Amos 5

In this sermon from Amos 5, Pastor Josh explores what it means when God says He actually hates His people’s worship—not because He’s against singing or gatherings, but because their rituals are divorced from justice, righteousness, and real repentance. Through Amos’ funeral lament over “Virgin Israel,” the repeated invitation to “seek Me and live,” and the warning that the Day of the Lord will be darkness for complacent religious people, we see a God who both mourns our rebellion and urgently calls us back to Himself. The message lands in the gospel: Jesus steps into the Day-of-the-Lord darkness on the cross so that compromised, churchy people like us can find forgiveness, new life, and Spirit-empowered lives where worship and justice finally flow together like a never-failing stream.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One of the things that we that just is central to who we are as a church is that we just love the Bible. And we believe that that's God's primary means for communicating with us. So when we do our discipleship stuff with waypoints, a lot of it's just scripture memorization. Go and look up these verses. Get yourself into God's word. Be immersed in scripture. Because God's, man, he's made so many promises to us about his word, that it's it's the way that he guides us, right? It's a he says it's like a lamp to our feet. But it doesn't just provide us with direction, but he likens it to a food that nourishes you. So if you feel malnourished, it may be you just don't have enough Bible in your life. It's a source of wisdom. It's how God helps you to discern not just what's right and wrong, but to really see the path and know, hey, this is the best thing. So we spend a chunk of time on Sunday mornings in our worship service. This is a service where we're worshiping God. One of the ways that we worship Him is by just lending Him our ear and saying, God, what you think and what you've written down is what I want to give my attention to for a few minutes. And that's what we're doing collectively as a church. In a minute, we're gonna pray together. And one of the things that we're gonna pray and we're gonna tell God is that our hearts are open to hear from him this morning. Not just open to receive from him, but also ready to obey on the things that he says to us. Okay? And the interesting thing about church this morning is that we're halfway through our series in the book of Amos. We've taken seven weeks out of 2026, and we said, God, speak to me through Amos. And so if you're here and you're visiting for the first time, you're gonna be like, wow, that's a crazy text. Um and chapter five has 27 verses. We won't go through all of them. I'm gonna highlight a few and try to draw your attention to a few that I think God wants to speak to us through this morning. So, first, we've been saying this every Sunday, but it it's it's just I want to keep it in front of you that the way God's designed you, what we see in Genesis chapter 1, is that you are a blessable, image-bearing covenant partner, and we're following Jesus according to the new covenant. And so the question that we have as blessable image-bearing partners, covenant partners with God, is how does the Holy Spirit, what does the Holy Spirit have to say to us from Amos? I'm gonna put in front of you just four things that we've we've covered and touched on as we've gone through. One of the things that we've seen is there's covenantal accountability, that God's holding the nation of Israel accountable because they're his covenant people. And that's important because we're God's covenant people. Once you accept Jesus Christ as your savior, and you step into a relationship with him, you receive the invitation into that relationship, you also become a covenant partner. And there is accountability that goes with the covenant, the new covenant that you and I are under. We see the inseparability of justice and worship. The nation of Israel were a people that were worshiping, but then turning their back on the most vulnerable in society. And Amos makes it very clear to the nation. You can't worship Yahweh, you can't worship the God of the Bible and commit injustice in the relationships around you. God cares deeply about how you engage the people that He's put around you and society at large. The third thing that we've seen in Amos is that there is divine teaching judgment, that God is reminding the nation of Israel look, I've allowed some of these calamities to occur in your life just to remind you, just to teach you, to instruct you. Not Zeus with lightning bolts to just finish them off, but judgments, infliction of pain, painful circumstances, with the intent of teaching them and calling them back. Remember, God wants them to come back, to return, as we saw last week. And then the last point, the last theme that surfaced is the economic exploitation of the elite. You had the upper crust of society that Amos is primarily addressing in this book. And what he's saying to the elites, the wealthy, is he's saying that you cannot exploit the poor. You can't get to the point where you think, oh, I've arrived. I'm no longer down there, lower class, poor, beat up. No, I'm arrived and I can be separate and I can be disengaged. In fact, I can develop the systems to oppress the poor. Amos says that does not work with God. That does not work with who he is. If you're gonna be my covenant people, it means that just what is normal for you in your life is that you care about the weak and the vulnerable. And so we come to uh chapter 5. I want to put in front of you um verse 21. Verse 21. God says this I hate, I despise your feasts, I can't stand the stench of your solemn assemblies. We could say that there's a point at which