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Lukewarmness
A Sermon Delivered on a Sunday Evening, in the Winter of 1860-1861
by C. H. Spurgeon
at New Park Street Chapel, London
Revelation 3:15-16
“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
Introduction
If I had said this, people would have called it rude and tasteless. But as a sentence of Scripture, I suppose it may be permitted to escape the criticism of those modern critics who find fault with common language. The native language and the common figures of speech may be condemned as offensive; but, if it is, it will be by those whose tastes have been inadequately taught. A vicious refinement has become popular. If people call things by their right names, and use easily understood common words, they are constantly condemned for being tasteless and inconsiderate. A return to such “tasteless language” in the pulpit would be a return to power. I would far rather have back the common language of Hugh Latimer, with all its remarkable quality—and, I must confess, with some of its grossness—than have the weak style of the times, in which holy things are talked about as if they were only meant to be whispered in the privacy of homes, and not be spoken where people meet in everyday life.
The fact is, the Bible is a book that deals with things as they are—a book that, just like all of God’s works, is glorious because it is natural and uncomplicated. God has not polished the rocks in the valleys; he has not placed the mountains in perfect geometric order; he has not been pleased to make every part of the earth just as flawless and beautiful as if they had been intended to form a lovely landscape; but, at least in some places, he has cut them out, and left them rough and rugged, to stand in all their naked glory.
It is the same with the Book of God. There are things in it at which the overly polite may take offense—perhaps not as many in the original as in our translations—but, still, enough to shock the unnecessarily sensitive. The Bible is not less holy because it refuses to call objectionable things by clever names. I love the Word of God because, while it is a God-like Book, it is also a human-like Book. In all the glory of his infinite wisdom, the Lord has written this divine message to us in the rugged splendor and wonderful simplicity of language that even a child can understand.
The Lord Jesus uses a plain, common figure of speech here. As slightly warm water makes a person sick to their stomach, so a lukewarm profession of Christianity is nauseous to the Almighty. He would rather endure the coldness of indifference or the warmth of enthusiasm; but the person who is lukewarm in religion moves him to the deepest disgust. He vomits him from his mouth. His very name will be dismissed from the lips of the Lord with the most sickening disgust—a disgust beyond imagining. It is an expression so strong that no words of the most forceful and passionate orator could rival it. There is such a disgust in this warning against lukewarmness that I know of no description within the imagination, and no words in the whole vocabulary of language, that could have communicated the meaning of “Jesus Christ the faithful witness,” so fully, or with such terrible force.
I am going to try to show you, from this text, first, some reasons why lukewarmness in religion is so distasteful to Christ, and then to point out to you some actions to take against lukewarmness, urging you to be very warm—even hot—in your Master’s cause.
Reasons Why Lukewarmness in Religion
Is So Distasteful to the Lord Jesus Christ
Is So Distasteful to the Lord Jesus Christ
First, then, I have for you some reasons why lukewarm religion is so distasteful to the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me begin by saying that it is because it is a direct insult to the Lord Jesus Christ. If I boldly state that I do not believe what Jesus teaches, then I am calling him a liar. But if I say to him, “I believe what you teach, but I do not think it is important enough for me to be troubled much about it,” I am actually more intentionally resisting his Word. I am saying to him, “If your Word is true, yet it is something that I despise and consider so worthless that I will not give it my heart’s respect.
Did Jesus Christ think salvation was so important that he must come from heaven to earth to work it out? Did he think the gospel, that he preached, was so worthy to be made known that he must spend his life on earth proclaiming it? Did he think the redemption, that he accomplished, was so valuable that he must shed his own precious blood in order to complete it? Then, surely he was serious. So, if I claim to believe the truths that he taught, and yet I am indifferent, do I not insult Christ by seeming to imply that there was no need for him to be in such dead earnest? Am I not, in fact, saying that he took these things too deeply to heart?
His intense zeal was not for his own benefit, but for others. Therefore, it stands to reason, that those who are the interested parties—those for whom Christ’s work was done—should be more interested than he himself was, if that could be possible. Yet, instead of that being the case, here is Christ in earnest, and we—too many of us—are lukewarm, “neither hot nor cold.” This lukewarmness does not merely seem to call God a liar, it does not merely appear to rebuke Christ, but it does, as it were, tell him that the things, that he thought were so valuable, are of no worth in our opinion, and so it insults him to his face.
