees us and pities us and like begrudgingly gives something.

That's not what grace means. It doesn't mean that God looks at us and goes, well, I really don't like them, but I guess I'll help them. Now, Grace means favor. God looks on his people and when he pours out grace on us, he is acting in favor towards us. So if you were to say good stewards of God's varied favor.

Of all the ways God has poured out favor on you. This text says we as a body of believers are to take that favor and steward it well. That's what we have. We have varied, beautiful help. Favor, grace. We could put different words with grace and start to see some of the different types of grace. We can talk about saving grace.

We can talk about transforming grace that doesn't leave you living the way you are now, but helps you to grow. We can talk about convicting Grace.

It's a grace when God shows you something in your life that will harm you, and he convicts your soul of that and points that out. That's God's grace. We can talk about God's providing grace, and we could share story after story after story of the way he's provided for different ones of us. And we'll go on and look at more as we go throughout this morning.

But we see first, what do we have? God's varied favor. Second, what are we supposed to do? Well, he describes it with his word steward. The idea is that a steward has responsibility for something which has been given to them, but the steward doesn't own it. The one who gave it to them owned it. And the steward is to manage that.

In some ways it would be like a business owner hires a manager and we could say hires a steward and says, run the business. That manager's not supposed to go off and do whatever they want to against the principles of the company or the owner. They're supposed to use their responsibility and what they've been given in the way that the owner would want it to be used.

So steward. I want you to notice here he doesn't say that we're supposed to repay God's varied grace, as if God chose this great grace, and now I have to pay him back for it, because he did something good for me. So I have to do something for him.

He doesn't say that. He says you've been given something, so steward it. So use what you've been given and use it well. Use it in a way that the one who owns it would approve. What do we have? God's varied, multifaceted grace. What are we supposed to do? Take what we've been given. Manage. Use it well with our responsibility according to the way he would want it to be used.

Why does that matter? Well, it's the first part of the phrase. As good stewards, if you can be a good steward, you can also be a bad steward. The manager of the business who runs the business into the ground is not being a very good steward. The manager of the business who decides to take the business in a completely different direction than the owner is not being a good steward.

So we are supposed to be a good steward. In fact, this word steward might remind you of one of Jesus's parables, the parable of the talents, where three people are given different amounts of money and they're told, you go and use that. The first two do. The third one keeps what he was given and gives it back. In fact, this is another place we can go to say the point is not repayment.

Technically, the third guy did repay what he was given, but the parable isn't about how to repay the master for what the master gave you. It's about the master has given you something. Now do you use it in a good way?

And here's the pattern then, throughout Scripture. And we're going to see this in numerous places this morning throughout Scripture. The pattern is this God has given you something. That's what grace is in many different ways. But whatever God has given you in his favor, that's all grace. The grace God has given you then shapes and changes you. You have responsibility and dignity to take what God has given you and to use it.

You're a steward. And so you should use it as a good steward to serve others for the glory of God. That's the pattern over and over in Scripture. God gives grace. It changes you. You have responsibility to use that to serve others and to glorify him. I hope that that pattern will echo throughout your week. I hope it'll echo in your mind.

I said earlier, it'll be like a pulse. One of the beauties of that picture is that you all have a pulse right now, and yet none of you were thinking about it until I said pulse. Probably. I hope not. If we have a medical emergency, that's a different situation. If you have a pulse, that pulse, it runs. It drives you over and over and over and over and over.

I hope that this will be part of what drives you. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, God has given me grace in more varied ways than I normally think of, and I want the pulse to be there where he has given me this grace. Now, how do I steward it? Well? How do I use whatever he has given me?

That is exactly what should define a community of believers. If you think about all the ways you could define a church, you could define it by just what we happen to live together. We happen to like some of the same things our common life experiences. You could define it a lot of ways. What should define a church is that it is a community of people who receive God's divine favor repeatedly, and steward it for each other.

We should be, in that sense, a community of grace where God has helped me, and so I help others. Would you turn with me to Romans 15?

This morning we're going to be in several different texts, but we're going to see this pattern over and over. Romans 15, beginning in verse one, we who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. He's been talking about strong and weak believers who have a better understanding or a worse understanding of what exactly was allowed for Christians, and how they should proceed, and how they should live for the glory of God in some challenging questions.