for these this nation, the nation of Israel, where God just hates church. And um when we went through the book of 1 Corinthians, I the theme, I can't remember the exact phrasing that we used, it was a few years ago, but it was, I think it was church for the better or together for the better. Because um Paul talked to the church in Corinth and he says, I'm concerned about your gatherings. They were rushing to um eat at different times. So you had poor people that would come to the potluck and wouldn't have any food to eat, and then you'd have wealthy people at church bring in a whole bunch of food, and the wealthy people would eat their food first, and the poor people would be standing around watching the wealthy people eat, and then communion was kind of like a mess, and they were not really taking communion in reverence of God and in as a memorial to what Jesus did on the cross. And Paul says, I'm concerned that you're gathering for the worse, not for the better. My my concern is that you're doing church and you're worse off in your gathering rather than better off in your gathering. And here, Amos says, Here is God's word to you as a nation. I despise your feast. These were the feasts that the nation would celebrate together. They were religious ceremonies. They were meant to be kind of like a high point in the calendar year of where you really give your attention to God and you offer your sacrifices and you come back to the Lord, and where there's there's loose ends in your spiritual life or you're messing up a bit, it's it's a returning point. And they would come into their feasts, supposedly, to worship God, and God says, Look, I hate it, I despise it. Even just the smell of your sacrifices, it's a stinky stench before me. It just doesn't work before God to neglect the poor, to turn a blind eye to injustice, and then go to your religious celebration. And I'm glad that we're here together. It's good to gather as a church, but that's not enough. God cares about how we live out this coming Tuesday, how we live out Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., Thursday afternoon at 4.30. God's in our midst. He said in the last chapter that we looked at, he's the God that is present. He is there. There's nothing that escapes his presence. He can see it all. And it is important to him how we handle the people around us, our family members, our friends. Speaking of family, happy Mother's Day. We are grateful for you, mothers. Some of you have like a lot of kids. Yeah. Yeah, we're grateful for you, mothers. What? You are awesome. Exactly. Mothers are awesome. So um this just a heads up, this chapter is kind of weird. So we're gonna take God in his weirdness, and we're gonna sometimes the weirdness is usually um helpful. The Holy Spirit uses the weirdness to really speak into our life. So let's go before the Lord. Let's let's pray and ask God to speak to us. Father, we do um give you this time. We pray that you would speak to us through the strangeness of uh these prophetic words. Um you used Amos to speak on your behalf to the nation of Israel. And now as we're rereading his words, we ask that you would um use your spirit to just cross the the culture gap, the time gap, the language gap, just to our own personal lives. Um, and that you would uh um speak to us. While some of this language is harsh, um Lord, we may not be the ones that need the harsh language. We may be the ones so grateful that you are harsh with the wicked. But Lord, you got to sort it out for us this morning. Help us to see where we're at. We just ask that we would encounter the grace of the new covenant as we're going through this text. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Well, let's look at verses one through three. We'll just kind of jump into one through three. He says, Listen to this message that I'm singing for you. A lament, house of Israel. She has fallen. Virgin Israel will never rise again. She lies abandoned on her land with no one to raise her up. For the Lord God says, the city that marches out a thousand strong will have only a hundred left, and the one that marches out a hundred strong will have only ten left in the house of Israel. The the genre. So Amos takes up a genre that would have been familiar to the people. You know, like when we talk about music genres, you go on Spotify, and some of you like, you know, country music, some of you like um hip-hop music, some of you like gospel music, some of you like worship. All of that is a genre. Amos engages in the genre of a funeral. And a funeral at that time would have what was called a dirge, a mourning, uh, a sense of mourning. And the way that this is written is he's he's saying, um, let me sing to you the funeral song. Now, he's singing a funeral song in the midst of a nation that is well established, wealthy, everything's going good. So, like, imagine you went to the middle of the mall and you tried to sing a funeral song, right? It would be just so out of place. And that's what Amos is doing. He's he's he is saying, let me step into what is real to God, even though you have this sense of comfort, even though you have this sense of, oh, I've arrived, everything is good. Amos is this pulling back the curtain so that he's attempting to say, listen, everything is not good in God's eyes. There's a funeral coming. This nation is on its way to a death where there's only going to be 10%, a 10% remnant that remains. If a thousand go out to march to battle, only a hundred are coming back. If a hundred go out, only ten are coming back. There is an appropriateness about a funeral dirge, even though you don't feel like it is. And that's that's what it's like to walk with God is that we want to we want to not be taking in life