Oh, my brothers and sisters, have you ever really thought what an insult it is to God when we come before him with lukewarm prayers? There stands the Most Holy Place; the road to it is sprinkled with the precious blood of Jesus. Yet we come to it with cold hearts, or we approach it leaving our hearts behind. We kneel in the attitude of prayer, yet we do not pray. We chatter meaningless words, we express thoughts that are not our real desires, we pretend to have wants that we do not feel. Are we not showing disrespect for the Most Holy Place? We make it more into a coffee shop in which to relax and chat, rather than an awe inspiring place where we wrestle with God, and plead the blood of Christ while we sprinkle the place with the sweat and tears of our impassioned prayers.
When we come to the house of God, to which Jesus Christ has invited us like it was his banqueting house full of rich food, do we not come, much too often, just as we go to our shops and work? Do we not go shopping or stop by the bank with more seriousness that we often take with us to the place of worship? What are we really saying except that God’s house is a common place, that the food there is just ordinary food, and that the serious things that take place in God’s sanctuary are really only everyday things, not worthy of the zeal and energy of sensible people. What are we truly saying when we meet together as God’s people with spirits that are only lukewarm? I think, if I were to pause here longer, I could prove to you that I have not gone too far when I said that lukewarmness is an insult to God. It insults him in all that is dear to him by acting like everything he wants us to believe is precious is worth next to nothing.
Does the Lord deserve this kind of treatment from us? If we are lukewarm, is he not justified in saying to us, “Would that you were either cold or hot”? Oh Jesus, your heart was full of love to those in whom there was nothing lovable! You left the glories of your Father’s house, though there was no necessity for you to do so, except for the divine necessity that was found in your own heart. You loved your Church so much that you became bone of her bones and flesh of her flesh. You fought her enemies; you rescued her from the hand of him who was stronger than she was; you poured out your life’s blood as the ransom for her redemption. Your pain was dreadful, your sufferings were bitter, your anguish was extreme. I look up to your thorn-crowned brow, I gaze into your marred face, and see those eyes red with weeping, and those emaciated cheeks, and I say: “Oh Jesus, you are worthy of the best place in the human heart! You should be loved as never one was loved before. If there are flames of love for you in my heart, let them burn like the ‘glowing coals of the broom tree,’ and let them be fanned into a fiery heat.” Oh, if it is possible for us to ever feel warm emotions, we should feel them here!
Is it not a sad thing, if we repay Christ’s love to us with lukewarm love to him? Which would you rather have—lukewarm love or positive hatred? Perhaps you have little choice with most people; but if they are very dear to you—the partner of your life, for instance—lukewarm love would be no love at all. What else could there be except misery in a family where there was only lukewarm love? Is a father satisfied with halfhearted affection from his children? We give our whole heart to those relationships; but Christ has a greater claim on us. How is it that we can give our love to a husband, or father, or mother, or brother and then dare to offer Christ a distant bow, a cool recognition, and a chill, inconsistent, wavering heart? Let it be so no longer, beloved.
Oh my brothers and sisters, I call on you, by his agony and bloody sweat, by his cross and sufferings, by all the pain that went through his holy body, and by the deeper torment of his inmost soul, I plead with you, either love him or hate him. Either drive him from the door of your heart, and let him know that you are not his friend, or else give him a whole heart full of affection. Give him a heart that is almost ready to burst with the intensity of your love toward him!
These two things—insult and ungratefulness to Christ—would be quite enough to justify the strong expressions in our text. But let me remind you about something else. The lukewarm people who claim to have our religion weaken the reputation of God in the eyes of the world, by all that they do and say. If a man is an unbeliever, openly opposed to God, known to have no connection with Christ and his cause, let him do what he may, he causes no scandal for the Savior’s name. He has no fear of God, he is openly hostile against the Most High. Therefore, though he is rebellious and wicked, full of troublemaking and blasphemy, he does not compromise the dignity of God.