And he says, then those who are strong, who have a better understanding of God's truth applied in their lives. In this section, there are two. Bear with the failings of the weak. They're not to be irritated with the weakness of those who are around them. They're not to be proud about their better understanding. In fact, is Texas. If you don't bear with the weaknesses of others, you would be merely pleasing yourself.

Notice that we who are strong have an obligation to do this. Bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. So the opposite, then, is verse two. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. Don't please yourself in pride. I got it right. And you didn't. This weaker person or in irritation.

I've got it right. And I can't believe you don't have this weakness. Don't please yourself, but instead please your neighbor. Not just to please him, please your neighbor for their good, which is defined here as building them up or strengthening them. He uses Christ as an example. Verse three for Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.

If we were to put that in slightly different terms, Jesus took criticism for the weakness of others. That's a little bit more than that. The reproaches of them fell on me because it went all the way to the cross. It was far more than criticism. But that phrase alone is challenging to me. How many times do you feel like you're criticized when it was actually someone else's fault, and irritation just rises up?

And yet, this text points us to Christ as our example, where the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me. Well, why does he write that verse? For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. So instruction, endurance, encouragement. There's a good word that can summarize that grace.

Those are three aspects of grace. They're part of God's varied grace instruction, endurance, encouragement of the scriptures. We might have hope. Hope is also grace. So he prays. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God. God has poured out his grace. Notice the pattern. God, both in Jesus's example and in Scripture, has poured out on these people. Grace of unity. Instruction. Endurance. Encouragement. Welcome. That's a lot of different varieties of God's favor of God's help. He has poured that out on them.

And since God gave them this, grace says, therefore you welcome one another. It's not quite the same thing as repayment. It's really the effect of grace. Paul says this in First Corinthians. He says, by the grace of God I am what I am. And his grace toward me was not without its effect. God's grace towards me changes me here.

Paul, writing to the Romans, says, here's grace that's been given you endurance, encouragement, hope, unity, welcome. All of that has been given you. Now, when that. It's a subtle difference, but it's an important one if you hear that as I've been welcomed, I guess I have to welcome somebody. You see, the attitude is not quite what it should be.

I've been encouraged. I guess maybe I should go and encourage somebody else. But if instead you say I have been welcomed to the throne of God so that I don't need the approval of other people around me to fulfill my life.

Then when they're weak and you're tempted to be irritated, it's not that you're repaying, it's that you've been changed by grace. So that now I go, I want to welcome. I want to encourage. I want to keep unity over and over again. This is the pattern. These are some of the colors of God's grace. He unites. If a church has unity, it's only because God has poured his grace out on them.

He has united the church. So we because we've been given this unity, this grace, and it changes us internally. We steward it. And as Paul says in Ephesians, we endeavor. We work to keep the unity, to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. Grace in this text. It builds us up. God builds us up.

And so as we are transformed and grow, we also help others. We steward the grace, the help, the favor that's been given us, and we steward it and use it well to build others up.

It's God's grace when we are filled with worship, when we see him and love him, that's God's grace. Notice in Romans 15 the prayer is, May God grant you harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus for this purpose. So that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. His grace pours out.

You respond with a heart of worship, and that's not only for you. That is so you can take the grace you've been given and steward it well so that others will worship as well. He welcomes you by his grace, not by your performance, and that transforms you so that you can welcome one another. Not because the person I go to church with never disappoints me.

Because you'll never find that church. But because you've been welcomed by grace and changed by grace. Now you can welcome others by grace and not by performance. Later in this chapter, there's more varied colors of God's grace. Look down to verse 14. Paul says, I'm satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness. That's one grace filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another.

God has given us knowledge of his truth. Then we are able to instruct. Notice the pattern. We've received something. It shapes us. Now it's our response. Ability to steward it well, to instruct others to take what? The grace we've been given and use it. Well, if we went back a few chapters, we'd find God's grace of abilities in Romans 12, where he talks about as members of the body.

We don't all have the same function. We, though many, are one body in Christ and members one of another. And then he talks about this list of gifts, of prophecy, of service, of teaching, of exhorting, of giving, of leading, of mercy. See all of those things. If God has given you mercy, that's grace. How do you steward it?