according to how other people tell us the world is doing. You know, look, so like every um every week, it seems like, on a cycle, there are financial numbers that come out, right? And they tell us the state of the economy, what's unemployment at, what is the, so what's the job markets, what's the um uh the G, what is it? The earnings report. Yeah, all of those reports. They give you kind of a metric on here's where the economy is at, right? Or you may have like a sense of like here's where the where political uh politics are at, right? And you could be deeply invested in politics, or maybe you're deeply invested in in science. It's like here's the latest science um discoveries and innovations that are coming out. But for those of us that walk with Jesus, the most important perspective that we could have is God's perspective, right? Because really that's all that matters. It really doesn't matter. Like, so some of you struggle with um mental health stuff, and you may have like high anxiety or or feel depressed, or or maybe you're bipolar and you'll have these these moments of exuberance and then really deep lows. But that's us registering reality in some way or another, and and maybe our sense of maybe there is uh an appropriateness about anxiety or fear. Um, but really what matters as we're engaged in life is what does God think? And and what God thinks flows through Amos, and he's saying, what God thinks is there's it's appropriate right now to sing a funeral song. Before they're even destroyed. When they're vibrant and established, Amos is playing the role of a mourner. You could say that he's a doomer in the midst of a society that only sees abundance. He's looking at the society through this lens that only, that really somebody who's in touch with the Torah, somebody who's in touch with God's word, would take and see, wait, we're violating God's covenant. This isn't just a matter of like the glass is half empty, or you know, it's like, hey, Amos, you didn't forgot to take your meds today. No. What's going on is that he has a true sense of this is where we are at. It's like somebody healthy going to a doctor, young, and they feel great, but they're doing their normal checkup, and the doctor does some blood work and comes back and says, Your body's riddled with cancer. And that doctor is the one, before he delivers that message, that doctor has a sense of like there's impending doom over this person's life. And that's where Amos sits. He is speaking on God's behalf, saying, This society has a cancer in the way that it's handling the weak and the vulnerable. And there is a stench of death that God smells when he sees these people. The beautiful thing though about this is that God doesn't leave you and I to rot in our death. Instead, what God, the God of the Bible, does is he sends an Amos, he sends his prophets, he works in our conscience, and he comes and he says, I don't want you to be a person on your way to a funeral. I want you to have life abundantly. And he sent his son Jesus to step into the world of death and darkness and sin and addiction and brokenness. He sent his son Jesus so that your sin and my sin could be taken away. We're not hopeless. No, there is always this invitation to return. And that's what I want to show you next. There are two there are two sections where the word repeat is is um used. Two sections from this chapter that I want to draw your attention to. The first is um in verses four, five, and six. He says, For the Lord says to the house of Israel, seek me and live. Do not seek Bethel or go to Gilgal or journey to Bersheba, for Gilgal will certainly go into exile. Bethel will come to nothing. Seek the Lord and live, or he will spread like fire throughout the house of Joseph, it will consume everyone, everything, with no one at Bethel to extinguish it. So Amos, speaking on God's behalf, says, seek me and live. There's a funeral, right? There's this funeral dirge, and Amos, in the midst of warning about impending doom, he says, seek God and find life in the midst of this funeral. Seek the Lord. God's constantly inviting humans to return to him. I don't know what your perception of God is, especially the God as he's presented in the Old Testament, but if you see him as a God of anger, a God who's ready to strike you down with a lightning bolt, then you're not seeing the God of the Bible in how he presents himself. Because he's saying you need to honestly understand that you're not in a good place, you're not living as my covenant people, and there is just impending destruction on its way, like a fire, but the invitation is there. Seek me and live. Again, seek me and find life. Seek me and live. This is the doctor's prescription for the spiritual ailment that they're facing. You go, you get that cancer diagnosis, the doctor's gonna come up with a treatment plan. Maybe it's gonna be chemo, maybe it's gonna be radiation, maybe it's gonna be something else, right? When God looks at you and I and he sees our spiritual sickness, the answer to you and I is very simple to seek to return to him. And some of you are in a place where there's a stench of death over your life. And it's because of your rebellion, it's because you're rejecting the work of God in your life, and the fruit of your life is death. And you just need to know that the God of the Bible absolutely loves you and is calling you to seek his face, to return to him, to find him. You may say, Well, but but you know, I know that's good, but what about my career? You know, my my my I'm really busy with my work. Or maybe you're you say, Look, it I've got this relationship or these group of relationships. I know God's, like, I know I should. Should but man, to seek God, to seek God, I would have to forsake