But when the lukewarm follower of Christianity goes out among ungodly people, they say, “This man pretends to be a child of God. He says he has been washed in the blood of Christ. He stands before us as one who declares that he is a new creature in Christ Jesus; he is practically daring us to observe and evaluate him. He tells us that he is the workmanship of the Holy Spirit, that he has been born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Now, whatever that man does, the world sees them as the works of a new creature in Christ Jesus, as acts inspired by God’s Spirit within him. The world does not make distinctions, like we do; they do not recognize the difference between the old Adam and the new; their reasoning does not separate the old nature from the new nature. The people of the world look at us as a whole, and if they see anything wrong in our beliefs and practices they immediately attribute it to our religion, and charge it as being inconsistent.
Now, lukewarm follower of Christ, what does the world see in you? They see someone, who says they are going to heaven, but who travels at a snail’s pace. They see someone who professes to believe that there is a hell, yet their tearless eyes betray them; they never try to rescue souls from going down into the pit. The world sees someone who supposedly deals with eternal realities, yet they are only half awake. They see someone who claims to have been transformed in a mysterious and wonderful way. But, if true, would that not cause such a great change in the outward life that it would be obvious? Yet they see that that person is as much like themselves as can be. Their moral behavior may be morally consistent, but they see no energy in their religious character.
When the world hears a serious, moving sermon about the wrath of God, they say, “It is all very well for the minister to appeal to our emotions, but what does it matter? The people in his congregation are not in earnest; the ‘saints,’ who claim to believe what he says, act like it is not important. In their hearts, they are, no doubt, as skeptical as we are.”
Let the minister be as earnest as he can be, the lukewarmness of his followers neutralizes, to a large degree, any effect that his ministry produces, because the world will judge the church, not so much by the pulpit as by the pew. If not in so many words, yet the world’s actions say, “There is no need for us to make any big deal about religion. These ‘saints’ take it remarkably easy. They seem to think everything will turn out okay as much as we do. After all, they seem to think it would be fanaticism to believe that the things they hear from the preacher are facts. They do not act as if they believed they were true. Therefore,” they say, “doubtless they are not real after all. And, as one form of religion is as good as another, and as there is nothing of value in any one of them, we see no reason why we should have any religion at all.”
As a result, the careless unbeliever is lulled to sleep by the lukewarm adherent of Christianity. In many ways, the lukewarm follower acts like the sirens of Greek mythology who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music to shipwreck on their rocky coast to be destroyed. This is a serious matter, beloved. Great damage is done to the cause of truth in this way. God’s name and God’s honor are undermined by inconsistent followers. I ask you to either give up your profession, or to be true to it. If you really are God’s people, then serve him with all your might; but if Baal is your god, then serve him.
If the flesh is worth serving, then serve the flesh; but if God the Lord is most important, then cling to him. Oh, I plead with you, I beg you, as you love your own souls, do not play fast and loose with godliness! Do not be irresponsible; either leave it alone, or else let it saturate you through and through. Either possess it, or quit professing it. The great curse of the church—that which brings more dishonor on the Lord than all the lewd jokes of the mocking atheists—is the lukewarmness of its members. The Lord may well say to his lukewarm church, as he does in our text, “I will spit you out of my mouth.”
Next, notice that lukewarmness in religious matters is always out of place. There is no place near the throne of God where lukewarmness is acceptable. Take the pulpit, for example. Ah, my brothers, of all the places in the world, if lukewarmness comes here, then the preacher is finished. Of all men, the person who assumes the care of souls should be the most committed. He has that serious charge ringing in his ears: “So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquities, but his blood I will require at your hand.”
Those who have to deal with hardhearted sinners—those who have to preach disagreeable truths—surely they should not make people’s hearts harder, and the truth more disagreeable, by speaking in a halfhearted manner. It will go hard with the man who has carried on his ministry with indifference. “If,” said one of old, “there is a man who finds the ministry an easy place, he will find it a hard matter, at the last, to turn in his accounts to God.” My brothers, if there are any professed ministers of Christ, who never know what it is to be “in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in” the souls under their care; if there are men who take up the ministry merely as a profession, and handle it as they might do any secular calling; if they preach merely as a matter of routine, or because they consider it a pleasant occupation; it would have been better for them if they had never been born. It would have been far better for them to have broken stones by the edge of the road, than to have been preaching the gospel, and leaving their hearts out of their sermons. I do not know whether it might have been better to have been a devil in hell than to have been a minister in the pulpit without his heart in his work.
Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor stirs my very soul whenever I read its glowing words. They are fiery thunderbolts that he hurls at the heads of idle shepherds and lazy ministers. I have read almost the entire book to those who are studying for the ministry in connection with this church; and I have often seen the tears flow from their eyes while listening to the burning language of that impassioned preacher and writer. Every time I have read a chapter in that book, I have felt that, the next Sunday, I could preach—I must preach—with greater earnestness after reading the solemn words of that mightiest of ministers, Richard Baxter.
Ah, beloved, we need to have more of that earnestness in the pulpit! What if my young brothers studied less, but were more in earnest? Yes, let them study as much as they can; but, oh, if the Holy Spirit will only pour out his holy fire on the dry fuel of their studies, how much more will be accomplished for the kingdom of Christ than is done now! So, you see, dear friends, that lukewarmness is out of place in the pulpit.
Brothers and sisters, the same applies in the Sunday school, with the person who distributes tracts, and even with private Christians living their lives, reading their Bibles, praying, attending worship services, and quietly going about doing good. Lukewarmness in religion is always to be loathed and deserted, because it is a shameful and glaring inconsistency. I would not have you even distributing tracts with a lukewarm heart. I would not have you dare to visit the sick unless your heart is filled with love to Christ. Either do such work well, or do not do it at all.
Either put your heart into the work, or let someone else do it. We have too many men of straw filling up our ranks. We have had too many automatons going forth to fight our battles. We have counted our regiments, and said, “They will be a brave army.” But if our army is examined, if our ranks are thinned, we will probably find that fewer true soldiers of the cross will accomplish more if they are not held back in their onward march by the mixed multitude of those who pretend to join the army of the living God.
I hope than lukewarm disciples will find themselves thoroughly out of place among us. I do not think they could be happy here for long. There are so many brothers and sisters in the Lord here who have such red hot spirits that those people would get burned, and they would say, “This is not the place for us.” If you, lukewarm follower of Christ, come among us, you will be asked to do fifty things, and you will be teased until you do them. The good people here will not be content unless you do all that you can, and they will probably want you to do two or three times more than you can.
I am sure that, in all places where God has sent warmhearted men to preach the gospel, you will find yourselves extremely uncomfortable if you want to be lukewarm. I could certainly tell you about some chapels where you could take your seat, and where you would be greatly needed to help support the ministry. The minister would never wake you. I would venture to say, if you paid a few extra dollars every quarter, he would let you sleep on as long as you liked. If you did not join the church, nobody would ever think of asking you whether you were a member or not. In our fashionable churches, of course, people do not speak to one another; that would be quite beneath their assumed dignity. In a place like that, no man would dare to turn to his neighbor and say, “Are you a child of God?”
Well, if you intend to be lukewarm, go to one of those places; but do not stay here; we would bother you with our annoying persistence. I question whether anybody could come here for a few Sundays without some brother walking up to him and asking him whether he was a follower of Christ, or not. And then, the question would be repeated, by one person or another, until he came to some decision concerning his soul.
Actions Against Lukewarmness
Now I will turn to the second part of my subject, in which I will give you some ways to combat lukewarmness. I have exposed its evils, now let me try to discourage your from being lukewarm.
Let me remind you that, as Christians, you have to deal with serious realities. You have to deal with death, with eternity, with heaven, with hell, with Christ, with Satan, with souls that must live forever. Can you deal with these things in a cold spirit? If you can, and if you can do it successfully, then it will be one of the greatest wonders in the world, because these things demand the whole person. If simply to praise God requires all the powers of our soul, how much more is needed to serve God, and to serve him, not just by being “cutters of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God,” but in the winning of souls, in preaching his gospel, in promoting his cause, and expanding his kingdom. These are serious and demanding things for us to deal with. They must not be touched by any but those who come to deal with them with warm hearts.
Remember, too, that these things were once very serious with you. Perhaps you were converted ten or twenty years ago; can it be that you now hear these truths and they mean little to you, that they excite very little emotion within you? There was a time when it took very little to make you earnest; you were, then—
“Laden with guilt, and full of fears.”