If God has given you an ability to teach or an ability to lead, that's grace. How are you stewarding it? Are you using it the way your master wants it to be used? Good stewards of God's varied grace. One of my hopes this morning is that you will expand your mind about what it means for God to give you grace.

You. All that's required for it to be labeled as grace is. This is something which God has given, and it's his favor or his help to you. And Scripture says every good and perfect gift comes from above. It also says, what do you have that you did not receive? So every good thing you have is God's varied grace in some way.

How do you use it? Are we good stewards of God's varied grace?

If you'd like to turn to Colossians three, I want to show you the same pattern again.

It's a familiar passage where Paul is telling them they need to put off certain things and put on other things. Verse 12 he says, put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved. Compassionate hearts has God poured out grace of compassion on you?

So, as good stewards of his varied grace, if he's given us compassion, what can we give to others? Compassionate hearts. Kindness. That's God's grace to you. Humility that might not feel like a grace. But if you've been around someone who's truly humble and you've been around someone who's obviously proud, you'd say, God, please help me to be like this humble person.

And when he does, that's grace of humility. So if that has been poured on us, if that's another color of God's varied grace, how do we steward it? Meekness and patience. How much grace has God poured out on you in patience?

Think back to your life. Think how many times you've gone down a path you thought was right. And you found out later it really wasn't.

And yet your God has never put you on a shelf and said, I'm done with you. Praise God.

Good stewards of God's varied grace doesn't just mean he's giving you an ability. It means one of the ways he poured out grace in your life is to give you this unbelievable patience.

And for you to steward that grace that he's given you.

How about God's forgiving grace? That's the next section bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. He's poured forgiveness out. He's poured grace on you. And so you're supposed to be good stewards of that part of God's varied grace. And it's not that God forgives you, so you have to repay him.

It's not even that God forgives you, so you have to pay it forward. You have to pay the forgiveness to someone else. That's not the whole point. The point is that when God's forgiveness transforms you so deeply and you feel the joy of that forgiveness.

And you don't have to fight and claw to measure up and have your performance in your relationship with God, it changes you to be the kind of person who can take that grace and steward it well in a million ways, and forgive others.

He goes on above all these, put on love which binds together everything in perfect harmony, knowing every thought that you would have. This week. Including the ones you'd like to forget that you had this week. Including the ones I'd like to forget that I had this week. Knowing all of that. Jesus went to the cross for you. He displayed his love.

While we were sinners, Christ died for us. What grace. What favor? What help is it that he says you are loved? And if you've been given that grace, be a good steward of God's grace to you. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. Verse 16. God's word is grace. Do you steward it well? Its help, its favor.

He did not leave you to blindly stumble around in the darkness. He said, this is what is true and right. That's his grace. So be a good steward of God's varied grace. He continues teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom. If God has given you wisdom, that's God's grace to you. That's part of his varied grace. So use it well.

Use it according to what he wants you to use it for. Steward it.

Specifically, he continues to say singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. God's giving you a voice. That's God's grace, too. He didn't have to. You might say, well, I think some people got a better voice in others. Okay, fair. But God has given you a voice. And maybe he didn't give you the most amazing voice.

None of these texts tell you to sing like an amazing singer. What they tell you is steward the grace you've been given. And if you've been given the grace of a voice that can sing God's praises, then use it the way God wants you to use it.

Steward what you've been given. Not only that, you've been given the opportunity in our context to sing together. A few years back, we had a pastor who was from China. He was a national pastor from China, and he came to our meeting. The church I was at. And we sang nothing special, just sang songs. His pastor commented afterwards through a translator how amazing it was to be able to have that many people in a room singing loudly.

Because they sing where he was. But where you can barely hear it. Because in their context, you don't know if the neighbors will turn you in. We have an opportunity to sing freely every week. That's part of God's grace to us. So as good stewards of God's varied grace, how do we respond?

We could go on and on and on. We can talk about Titus two. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation, teaching us to turn from ungodliness and worldly desires, and to live self-controlled and righteous and godly lives in this present age. The grace of God has done some things. It invites us to come and be saved. It trains us to fight sin.

It teaches us self-control and godliness. It fills us with hope. That's all God's grace. That's all part of God's varied grace. So if you have ever, in any area of your life, learn to fight against sin and worldly desires, that's because God poured that grace into your life. Are you stewarding it?