these friendships. Or maybe it's some pleasure, some thing that you're chasing after, and you're like, no, you're rejecting that invitation because you don't want to let go of the thing that's pleasurable. It could be your own reputation of like, look, if I if I become a seeker of God, if I return to Him, then it's going to affect the way that people see me. You may have an expectation, you may have something in your life that's keeping you from doing what the Lord is saying, to seek the Lord and to live. And you just need to identify it. You need to identify the thing that you're holding on to instead of obeying what the Bible says. It's super simple here in the text, right? It's just as simple like seek. Did you ever play hide and go seek as a kid? Yeah, you didn't play hide and go seek by playing video games sitting on your couch. You engaged the game. And somebody was the seeker. Now, how many of you dreaded being the seeker? That job sucked. I mean, who wanted to be the seeker? Right? I'm always like, why can't we come up with a game where we're like, you know, there's not like one job that's like lame, right? Because we all like the hiding part, right? But there's the seeker. And what Amos is saying to these people that have this spiritual sickness is seek out God. Do you remember it's the seeking around in the dark for your friends or your family members, your brothers and sisters? You're looking, right? There's an intent about it. And that's what it is required of us. That's the action that we're called to is with intent, seek out the Lord. That means that you're not doing something else. All right, well, Crystal and I celebrated our four-year wedding anniversary this last week. We had a great time. It's very refreshing, a lot of time of just like vision. But on the last day that I was there, as I was like processing through the things that I was reminded of of like, yeah, I want my life to be characterized in this way, the um mental run through was like, some things need to go in my life. In order for me to um, in order for me to do the things that God has laid on my heart while I was on this vacation, some stuff's gotta go, right? There's gotta be a there's gotta be some stuff that's subtracted in order to accomplish this. In verse 2 of 2 Corinthians chapter 6, it says this. Paul says, at an acceptable time I listened to you, and in the day of salvation I helped you. So Paul's quoting from the Old Testament. But then Paul says, Since God found an acceptable time and found a day of salvation to help us, see now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. Paul takes and puts his spin on that Old Testament passage and says, right now is the acceptable time to seek the Lord, to step into his salvation. And so, what is it, friends? What is that obstacle that's keeping you from seeking the Lord, receiving from him life? He says, Seek me and live. What is that thing? You got to identify it, you gotta let the Holy Spirit put his finger on it in your life so that he can begin to bring you back to that place where you're engaged in friendship and fellowship and relationship with him. So he says, seek me and live. But then if we jump down to verse 14, he's gonna talk again about seeking. But look at this: pursue good. In your version, it may be say, seek good and not evil, so that you may live. There it is again, so that you may live. And the Lord, the God of armies, will be with you as you have claimed. Hate evil and love good, establish justice at the city gate. Perhaps the Lord, the God of armies, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph. One of the things that we don't have time to look at throughout this chapter is the idea of remnant, because Amos is holding out this reality that there will be some, there'll be massive judgment. 90% of the nation of Israel is gonna be judged, wiped out, taken into exile, but there's gonna be a remnant. There's gonna be a small group that remains that doesn't get totally smoked in the judgment by God. And the way to be that group, that people, is to do what he's saying here, to seek the Lord and to live, to pursue good and not evil, so that you may live. So he says, seek God, step into the relationship, but then he says, seek good and not evil. Two, seek the person of Jesus Christ. Seek the relationship with him, and then second of all, in your life, seek out what is good and not evil. What does it mean to hate evil and to love good? What does it mean for you to hate evil and to love good? There's this um this phrase that he uses here in verse 15. To establish justice at the city gate. To establish justice at the city gate. This the city gate was like um what we would call like city hall. That's where the elders would gather, that's where decisions were made, that was where the judges would sit and decide cases, was at the city gate. Because the city contained people, but people from uh in the surrounding area would come to the city gate also to have matters decided. And so Amos calls for the establishment of justice at the city gate. In verse 24, you you recognize this from Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech, but let justice flow like water and righteousness like an unfailing stream. I don't have the slide in front of me, but in verse 7, one of the things that Amos says about the nation is that justice and righteousness had become like wormwood or dead rotted-out wood. There was missing from society justice and righteousness. And that's what Amos is calling for. If you're a people that are seeking God, if you care about God, then you care about justice. You care about righteousness within society. You're seeking what is good and you're hating what is evil. Well, what does righteousness mean? Because