Your groans were deep then. You could not sleep at night. You were laboring under such a heavy burden that it seemed to crush your soul and all but push it into the lowest hell. You prayed in earnest then; you sought God in earnest then. Oh, in those days, you were willing to even stand in the aisle, if you could just hear the Word! You came from a great distance and the pressure of the crowd trying to gain entrance into the house of God was inconvenient. Sometimes you were almost ready to faint before the sermon was finished, because the air was so stale; but you put up with it because you were so eager to listen to the gospel message that might be the means of your salvation. Do you not remember how you thought every unsaved person was a fool then, and you especially thought that you were a fool for having left these great realities untouched for so long? Do you not recall your regret at having barely considered these things while your thoughts were consumed with the trivial things of the day?
Oh, then, I call on you, by those days long ago, think as earnestly now about those things as you did then! Let your past experience be the standard by how you measure your present zeal. You should have advanced beyond that; but if you have not, be patient enough to go back, and begin again. Begin where you began before; be humble enough to ask God to revive the sincerity of your repentance, the reality of your grace, the eagerness of your desires, and the flaming passion of your heart.
Remember, also, that there have been times when you thought the gospel message was not important enough for you to have a warm heart for it. Perhaps you remember when a child from your Sunday school class died, and then you thought, “Oh, I wish I had taught that child with more conviction, and prayed over it with all my heart!” Possibly, even your own child died, and you cried, “O Absalom, my son, my son!” The thought came to you, and wounded you deeply, that you had not taught that child as you might have done, and that you had not wrestled with God in prayer for that child’s soul as you should have done.
Have I also not thought the same when I have buried some of your relatives and acquaintances? As I have looked down into the grave of some unconverted hearer, the tears have streamed down from my eyes; and, later, I have awakened at night with some serious and terrible dream about this dark thought: “Have I been faithful to that soul? Have I treated that spirit, now departed, as I would deal with it if I had another opportunity of preaching to it?”
Sometimes, I feel that I can even say, with the apostle Paul, “I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.” But there are other seasons of awful questioning when I tremble, because I fear that the loss of even one of such a numerous flock might be associated with the shepherd’s neglect. Do some of you remember 1854, when the Broad Street Cholera Outbreak was so widespread in the Golden Square district and hundreds died? Do you remember how serious the things of God were to you then? And when the fever came into your house, and one after another died, you thought there was nothing worth living for except to be prepared to die; and that your whole business, from that time forward, would be to seek to warn others, to warn them about dying and going to the dread place of torment.
Let me also remind you, the day is coming when you will think these things are worth believing in and acting upon with your whole heart. When you and I are on our deathbeds, I think we will come to regret, above everything else, our coldness of heart. Among the many sins that we must then confess, and which, I trust we will then know were pardoned, and placed on the head of the scapegoat and sent away, perhaps this will lie the heaviest on our heart and conscience, “I did not live as I should have. I was not as earnest in my Lord’s cause as I should have been.” Our cold sermons will march before our eyes like terrifying, haunting ghosts. Then our neglected days will rise up, each one seeming to look right into our hearts and filling us with horror. Then our Sunday school classes will appear before us. And then those who taught us to teach others will come and rebuke us because we despised their training, and did not make use of the holy instruction that we received when we were set apart for God’s cause, and were first trained to serve in his great army.
We may consider that these things are of small importance now; but when we lie on the borders of eternity, we will think them worth living for, and worth dying a thousand deaths for. If you have lived lukewarmly, then the things of God will weigh down your spirit with a fearful load of sad memories. I believe that, even though you are a child of God, your dying hour will be dark. Those truths that we have kept back, those ordinances that we have neglected, and those doctrines that we have despised, will seem to grow into an awful mass, too heavy for your soul to endure. They will grow into a mountain, as we sometimes have in a dream; a single grain of sand will appear and begin to rise, and to swell, and swell, and swell, until its massive weight seems to oppress your brain, and to crush the very life out of you.