I'm ashamed to think plenty of times.

I want to take that grace. Use it when I want to. And go love my sin when I want to. That's not stewarding the grace of fighting against sin. It's not stewarding it well. Or maybe second Corinthians one. The God of all comfort comforts you. Why? So you can comfort others. Again, the pattern, the pulse grace pours out from God.

It transforms you, meets your need. Now, what do you do with it? The text tells us God comforts you with his comfort. He's the God of all comfort. So you can steward it well to comfort other people.

We could also talk about the grace of experience that might not always feel like grace to you. You say some experiences I'd rather not have. Sure. But God has given you a wide range of experiences. Some of you, he's giving you 60, 70, 80, 90 years of experiences. Some of you, he's given six. And it's different. But the experience you've been given God, who is wise and good in the way that he providentially guides, he's given you grace.

Sometimes that grace looks like a mistake that you made, that you wish you didn't make. But he showed you it was a mistake. He protected you, and now you have a chance to steward that grace well, for others.

And then there's two things that I want to particularly talk about here. Two different stewardship. Two different graces that maybe we don't think about. One, I think we do. One we probably don't. One is resources. And I think we probably know that whether that's money or time or any number of different things. Again, if every good and perfect gift comes from him, that means when you have dollars in your bank account, that's God's grace to you.

When you have hours in your day. That's God's grace to you.

So how do we steward that grace? In Second Corinthians, Paul talked about the grace that God had given to the Macedonians, who were a poorer church, and yet God had given them grace, so that they gave generously to the point that Paul was kind of like, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't give. And they're like, no, we have to give.

That stewarding grace. Grace had been poured out on them and they wanted to steward it well. We have a stewardship of resources and we have a stewardship of opportunity.

This week.

I'm saying this not so that all of us can say, oh, I messed that up, but so that all of us can get a bigger view of God and what he's doing. This week you talked to a lot of people. I don't know how many. Some of you that might have been five, and some of you that might have been 700.

But every opportunity you have to talk to someone, God's giving you the breath and the life to do it. It's grace. How many opportunities do we not steward as well as we should?

Steward the opportunities. Well.

As a body, I want to share one thing for your prayer. At the end of our time here, and it relates to both stewarding resources, an opportunity we have. And it's a specific corporate application, really. It's a question of how do we as a body say we are going to be good stewards of God's varied grace?

If you've been with us for a while, you've heard that we are pursuing a family pastor or a pastor of family ministries. However, you want to word that, and maybe I've heard a lot of people say, what exactly is that? What is a family pastor and why is it called that? And what does that look like? What are we doing?

So I'd like to share a little bit about that this morning. And the reason is to frame this as we are stewarding both resources and opportunity. Every decision that we make as a body is trying to say, God's given us grace. How do we use it? Well? Well, as we know we are, we have a stewardship of resources.

So God has given us both physical resources here, financial resources. And he has used many of you to do that because you have been faithful stewards of God's varied grace. And we are grateful for that. He's also given us a stewardship of opportunity, and I am so grateful for the opportunities God has given us to minister his grace, particularly to teenagers and children.

You know, there are many churches in our world that don't have that opportunity in the same way, because God has not in his providence, given that grace to them right now. But God has given us anywhere from 30 to 40 teenagers at our youth group on Wednesday nights. Something like 40 to 50 kids who are here to want us, sometimes a little more.

450 students, roughly, in the Christian school here. And those are just the ones who are regularly here.

Not only is the next generation of worshipers here, but there's multiple waves of the next generations of worshipers that God has given us the grace to minister to. And that's not just something that the body does. That's something that many of you individually have poured out your lives as God has taught you. You have faithfully stewarded. You have faithfully taken that grace and said, this is not just for me.

It's for some little people too, or not so little people as they are. But we don't want to just reach the next generation. We want to do something more than that. We want to connect them into God's plan for his people, which is the church. Steve mentioned it beautifully earlier. This is the way that God started at Pentecost.

This is his plan is that a body of believers would gather together. We want to connect young people to the church. If God did not add another young person to this body of believers here, there's already a tremendous opportunity to reach and connect the next generation with the beautiful truth of the gospel, to worship God through this building and these resources that we have.