these are paired oftentimes throughout scripture. When we hear the word righteousness, we don't oftentimes, like Tuesday at 8:30, you're not going to be saying, like, wow, that's really righteous. It's unlikely. Biblical righteousness, and I put this in front of you because I want you to capture this, okay? Biblical righteousness, when God talks about righteousness, it means community life with all relationships, with God, others, self, and the rest of creation. It means it's well-ordered, full of shalom, that's the Hebrew word for peace. So full of peace, all things flourishing as God designed them to be. Does that help you understand if you're supposed to pursue righteousness, or if we're we're hoping for righteousness to just flood like a water through our city, through society, we're looking for relationships to be right. We're looking for them to be well ordered, that there's peace in relationships, that things are flourishing as God designed them to be. I know some of you in your life are not experiencing that sense of peace or shalom. And for some of you, it's because righteousness is missing from your life. Your relationship with God, your relationship with others, your relationship with creation, what God has made, your relationship with yourself, it is not marked by order. And so you do not have a sense of the peace of God over your life because there's a disorder to the relationships that you have, the community in your life. And you're not flourishing as God designed them to be. What Amos is calling for by the power of the Spirit is he's like, let's be a society where our relationships are right, rightly ordered. And he has an eye on the poor, the person that's handicapped, the kid that lost their mom and dad, the orphan, the woman who had a husband who died too young and now she's widowed. And Amos is looking at those people in society and he's like, they're a part of our community. And our community needs to be one that's ordered and designed where they are experiencing peace. Your homework this week is just to try to go and identify who are the people who are who are vulnerable around you. God's put into your life people who are powerless to change their circumstance, and they are in great need. And they are very, very susceptible to missing a paycheck, a tax bill, a ticket, a water, water heater going out. They're particularly, particularly vulnerable to those things. And you and I are called to care about those things. The American dream, the the rugged individualism of America does not coach you and encourage you to turn your attention and your eye to those people in society. But God's eye is on them, and his means of caring for them is you and I. He cares deeply for their pain and their suffering. And listen, he's going to take care of them. He has his eye. He cares about the sparrow and he closed the lily. And he knows the pain and the suffering of those of you that are particularly vulnerable. But you and I are invited as community members to step in, right? And some of you kind of grew up maybe in a politically conservative home or environment, and you're used to maybe a more liberal political party talking about those that are vulnerable and need justice and that thing that the injustice needs to be remedied in with society. And so as you take steps towards justice and righteousness, you may start to having to rub shoulders with people who like don't vote like you. Heaven forbid. Just be careful, just be just know that that's a part of it. But heaven forbid that we idolize our political party over what God cares about. Right? He cares. So that's righteousness. But let me give you a um a sense of justice in the biblical sense. Doing justice means inconveniencing yourself for the sake of the worthless person. Doing justice is inconveniencing yourself, honoring what is true and right, even at your own expense for the worthless person. This is a quote, this is not me, this is a quote from Gary Bashears. He he would oftentimes call the worthless person the person that is meaningless, the person that's easy to ignore. I forgot that person even existed. And justice is inconveniencing yourself for the sake of that person, especially the widow, orphan, stranger, the poor. Injustice is keeping my stuff for my own comfort. Yeah. Yep. Man, may the Holy Spirit just put his finger in our life on what that looks like. And again, you got political parties that camp out over in these different sides. And you're this is not asking you to follow any political framework. This is just asking for you to be in community, pursue what is righteous, and pursue justice. To honor God. We see this when you see this pairing of righteousness and justice throughout scripture, you get this broader sense of definition. I'm not saying that this definition comes from Amos. This is more Gary Brashir's from the whole of looking at justice and righteousness from the Old Testament. It was spoken of Abraham. Abraham was a person that cared about justice and righteousness. It was a mark throughout the Levitical law and Deuteronomy, just talked about these things being woven into society. Righteousness refers to this moral quality that establishes right order, and justice refers to the moral quality that restores that order when it is disturbed. And so Amos tells the nation of Israel, seek the Lord and live. And then he says, seek and pursue what is good and hate evil. Let righteousness and justice flow like torrents of water within society. You know, as we look at the Compassion Center and which is this relief center that we run throughout the week, you know that one of our objectives is to make it so people don't have to wait in a line outside, but to have an indoor space where people can