Yes, and there will come a time when the things of God will seem even more real than even on our deathbed. That will be when we stand before God in judgment. Am I prepared to stand there with a ministry half finished? What will I do if I have to give my account before God for sermons preached without my heart being put into them? How will I appear before my Maker if I have ever kept back anything that I thought might have been useful to you? What will I say if I have avoided rebuking any of you when I should have done so, if I have not warned you faithfully, and loved you tenderly, even as my own soul, and tried to woo you to the Savior? How can I turn in my account, as a steward of the Lord, if I have only served him halfheartedly? Oh God, grant, I plead with you, that in spite of a thousand weaknesses, your servant may always be free from that great sin of being lukewarm in your cause!
And what do you think you will do, as professed followers of Christ, if you have been lukewarm followers? What will you do if you have had a name to live up to, and yet have been dead, or if you have been only half alive, with all your energies paralyzed? Ah, friends! Ah, friends! I would not, for all the world, live as some of you are living. You pay attention to the externals of godliness without the vital power. You give Christ a little of your money just for mere show. You offer him a little of your time just to quiet your conscience. You call yourself a Christian as an excuse to hide your own defects. All this, but still you are a stranger to his grace. You remain unconsecrated, not devoted, not giving yourself entirely to him, but still living for the flesh while pretending to be made alive by the Spirit. Your heart is in your business, but you have no heart in your religion. You pursue the world closely, but you follow Christ at a distance. You have a firm hold on the world’s plow, but you only now and then lightly touch Christ’s plow, and you look back even while you do.
Oh, friends! When the earth begins to sway, when the heavens begin to shake, when the stars fall from their places, and begin to rush here and there across the sky like confused men, you will be confused, too. Your heart will also shake, and your grand hopes will teeter to destruction, if you have only served Jesus with a lukewarm heart. May God give us grace to make our religion everything, that we may put our whole heart into it, and live it out, and then be prepared to die for it, if necessary. And may it please God that we may live to enjoy the results of it in everlasting glory!
I am very often fearful, that in speaking to the same congregation, Sunday after Sunday, and week after week, now for seven years, that my voice might grow stale to you. I can truthfully say that I would rather stop preaching than preach to people to whom my voice has become so familiar that it was only like the ringing of an old bell to which no none pays attention. No, there must be feeling in the congregation as well as earnestness in the preacher. Otherwise, let me resign my commission.
I ask God, if I am spared to minister to you, year after year, and you are spared to sit in the pew to hear the Word, that there may be earnestness in you, and earnestness in me. I do not want us to ever come down to the dead level of some of the churches of which I spoke a little while ago. You may think I spoke in a spirit of attack, but God knows that it was in a spirit of loving faithfulness. They are old churches that have come to resemble lakes without outlets, covered over with the sickly green slime of respectability. Stagnation in a church is the devil’s delight. I do not think he cares how many Baptist chapels you build, nor how many closed churches you open, if you have only lukewarm preachers and people in them. He does not care about your armies if your soldiers are sleeping. He has no thought for your guns if they are not loaded. “Let them build as much as they like,” says he, “because those buildings are not the batteries that shake the gates of hell.”
What we want is new zeal, fresh energy, more fire. Our old Baptist cause has become very flabby. Most Baptists seem to be ashamed of their opinions, and many of our ministers say so little about baptism that people forget that there is such an ordinance of Christ. If we have held our tongues concerning baptism, then we have that sin lying at our door; and, for that we will have to answer. I trust that we will not continue in that way any longer. If believers’ baptism is an ordinance of Christ—and we know that it is—we ought to speak out clearly about it. I recommend that our brothers and sisters distribute tracts on the subject, as widely as the can; and, especially, to make the teaching of the New Testament about it known. If those ministers who practice infant baptism will only preach about baptism, then I will not need to, because that will send some of their people to search the Scriptures, and that is all we want. If our views do not agree with God’s Word, then let us abandon them. But, if they are in harmony with our Lord’s teaching, let us not hold our tongues about them.
We have had too much of this guilty silence. Let us boldly proclaim the whole truth; and may the “God of our salvation…by awesome deeds…answer with righteousness.” Oh Lord, bring on the clash of armies again, and let your Church win the victory! Give the victory to the right and the true, and let all error be trampled underfoot! So be it, Oh Lord, and to your name be all the glory! Amen.
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