And I want to say to the point of connecting young people to the church is not just so that we do something for them, because if there's a seven year old who's truly converted, that means they have the Spirit of God in them, and he has gifted them, and we spiritually need them.

So what's a pastor of Family Ministries? What does that do? Well, if if you hear me talking and you think it sounds a lot like a youth pastor, I get it. That makes sense. And that is in some ways what it would look like. I don't want to call it that for a couple reasons. One, I think it's better to pursue someone who is a pastor who happens to work with teens than to pursue someone who's really good at working with youth, and may or may not be great at being a pastor.

The general idea to say God's Church is served by what he's established in His Word by pastors. That includes staff pastors. That includes elders who serve here, who are not paid for that role.

But I think it's important that God's church is served by people who are shepherds, pastors, elders, people who are shepherds first and then do different tasks. Second. Otherwise, it's easy for different ministries in church to end up functioning like bumper cars. You guys ever seen that? You know, if you want to go somewhere and get somewhere in a hurry, a bumper car setup is not what you need.

You need to train cars. They're connected. They're all headed in the same direction on tracks where it's easy for different ministries in church, whether it's use or women's ministry or missions, or it's deacons or elders or small groups. It's easy with all these different groups. If we're not careful, they can end up being bumper cars that run into each other, and we don't end up actually headed in the same direction.

And so that's why it's good to say we want shepherds first, and then they'll serve in different areas. So when we talk about a pastor of Family Ministries, we're saying it's pastoral period. But their main task will function around youth ministry, leadership for youth, oversight for children's ministries in various forms.

And connecting in with the school here, as well as they have opportunity to say, how can we shepherd a large body of people, but especially, how can we care for the opportunity that we have before us in the next generation? When we started praying and considering this process, we talked about talked about four areas, three of which I've mentioned use children, school, and the fourth being if we were to hire someone who could give assistance in leadership and music, that would be great as well.

That's four big areas. We thought you know, we'll see what God does. God probably works out. Maybe two of those are great. That'd be fantastic. And as we pursue this process, God has brought us to this point where we're talking with a candidate who has experience in all four of those areas. That's our God. He does some amazing things.

Now, as we're in this process over about a year and a half, we've talked with people off and on. We've had different interviews. We're not finalized by any stretch, but the goal is that next month we'll have a candidate here to visit officially. You'll have opportunity to meet him, get to know more about him. He came up for a brief visit, wasn't able to be here on a Sunday.

But some of you met him then as well. And I want to ask you, would you pray? All of you, whether you feel like you're connected to those areas of ministry or not. Would you pray because we are supposed to be good stewards of God's varied grace? He's given us opportunity. He's given us resources. He's given us wisdom.

And we want to steward it well as a body. Would you pray with us? Would you pray that God will give wisdom and clarity to both us and to this candidate as well? Would you pray that God would pour out his grace in more and more ways in our lives, and in his through this situation, no matter how it works out?

Would you pray that that would be more and more grace poured out, so that we can steward it well to the glory of God? I'd like to ask you, especially over the next month and a half or so before we'll be looking at a visit. I'd like to ask you to spend time in prayer. If you have questions.

Further questions you can ask me. You can ask our elders or our deacons about more of that situation.

This morning.

I hope that God has shown you over all of these texts, that God has shown you different ways that he's shown grace to you. He's poured grace upon grace upon grace out on you and on us. Why has he done that?

Ultimately, he's done that to display his unmatched worth, to say, look at all the good things I can give. We read earlier. He opens his hand and he satisfies the desire of every living thing. That's how easy it is for God to pour out his varied grace on us. He just opens his hand. That's the first reason. But the second reason he loves you, he wants good for you.

And you and I will chase after a million things that are not good for us, and certainly that are not best for us, might even harm us. Yet he pours out grace. He justifies us by his grace as a gift, and he is 100% for us. God has poured out grace after grace, after grace after grace to display his glory.

And because he loves you. But it doesn't stop there. No less important. God pours all of these graces out on each of you so that you can steward it well for the good of others.

Don't take God's lavish grace and hoard it. Don't take God's lavish grace, and then sit on the bench and watch other people serve other people.

Instead. Absolutely love every bit of God's grace that he's given to you. And steward it well. Pour it out for the good of others. As first Peter continues to say in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion, forever and ever. Amen.