wait out of the elements, they could sit down while they're waiting for their turn to get food. And um, which is good. Um that's caring for humanity. Right now, though, when you're you come by on Tuesday or Friday, you see just a line of people. And when I hear that idea of just justice and righteousness flowing, I just think of that line and how God just desires on each one of their those those individual cases in each of their lives that they would be the recipient of righteousness and justice within society. Isaiah says this seek the Lord while he may be found, call on him while he is near. Let the wicked one abandon his way, and the sinful one his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, so he may have compassion on him and to our God, for he will freely forgive. God is inviting you and I to return to him, to participate in his kingdom values, and to experience life. The last little section I want to show you from this chapter is verses 18 and 19. Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord. What will the day of the Lord be for you? It will be darkness and not light. What you need to know is that the day of the Lord was to be, was supposed to be this glorious, anticipated day that was spoken of throughout Israel's history. It was this, um, it was supposed to be a magnificent day where God is present and he comes and he visits his people. And they are longing for the day of the Lord, but Amos is saying, warning to you who long for the day of the Lord, because for you the day of the Lord, the day of God's visitation, it will be darkness and not light. So he's flipping it, he's inverting the concept of the day of the Lord. It will be like a man who flees from a lion, only to have a bear confront him. So you're running away from the lion, and you're like, whoo, got away from the lion. And then you see a bear, and you run into the house. And you rest your hand, oh man, I got free, against the wall, only to have a snake bite him. We would say of this character in the cartoon that he's doomed. He's doomed. And God's saying to the nation of Israel, listen, you've got your high hopes, you have these expectations, you have a framework of thinking about life that you're good, that your your religious and spiritual activities, that you're good, that you're set, and you're anticipating the day of the Lord where where God's gonna come and be present in the midst of you, and you're doomed. You deserve a funeral song at this moment. You're like the guy chased by the lion and then the bear, and then the snake gets you ultimately. You've got the wrong way of seeing it, and sometimes, by the grace of God, his spirit comes and kind of hits us over the forehead with a two by four and says, Stop it. You got the wrong perspective. You think you're good, you think you change that circumstance over there, and you're you're all good, but you're you've got a spiritual cancer that only God can take away from you. And here's what you and I need to know as recipients of the new covenant: that when we talk about the day of the Lord, there's a day of the Lord, and Jesus was punished on that day for your and my sin. The day of the Lord that they should have been, that they were being warned of, that was turned into darkness, when Jesus hung on that cross for three hours, it went dark. That was the day of the Lord for your sake and for my sake. So that so that the language of seek me and find life becomes the substance in Jesus. When we say seek me, we're seeking Jesus Christ, the historic Lord Jesus Christ, the King of kings, who died on the cross for your and my sin, who rose from the dead and then ascended and is seated at the right hand of God. He is the one that we now seek. And the life that we receive is life that is this incredible overflowing life. He spoke on the Temple Mount. Jesus said, Come to me, and I will give you torrents of living water that flow out of your inward being. This overflowing, abundant life is what you're being invited into. And so again, the pieces are rearranged through Jesus. You have covenant, you have rebellion, you have God's discipline and his judgment, but it's rearranged for us around Jesus. Where we're not anticipating a looming hammer about to smack us on the head, but we know we're held accountable in this covenant and we're chastened faithfully by. By God, so that we'll return and we'll come back to Him and then experience life. Remember, you're a blessable image-bearing covenant partner. You're blessable. You're blessable. You are designed to be this container being filled up with the blessings of God. And because of what Jesus has done on our behalf, it's uncorked. You're able to receive the blessing of God over your life. I can't put it any better than that. It's on us to respond. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for what you've accomplished through your Son Jesus on our behalf so that we could be blessed by you and not cursed. Lord, we long to be a people that are participating in this righteousness and justice, where it's it's through us as your instruments that righteousness and justice just flows through the streets of Baltimore, flows to our neighbors, flows to the vulnerable people around us. Lord, if there's people around us that you've put in our life that are suffering, that are weak, they're susceptible, and you've put us in their life to be your tangible righteousness and justice. Help us, Lord, to obey your word, to step into that space and honor what you're saying here in your word. Thank you for when you have took us from our place of being vulnerable and took care of us. We love you. We're so grateful for your rescue you have brought about in our life. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.